Tennis’s first Battle of the Sexes was 137 years ago, not that the Victorian promoters called it that. Lottie Dod, who had won her second Wimbledon title at the age of 16, took on Ernest Renshaw, the men’s champion. Renshaw gave her a 30-0 start each game and lost the first set 6-2, but won the next two. There have been several other men v women clashes. After Bill Tilden demolished Suzanne Lenglen in 1921, the Frenchwoman said: “Someone won 6-0 but I don’t recall who it was.”
The latest is Aryna Sabalenka, the women’s world No 1, against Nick Kyrgios, the men’s world No 673, and the Belarusian has a good chance, especially as the court is 9% smaller on her side. (Sunday, BBC One, 3.45pm). Billie Jean King, who won the first encounter to be called The Battle of the Sexes, was not impressed. “Ours was about social change,” she said of her victory over Bobby Riggs in 1973. “This one is not.” King got neither dimensional nor scoring advantage, though she was playing a 55-year-old.
Dennis Priestley won just £16,000 for claiming the first PDC World Championship in 1994, after the Great Darts Schism. The winner this time will get £1m, twice what was offered only last year. This is in large part down to the impact that a 16-year-old from Warrington made on his debut in 2023. The third round from Ally Pally continues with the final Saturday 3 January (Sky Sports Main, 8pm).
Football’s fixture list has been generous to Premier League fans on New Year’s Day with Crystal Palace hosting Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur going to Brentford (Thursday, Sky Sports Premier, 5.30pm and 8pm). In Scotland the Hogmanay hangover gets two days to subside as the Old Firm derby is on Saturday (Sky Sports Main, 12.30pm).
The Winter Olympics start in under six weeks. Britain won’t threaten the top of the medals table but there is normally one gold to warm spirits. In 2002 and 2022 that came via the women’s curling, while Amy Williams and Lizzy Yarnold won two successive titles from 2010-14 in skeleton, where they go head-first down an icy, bending slide while lying on a tea-tray.
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This time, Britain’s best skeleton is male. Matt Weston, a world champion in 2023 and 2025, has won three of this season’s four World Cup events. The next event is in Winterberg, Germany, (Friday, TNT Sports 2, 8am) with others to come in St Moritz and Altenberg before the Olympics are held in Italy at the Cortina Sliding Centre. Sounds like where they practise car chases for a 1970s police drama.
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