• 39-year-old collapsed during event in June

• American won world title in 2011

Former 1500m world champion Jenny Simpson says she will not return to running after she collapsed during a track event in June.

Simpson, a three-time Olympian and one of the most accomplished American female runners in history, was pacing a mile group at an event in North Carolina when she went into cardiac arrest. She was given CPR before she was rushed to hospital, where she was placed on life support due to issues with her heart and lungs.

• World No 1 makes ‘difficult decision’ to miss slam

• Draper still recovering from bone bruise in left arm

Jannik Sinner will miss the US Open with a right knee injury. The world No 1 has not played a match since beating Alexander Zverev last month to successfully defend his Wimbledon title, missing the Masters 1000 events in Canada and Cincinnati. Great Britain’s Jack Draper is also out of the event.

The news comes a day after his great rival Carlos Alcaraz, whom the Italian lost to in the final in New York 12 months ago, revealed he will make his comeback at Flushing Meadows after four months out with a wrist injury.

• Transgender woman has never played in the league

• Engelbert says league being used as ‘political football’

The WNBA commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, has denounced people she said are trying to “sow divisiveness” as the league grapples with a debate over transgender athletes.

Engelbert made the comments on Thursday before the Indiana Fever’s loss to the Dallas Wings at the home of the Dallas Mavericks. Demonstrators showed up outside American Airlines Center, as they have at other venues since the Fever’s Sophie Cunningham voiced support for barring transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports.

• Kai Spears incorrectly linked to death of young mother

• Times says it had not lost libel case in more than 50 years

An Alabama jury has awarded $9.25m in damages after finding that the New York Times defamed a college basketball player by incorrectly reporting that he was at the scene of a fatal shooting.

Kai Spears, who played for the University of Alabama men’s team, sued the Times in 2023 after it published a report, citing a person familiar with the investigation, that said he was a passenger in a car involved in the shooting. The Times reported that the person had spoken “on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”

Ravil Dzhamally fled when Russian forces occupied his farm in Kherson Oblast, then returned after liberation to clear mines and plant again. Now, tons of his grain lie unsold in plastic sleeves across his fields because Russian attacks have nearly halted exports through Odesa, Bloomberg reported on 20 August.

Odesa’s Black Sea ports handle almost all of Ukraine’s grain exports, Bloomberg reported. Weekly grain and oilseed exports have fallen by more than 90% since early July, data from commodity-data firm Kpler show. That threatens fall planting and the sector that generates more than half of Ukraine’s export revenue. The disruption is also raising food costs in countries that rely on imported grain, Reuters reported.

Farmers must either store harvests they cannot export or sell locally at about one-third of global prices, Bloomberg reported. They say this year’s crisis is worse than the 2022 blockade because the financial reserves that carried them through six months of disruption then have since been depleted.

Russian attacks drive ships from Ukraine’s grain corridor

Ukraine’s Black Sea grain corridor—the wartime shipping route from Odesa—was never formally closed, Euromaidan Press reported. Four or five ships entered Ukraine’s ports on 21 July. Still, none arrived the next day because shipowners had paused calls, not because Ukraine had restricted navigation, Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi told Ukrainian agricultural outlet Latifundist.

Ukraine’s state railway, Ukrzaliznytsia, subsequently restricted selected wheat and barley shipments to Odesa ports. Its register did not state a reason, and the railway did not publicly link the orders to the shipping disruption.

Oleksandr Havryliuk, who farms near the front in Kharkiv Oblast, told Bloomberg that losing his harvest would probably bankrupt him and force him to sell the farm. The National Bank of Ukraine estimates that Ukraine could lose about $2.5 billion in export revenue during the second half of 2026, Reuters reported. Bloomberg said the disruption could trigger widespread farm bankruptcies.

Ukraine seeks EU aid and export routes as losses mount

Financing was already constrained before the port crisis: available financing and insurance were “enough to keep the sector surviving, not enough to keep it growing,” Vysotskyi told Euromaidan Press in May.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, agriculture accounted for more than 10% of Ukraine’s economic output, according to World Bank data cited by Bloomberg.

The sector has since grown more important as Russian attacks have destroyed much of the country’s heavy industry, Evghenia Sleptsova, a senior economist at the economic forecasting firm Oxford Economics, told Bloomberg.

Her firm estimates that the disruption could cost the equivalent of 1.8% of GDP this year and 2.1% in 2027. Under a prolonged severe disruption, the 2027 loss could instead reach 5.3%, Oxford Economics said.

Ukraine could exhaust its grain-storage capacity by early November if exports do not recover, the Agriculture Ministry said, according to Bloomberg. Even using every available route, the country may export only about 30 million tons this season, leaving roughly the same volume stored or rotting, Vysotskyi said.

Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry requested a €220 million EU grant to subsidize interest and unlock up to €4 billion in loans, the ministry said.

Ukraine and Moldova are also discussing a rail route through Moldova to Romania’s port of Constanța, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources in both countries. Kyiv estimates the route could carry about 10% of its grain exports.

Western rail corridors have limited capacity, while low water levels restrict traffic through Danube ports. Both alternatives cost more than shipping through the Black Sea, Bloomberg reported.

Boxing’s most mercurial star is putting an old friendship aside as he moves up to 147lb to challenge Rolly Romero for the welterweight title he won against Ryan Garcia

For more than a decade, Teófimo López’s friendship with Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero endured through amateur tournaments, Las Vegas sparring sessions and the mismatched peaks and troughs of two volatile careers. That friendship ended, López says, the moment they signed to fight one another.

On Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena along the Vegas Strip, the 29-year-old López will challenge for Romero’s World Boxing Association welterweight title. The former lightweight and junior-welterweight champion is moving up to 147lb in pursuit of a belt in a third division. For Romero, himself a three-weight belt-holder after stacking titles at 135lb and 140lb, a victory would add another marquee name to a résumé transformed by last year’s upset of Ryan Garcia. The fight will be broadcast globally on Dazn pay-per-view and will see the champion go off as a roughly 2-1 underdog.

Bob Iger and Josh Kushner’s $12.5bn bid to buy the Lakers shows that NBA teams are no longer family dynasties, but quick flips for private equity sharks

For years, the NBA was built on the alliance of patient money and marketing pizzazz, and no team captured that curious mixture better than the Los Angeles Lakers. Through Showtime in the 1980s and the dominance of the Shaq-Kobe years, the Lakers became the benchmark for a league and a sport intent on global conquest: charismatic, ambitious, and flashy, a sporting-cultural amalgam in which athleticism and celebrity held equal rank. Through careful front office recruitment, savvy coaching, and the harnessing of Hollywood’s star power, the Lakers evolved from a team into a “brand,” establishing a template that virtually every other outfit in the NBA has felt compelled to mimic in the years since. But the razzle-dazzle on the court – the Laker Girls, Magic flinging no-look passes, Shaq smashing the glass, Jack Nicholson smiling his Joker smile in the front row, all eyebrows and mischief – depended on a far more staid and stable arrangement off it. Real estate investor Jerry Buss bought the Lakers for $16m in 1979, and remained the majority owner until his death in 2013, when his children assumed control of the franchise.

When Jerry Buss died, the Lakers were valued at $1bn. Now, the team looks set to be sold to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner, the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared, for $12.5bn. The sale is still under negotiation and will need to be approved by the NBA’s board of governors; the Buss siblings are also now bickering over whether to join the stampede and sell their minority 17.8% stake in the franchise to Iger and Kushner, which has added a subplot of Shakespearean family intrigue to proceedings. But in the likely event it goes through, the sale would make the Lakers the most valuable franchise in basketball. It would also signal an acceleration in private equity’s scramble to get its claws into the world of sport.