D2 EZ SU T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T.S A T U R D A Y, O C T O B E R 5 , 2 0 1 9
TELEVISION AND RADIO
MLB PLAYOFFS
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NHL
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COLLEGE FOOTBALL, SEE PAGE D8
NBA PRESEASON
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SOCCER
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9:30 a.m. German Bundesliga: Hoffenheim at Bayern Munich » Fox Sports 1
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10 a.m. Spanish La Liga: Granada at Real Madrid » beIN Sports
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Noon French Ligue 1: Angers at Paris Saint-Germain »
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12:30 p.m. English Premier League: Crystal Palace at West Ham » WRC (Ch. 4),
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1:30 p.m. Turkish Super Lig: Galatasaray at Genclerbirligi »
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TENNIS
6 a.m. ATP/WTA: Beijing Open, semifinals » Tennis Channel
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ATP: Japan Open, singles final » Tennis Channel4:30 a.m.
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WTA: Beijing Open, singles final » Tennis ChannelAUTO RACING
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TRACK AND FIELD
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RUGBY WORLD CUP
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Pool C: France vs. Tonga » NBC Sports NetworkWOMEN’S COLLEGE SOCCER
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WOMEN’S COLLEGE VOLLEYBALL
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TENNIS
Murray’s run is ended
by top-seeded Thiem
Andy Murray’s run at the
China Open is over.
The former No. 1, who had won
consecutive singles matches for
the first time since undergoing
hip surgery in January, lost to top-
seeded Dominic Thiem, 6-2, 7-6
(7-3), on Friday in the
quarterfinals in Beijing.
Thiem broke Murray, 32, in the
first game of the match, but the
British player made things more
difficult in the second set, testing
his younger opponent’s nerve in
finishing out the match.
Also, Karen Khachanov beat
Fabio Fognini, 3-6, 6-3, 6-1;
Alexander Zverev downed Sam
Querrey, 7-6 (7-3), 6-2; and
Stefanos Tsitsipas beat John
Isner, 7-6 (7-3), 6-3.
Top-seeded Ashleigh Barty
reached the semifinals in the
women’s draw by beating Petra
Kvitova, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3.
“From my opinion, that was
one of the highest-quality
matches I played all year,” said
Barty, the French Open
champion. “Petra always has a
way of bringing out the best in
me.”...
Competing in Tokyo for the
first time, Novak Djokovic beat
fifth-seeded Lucas Pouille, 6-1,
6-2, to advance to the semifinals
of the Japan Open.
Showing no lingering effects of
a shoulder injury, Djokovic is
attempting to win a title in his
tournament debut for the
10th time. He has not dropped a
set and has broken serve 12 times
in three matches.
“It was definitely one of the
best matches I’ve played this
year,” Djokovic said.
PRO BASKETBALL
The Los Angeles Sparks fired
general manager Penny Toler, a
move that followed a tirade after
the team lost Game 2 in the
second round of the WNBA
playoffs. The team said Eric
Holoman, managing partner and
governor, will replace Toler as GM
and executive vice president on
an interim basis while a national
search is conducted....
In the first NBA game ever
played in India, T.J. Warren hit
the shot that put Indiana ahead
for good with 1:03 remaining, and
the Pacers earned a 132-131
overtime exhibition win over the
Sacramento Kings in Mumbai.
SOCCER
Real Betis and Eibar drew, 1-1,
in the Spanish league, a result
that left both teams near the
middle of the table.
Fabián Orellana put Eibar
ahead by converting a 34th-
minute penalty kick, but the hosts
equalized through Lorenzo
Morón in the 66th with a goal
confirmed by video review on a
close offside decision....
Hertha Berlin ended a long
wait to beat Fortuna Düsseldorf,
3-1, for its third successive win in
the German Bundesliga.
Vedad Ibisevic, Javairo
Dilrosun and Vladimir Darida
scored as Hertha claimed its first
Bundesliga victory over
Düsseldorf since 1979.COLLEGES
An amateur coach was
sentenced to three months in
prison for his role in a college
basketball bribery scheme that
focused on NBA-bound athletes.
Merl Code, who was convicted
in May of conspiring to pay
thousands of dollars in bribes to
college coaches and families of
top recruits, was sentenced at a
federal court in New York....
Linebacker Jeremy Banks was
dismissed from the Tennessee
football team after video showed
him cursing and saying, “Where
I’m from, we shoot at cops,”
during his arrest last month
following a traffic stop. Coach
Jeremy Pruitt said in a statement
that he decided to “remove”
Banks in the best interest of the
team and university....
Oklahoma kicker Calum
Sutherland was suspended
indefinitely. The school did not
specify a reason for the
suspension. Sutherland was
arrested Sept. 21 on a public
intoxication charge....
St. Thomas is seeking to
become Minnesota’s second
Division I school. The university
that soon will be ousted from the
Minnesota Intercollegiate
Athletic Conference because of its
dominance of smaller schools in
its longtime Division III home
received an invitation to join the
Summit League....
The top-ranked Virginia men’s
soccer team stayed unbeaten with
a 2-0 win over No. 24 Louisville
(5-3-2, 1-2-1 ACC) in
Charlottesville. Daryl Dike and
Spencer Patton scored for the
Cavaliers (10-0-0, 4-0-0)....
No. 5 Georgetown was held to a
scoreless tie against DePaul in
Chicago. Tomas Romero made
two saves for the Hoyas (7-1-1, 2-0-
1 Big East), while Drew Nuelle
made eight for the Demon
Deacons (4-5-2, 0-1-2)....
Diana Ordonez had two goals
and Alexa Spaanstra also scored
as the No. 1 Virginia women (10-
0-2, 2-0-2) handled Miami (3-5-2,
0-3-1), 3-0, in Coral Gables, Fla.
— From news services
and staff reportsD I G E S TBY RICK MAESEAs Natalie Coughlin was piling
up her 12 Olympic medals and
etching her name in the record
books as one of the best American
swimmers ever to hit the water,
life was somewhat simple. She
had some of the best coaches,
swam in the best pools and had
relatively few worries.
Now as she embarks on a
comeback at age 37, life is more
complicated but the swimming is
actually simpler. She’s a first-time
mother, trying to nurse and work
and sneak swim sessions in be-
tween her daughter’s naps. Her
daily training pool? It’s located
only two minutes from her Cali-
fornia home. “They have excel-
lent child care there,” she said.
And in the water, there are only
six lanes, and as Coughlin said,
“The people next to me are doing
aqua aerobics and floating
around.”
None of this is to say that
Coughlin’s return to competitive
swimming has been easy. The
three-time Olympian will com-
pete this weekend for the first
time since 2016 when the Interna-
tional Swimming League launch-
es its inaugural season. Coughlin
has been training in earnest for
six months and will serve as a
team captain for DC Trident at
the opening meet this weekend in
Indianapolis. For Coughlin, prep-
arations have proved to be a
juggling act of sorts.
“It’s really, really tough,”
Coughlin said in a recent inter-
view. “Swimming isn’t my No. 1
priority anymore. It’s my daugh-
ter, who’s 11 months old. And my
winery, my responsibilities on
USA Swimming board and all
these other things that take pre-
cedence over my training.”
This weekend, for the first time
in three years, she will focus
mostly on swimming. The two-
day event will feature 35 individ-
ual races and three relays, none
longer than 400 meters. League
organizers hope for a fast-paced
meet in which swimmers com-
pete in multiple events. While the
teams are branded with city
names, none is physically based
in the city it represents and the
athletes train on their own, com-
ing together at the meets. Cough-
lin and Katie Ledecky headline a
team that is ostensibly based in
the District.
“When I think of the sport of
swimming, I think of Natalie,”
said Kaitlin Sandeno, Trident’s
general manager. “I think she’s
done so much for it. She’s so
established, so iconic. She truly is
a legend.”
As Sandeno, a former Olympic
gold medalist herself, started
fleshing out her roster in the
spring, she reached out to her old
U.S. teammate, not knowing what
her friend might say. Coughlin’s
last big meet, after all, was the
2016 U.S. Olympic trials, where
she failed to qualify for the Rio
Games. She never retired from
the sport but stopped competing
or training in any serious way.
Coughlin was five or so months
into motherhood and enjoying
her routine when the text mes-
sage popped up. She had just
published a cookbook and started
her own winery. Sandeno’s propo-
sition caught her off guard. “I
said, ‘Absolutely not,’ ” Coughlin
said with a laugh.
But she thought it through,
considered the logistics and how
it would impact her young family
and her other ventures. After acouple of days, she accepted San-
deno’s offer. “It’d be a really fun,
exciting way for me to get back in
shape after having a baby,” she
said recently. “It was a good
motivator for me to get back in
the pool.”
Next came the challenging
part. After a lifetime of elite
competition — she is tied with
Dara Torres and Jenny Thomp-
son as the most decorated female
American Olympic swimmer —
diving into a pool was no longer a
part of her daily routine.
“It wasn’t intentional. It just
kind of happened,” she said. “It
was a period where going to the
pool didn’t fit into my schedule.”
Coughlin stayed in good shape,
though. She ran and hiked
throughout her pregnancy, regu-
larly visiting the weight room and
retaining her strength. While her
stroke felt like second nature,
completing a full race still re-
quired shaking off some rust. She
appreciated that the league was
only competing in short-course
pools and felt confident her legs
could power her through the
sprint distances.She had to start carving out
time in her schedule to visit the
pool near her home. Long gone
are the days where she would
spend a full day training, getting
in her dry land work, conferring
with coaches, warming down
with teammates.
“I just can’t do that now,” she
says. “That part of my life is over.
I’ve moved on to other things. I
wish I could. I loved that so much.
It was such a wonderful, simple
life — training all day, hanging
out with teammates and focusing
on your body. That was wonder-
ful.”
She missed a string of days in
August when her schedule just
didn’t allow her to hit the water.
“I’m doing my best to balance it
all,” she says.
Her body isn’t just that of a
37-year-old, it’s that of a new
mother. When she started her
comeback, her abdominal mus-
cles hadn’t fully healed, and
Coughlin didn’t want to overexert
herself until they had. She didn’t
even bother with underwater dol-
phin kicks until late in the sum-
mer and didn’t step onto thestarting block until last week.
“It got better as I did more and
more,” she said. “Fortunately, the
muscle memory is there.”
Coughlin will swim the
50 backstroke this weekend but
could be tapped for another race
or two as well, possibly in a relay.
Ledecky also could hit the pool a
couple of times, possibly in the
400 freestyle and the 4x100 free-
style relay.
While most of the world’s top
swimmers are training for next
year’s Olympics in Tokyo, Cough-
lin has a birthday party to plan.
Her daughter, Zennie Mae Hall,
turns 1 this month. The Olympics
aren’t in Coughlin’s current
plans, but she is eager to get back
on the pool deck and show that
even though so much has
changed in recent years, she is
still powerful, graceful and faster
in the water than most people on
the planet.
“Natalie is the most competi-
tive person that I know,” Sandeno
said. “She’s a gamer and a racer.
When those lights come on, I
know she’ll give us her all.”
[email protected]Now a mom, Coughlin dives back in
The 12-time Olympic medalist in swimming is set to compete this weekend for the first time since 2016
BY EDDIE PELLSdoha, qatar — The message
American hurdler Dalilah Mu-
hammad kept telling herself when
her career was running into road-
blocks: Why not me?
The message Qatari high jump-
er Mutaz Essa Barshim kept re-
ceiving from an adoring home
crowd yearning to celebrate a
champion: We love you!
On a thrill-filled night at the
track and field world champion-
ships Friday, Muhammad an-
swered her own question — again
— by setting her second world
record in 10 weeks, while Barshim
loved everyone back by becoming
a back-to-back world champion,
winning this one on home turf.
“I’ve won a lot of gold medals,
but this one is home,” Barshim
said. “It feels different. I just felt
love.”
The late-blooming, 29-year-old
Muhammad smoothed her way
through the 400-meter hurdles in
52.16 to break, by 0.04 seconds, the
world record she had set at the
national championships in July.
Both she and Barshim — theycall him “The Qatari Falcon” — will
head into the Tokyo Games next
year as reigning world champions.
Muhammad will also go in as the
defending Olympic champ — and
almost certainly as the world rec-
ord holder, too.
“I didn’t even know who won
the race,” Muhammad said. “I was
looking to see who won, and then I
noticed, when they said ‘world
record,’ that I had broken it.”
Simply winning the race has
become more difficult because of
the rapid rise of Sydney McLaugh-
lin, the 20-year-old phenom who
juggles, rides a unicycle and seems
destined to win gold one day.
McLaughlin also finished sec-
ond to Muhammad at nationals —
but that one was by 0.68 seconds.
This one was by 0.07, and her time
of 52.23 would have been the
world record had she run it
10 weeks ago.
“We came into this season
knowing who the main opponent
was going to be,” said McLaugh-
lin’s coach, Olympic gold medalist
Joanna Hayes. “It’s not a surprise.
Dalilah has experience over Syd,
so all I wanted her to do was getsome experience. And run her
best. And she’s surpassed that.”
How close did Muhammad
come to missing out on this?
Shortly after graduating from
Southern California in 2012, she
went to the Olympic trials and
flopped. Out in the first round, she
had neither a spot at the London
Games nor a sponsor.
Things changed: She won na-
tionals in 2013, then a silver medal
at worlds. Then they changed
again: She faltered in 2015 and
watched those world champion-
ships from home.
“I had an epiphany one day:
‘Why not me?’ ” Muhammad said.
Muhammad barely broke stride
in clearing the 10 hurdles. It was,
she said, much closer to the per-
fect race that she decidedly did not
think she had run at nationals in
the rain in Des Moines. Yet this
race still came down to a lean at
the line.
“Next year’s going to be amaz-
ing,” Hayes said.
Close as the race was, though,
the men’s steeplechase was closer.
Conseslus Kipruto and Lame-
cha Girma rambled over barriersand through water over 3,000 me-
ters, and as they approached the
finish, there was nothing separat-
ing them. With fans screaming,
they sprawled as they reached the
line. A photo finish showed Kipru-
to had crossed in 8 minutes
1.35 seconds. That was one-hun-
dredth of a second faster than
Girma.
“I was praying, ‘Let me be faster
than him,’ ” Kipruto said. “I wait-
ed. I prayed. I saw the screen and
saw it said ‘Conseslus.’ It was my
name. I was definitely happy.”
In the men’s 400 meters, Steven
Gardiner of the Bahamas won
gold over Anthony Zambrano of
Colombia and Fred Kerley of the
United States. Finishing 1-2 in the
discus were Cubans Yaime Perez
and Denia Caballero, who ran to
the stands to share hugs with their
small group of fans.
But no win brought more joy to
the crowd than Barshim’s. He
brought the fans out of their seats
every time he cleared a height.
“I did it for them,” Barshim said
of his fans and countrymen.
“They’re the champions tonight.”
— Associated PressTRACK AND FIELD WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPSMuhammad breaks world record in 400 hurdles
JAE C. HONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Natalie Coughlin will swim for DC Trident this weekend in an International Swimming League meet.