(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE N.Y. Yankees 6, Philadelphia Phillies 5 Minnesota Twins 8, N.Y. Mets 3 Miami Marlins 6, Tampa Bay Rays 2 St. Louis Cardinals 10, Texas Rangers 1 Houston Astros 5, Pittsburgh Pirates 4 San Francisco Giants 1, Oakland Athletics 0 Colorado Rockies 2, Los Angeles Angels 1
AMERICAN LEAGUE Baltimore Orioles 10, Toronto Blue Jays 4 Kansas City Royals 10, Chicago White Sox 3 Boston Red Sox 3, Seattle Mariners 2
NATIONAL LEAGUE Chicago Cubs 13, Cincinnati Reds 4 Atlanta Braves 6 Milwaukee Brewers 2 Arizona Diamondbacks 5, Washington Nationals 4 San Diego Padres 8, L.A. Dodgers 1
(INGLEWOOD, Calif.) — The Los Angeles Clippers have been playing their home games in downtown Los Angeles at the Crypto.com Arena, formerly known as Staples Center, which is also home to the Los Angeles Lakers, the Clippers’ NBA rivals.
But the Clippers step out of the Lakers shadow beginning on Thursday as they officially open the Intuit Dome, their new mega stadium in Inglewood, California.
ABC News’ GMA3 got an exclusive look at the Intuit Dome, which spans 26 acres of land and includes close to 18,000 seats. The grand opening will mark the first time in 25 years that the team has its own venue — the multibillion-dollar passion project of Clippers owner Steve Ballmer that is changing the game.
The mastermind behind the new Dome comes from Halo Sports and Entertainment, an umbrella brand that also owns the Clippers, the Intuit Dome, the G League’s Ontario Clippers, and Inglewood’s Kia Forum.
Leading the charge is Gillian Zucker, CEO of Halo Sports and Entertainment, who also serves as the Clippers’ president of business operations.
Zucker and her team spent years designing and figuring out what it would take to create the best arena in the United States.
“I think that you can find pieces of this arena everywhere in the world, because we traveled the world looking at arenas, exploring the types of things that the fans who were at those arenas loved,” Zucker told GMA3 anchor DeMarco Morgan during a tour of the facility.
In the stadium lies a massive video screen known as the Halo Board, which is a double-sided 4K display in an arena setting with approximately 44,000 square feet of digital space.
“Some of the letters on it are over 2 feet tall, so it is massive and I think it’s going to provide a pretty incredible experience,” Zucker said.
The Intuit Dome offers a practice facility for athletes, complete with multiple basketball courts. Fans can enjoy an upscale menu featuring sushi and game-day classics like chicken fingers and hot dogs.
“So we tasted about 20 different chicken fingers before we chose the supplier for it,” Zucker said. “We’ve spent a lot of time making sure that each of these food items is something that you’re going to crave the next day.”
Fans who want to see a game but can’t afford the up-close tickets can buy upper-level seats and still be interactive.
The Halo Board is so large that you can watch the game from anywhere in the stadium. There are also mounted T-shirt cannons all along the top of the Halo Board, and they move up and down so that every single seat in the Dome has a chance to catch a shirt.
Zucker says the Clippers have prioritized community involvement while transitioning into their new arena. For example, inside the arena is displayed a jersey representing every high school basketball team in the state of California, for both girls and boys. This, Zucker said, is so that kids from all over California can come and they can find themselves in Intuit Dome.
“We built this for them,” Zucker said of the community comprised of the team’s fans. “And we wanted everybody to feel like this was a place that enhanced the neighborhood.”
Intuit Dome has already made a name for itself — it will host the 2026 NBA All-Star Game and will serve as the Olympic basketball venue in 2028. The venue earned these bids before even opening the stadium doors.
The Intuit Dome has over 20 concerts scheduled before the Clippers’ inaugural game, which will feature a performance by singer Bruno Mars and takes place on Nov. 22 when they face the Sacramento Kings.
(NEW YORK) — American gymnast Simone Biles is considered by many to be the G.O.A.T — the Greatest Of All Time — and for good reason.
“I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. I’m the first Simone Biles,” she told reporters at the 2016 Olympics.
Here’s a look at Biles’ historic gymnastics career thus far as she heads to her third Olympic Games, this year in Paris, France:
Most decorated gymnast of all time
Her rise to fame began in the wake of the 2012 Olympics, which Biles was too young to qualify for.
In 2013, at the age of 16, she secured four medals — two golds — in her first appearance at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships.
In 2014, she won four golds and a silver at the competition. In 2015, she scored another four gold medals and a bronze. In 2018, she won four golds, one silver, and one bronze. In 2019, she won five gold medals. In 2023, she won four golds and one silver.
Overall, she’s scored 30 world titles, 23 as a gold medal winner, according to the official Olympics website.
In her first Olympic Games in 2016, Biles won four gold medals and one bronze. In Tokyo, she won one silver and one bronze before sitting out for the rest of the competition to focus on her mental and physical health.
Biles is the most decorated gymnast in history — male or female — according to the Olympics. In all, she has 37 world and Olympic medals combined.
She has five moves named after her
Biles now has five signature moves named after her in three different events: on the floor, on vault, and on the balance beam.
“Many people aren’t even attempting to do them because there’s such high difficulty high risk maneuvers, and she does them with complete ease and effort,” Dominique Dawes, a three-time Olympian and 18-year gymnastics veteran. “It’s amazing to watch what she’s doing. And she does it with a smile on her face.”
For a move to be named after an athlete in gymnastics, the gymnast has to submit a video of them performing the move to the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique Women’s Technical Committee.
The committee determines the difficulty of the skill, and if it receives a high enough difficulty score, it is then eligible to be named.
Then, a gymnast must perform the move without “a major fault” at an international competition.
The “Biles on the floor” — first successfully completed by Biles on the world stage in 2013 at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships — is a double layout with a half-twist, which means that her body remains straight and elongated as she flips twice.
Her second signature move on the floor, “Biles II,” was first successfully completed on the world stage in 2019. For this move, Biles performs a triple-double, meaning she Biles flips twice while twisting three times before hitting the ground.
The Biles on the vault is a round-off, into a back hand-spring with a half turn, completing the move by twisting twice in a somersault. It one of the most difficult vaults in women’s artistic gymnastics, with a difficulty score of 6.4.
Biles II on the vault is the most recent move to be named after the athlete. In 2023, she became the first woman to land the Yurchenko double pike, a move that consists of a backflip off the vault and two full rotations in a pike position before landing.
The Biles on the balance beam, completed in 2019, features a double-double dismount from the beam — two flips and two twists.
Dawes was a gymnast during the old ways of scoring — which is when gymnasts aimed simply for a “perfect 10.” Now, gymnasts are scored on two metrics — the perfect 10 of execution and the open-ended scoring of difficulty that gymnasts have free reign of collecting points on.
Dawes said that with the old way of scoring, there was “no need to push yourself beyond that value.” Now, “sky is the limit” for athletes like Biles.
“It really is Simone versus herself.” Dawes said. “That’s really what makes her one of the greatest of all time … Back then they used to cap our scores. And so now with this new scoring system, the sky is the limit for athletes like Simone, who’s very talented. And so if she does a higher, difficult maneuver on any of the different pieces of apparatus, she’ll actually get credit for it.”
Prioritizing her mental and physical health
Simone Biles pulled out of the Tokyo Olympics before finishing the individual all-around competition and the team final following a shocking stumble on vault.
“We wholeheartedly support Simone’s decision and applaud her bravery in prioritizing her well-being. Her courage shows, yet again, why she is a role model for so many,” USA Gymnastics said in a statement.
Her exit shined a light on mental health among elite athletes who face intense pressures as the world watches. She later also discussed how her exit was tied to her struggle to recover mentally after being sexually abused by former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar.
Biles has also been outspoken about experiencing depression and having to take anxiety medication in the fallout of the Nassar abuse.
“As a recent competitor in the Tokyo Games who was a survivor of this horror, I can assure you the impacts of this man’s abuse are not over or ever forgotten,” Biles said at a 2021 Congressional hearing. “The announcement in the spring of 2020 that the Tokyo Games were to be postponed for a year meant that I would be going to the gym, to training, to therapy, living daily among the reminders of this story for another 365 days.”
Biles qualified in all six of the women’s gymnastics finals at the Tokyo Olympics and was expected to win an unprecedented six gold medals. The goal was to become the first woman since 1968 to win back-to-back titles in the all-around.
“I just never felt like this going into a competition before,” Biles said at a press conference Tuesday following the team final. “I tried to go out here and have fun, and warm up in the back went a little bit better, but once I came out here I was like, ‘No, mental is not there.’”
“It’s been really stressful this Olympic Games, just as a whole,” said Biles to reporters at the time. “It’s been a long week. It’s been a long Olympic process. It’s been a long year.”
(NEW YORK) — Five-time Olympic swimmer Dara Torres felt nervous about asking her doctor if she could compete three weeks after giving birth.
Her doctor asked her to wait. She could start some light exercise tomorrow, though.
Torres, now the head coach of Boston College’s swimming and diving teams, remembers running into her doctor 10 days later at the gym.
“I don’t know if the endorphins were going, because I was at a gym and I was working out and I was feeling good,” Torres told ABC News. But she asked her doctor, “I have a meet in a week and a half. Can I swim in it?”
Torres did end up swimming in that meet. Her impressive performance there paved the way for her 2008 Olympic comeback only 16 months after giving birth.
The spotlight on elite athletes like Allyson Felix returning to competition after having a baby has contributed to increased resources for parents competing in the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. However, shortfalls in research and guidance for athletes in the 12-week “postpartum” period following the birth of a child can hinder their return to competition and make it harder to achieve their peak performance.
Sparse advice for athletes post-childbirth
“There’s very little data out there about how postpartum women should progress, that’s supported by science. It’s mostly expert opinion,” said Dr. Ellen Casey, a sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
This opinion is to listen to your body. “Your body’s going to tell you when you’ve pushed its limits,” said Dr. Melissa Simon, an OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine.
“Just like if you’re trying to go from the couch to running a 5K, there’s a ramp up,” Simon said. “And for an athlete, that ramp up period obviously changes depending on the particular sport or event that they’re participating in.”
Olympian Ashley Twichell got back in the pool seven weeks after delivery. “I vividly remember my first day getting back in the water,” she told ABC News. Her time was slower than she hoped for. “My training times have never really gotten back to what they were pre-pregnancy,” but her competition times are catching up.
She remembers telling herself “this might be a little bit longer of a journey and maybe a little bit harder of a journey than I expected.”
Twichell is part of USA Swimming’s Board of Directors as the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee Athletes’ Advisory Council representative.
Torres, on the other hand, said that her joints were more flexible after giving birth, and her swim times reflected this. “My body changed, but it was for the better,” she said.
At the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Torres shaved time off the 50-meter freestyle performance at the 2000 Games in Sydney.
“I was probably in the best shape of my life after I had my daughter,” said Torres.
But the scientific jury is out on how pregnancy and childbirth affect performance. According to a review of the existing studies regarding postpartum performance in athletes, most were considered low quality.
One of the few studies to examine this question looked at the 150 best female marathoners worldwide. Of the 37 who had given birth, 70% posted their best times after giving birth.
More research is needed to understand how postpartum athletes should return to competitive sports, and “we have a long ways to go,” said Pamela Geisel. Geisel, an exercise physiologist, is the director of performance and wellness services at HSS.
Regaining core strength is key
The postpartum bounceback can be hard for athletes — and anyone for that matter — for a multitude of reasons: increased metabolic demands with breastfeeding, sleep deprivation and postpartum blues or depression.
Healing the pelvic floor and abdominal wall after delivery can be a particular problem for a lot of new moms.
Torres said “my core was so mushy,” after giving birth. This “mushiness” can be due to a condition called rectus diastasis, where the connective tissue between the abs muscles is separated or torn.
“Some statistics say that 100% of pregnant women will have some degree of separation,” in this connective tissue for the baby to grow, said Casey.
For 30% to 60% of postpartum women, the tissue doesn’t go back to how it was before pregnancy, Casey continued. However, “just because it’s common does not make it normal,” she emphasized.
Pelvic floor and core strengthening exercises can reduce pain and other complications from rectus diastasis, she said. Other experts say Kegels and squats can help strengthen the pelvic floor, while planks and crunches help the core.
“Strengthening the core was pretty key for me,” Torres agreed.
New taskforce advocates for more resources
The USPOC launched the Women’s Health Taskforce in 2022, which has focused on creating plans to support the women of Team USA. Casey is a part of this 16 person panel that has generated guidelines for postpartum return.
Advocacy for parent athletes resulted in the first ever Olympic village nursery. The nursery offers a childcare center, free diapers and wipes, and private spaces for breastfeeding.
“This is probably the most parent friendly Olympics ever,” said Simon.
However, Geisel said there is still much work to be done.
“We have a group of athletes that had to choose between becoming mothers or winning gold medals,” in the past, Geisel said. “I’m excited about the future and that women no longer will have to choose one or the other.”
Sejal Parekh, M.D., is a practicing pediatrician and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.