Team MRF takes the honours
The Hindu
Lindholm clinches drivers’ championship
Team MRF Tyres clinched the Finnish Rally Championship (Ralli SM) after Emil Lindholm and Reeta Hamalainen dominated the final round of the season in the SM KokUA 60-v Juhlaralli event on Sunday.
Going into the final round, it was a winner-take-all scenario with the top three drivers separated by just seven points. Team MRF was on the pace from the first of the 10-stage competition with Lindholm winning the Skriko stage. He ended the first day of action on Saturday in first place, but with a lead of just 2.9 seconds.
The pressure was intense for the four Sunday stages that featured 74km of action, However, Lindholm was in form, never relinquishing his lead.
He has worn India’s blues, albeit in an Under-19 World Cup, with K.L. Rahul, Mayank Agarwal, Harshal Patel and Jaydev Unadkat as his teammates. He has proudly adorned the Lion’s Crest — the famed Mumbai cricket logo — in all three formats. He has played with Yuvraj Singh, against Virat Kohli and Rahul Dravid and has the likes of Rahul and Joe Root in his illustrious list of dismissals. He is also a software developer for an IT giant, based in California. Virtually every middle-class Indian over the last three decades at some stage dreams of being either a cricketer or an IT professional. Saurabh Netravalkar has been combining two dreams, even after relocating to USA to pursue academics at the prestigious Cornell University in 2015.
Unlike most of the Olympic-bound athletes, who opt to train abroad before the big event, boxer Amit Panghal prefers training in home conditions prior to Paris 2024. A former World championships silver medallist and a World No. 1, Panghal won the 51kg quota place in the only chance he got. He wants to follow his own plans to script success in Paris.
The other men’s semifinal Friday is Norway’s Casper Ruud, twice the runner-up in Paris — to Rafael Nadal in 2022 and to Novak Djokovic in 2023 — against Germany’s Alexander Zverev, a finalist at the 2020 U.S. Open, an Olympic gold medalist and into the final four at Roland Garros for the fourth consecutive year.