Belmont Stakes winner Tiz the Law won’t run in next month’s Preakness, spoiling what would have been a highly anticipated rematch with Kentucky Derby winner Authentic.

The Preakness on Oct. 3 at Pimlico concludes this year’s reconfigured Triple Crown series, which was run out of order because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Jack Knowlton, managing partner of Sackatoga Stable, which owns Tiz the Law, tweeted that it’s “disappointing Tiz the Law will not be able to run in the Preakness.”

“Our primary interest is doing what’s right for the horse & in this case he’s not ready,” Knowlton wrote on Tuesday. “We look forward to training him up to the Breeders Cup Classic on 11/7.”

Knowlton had made it known since Tiz the Law finished second to Authentic in the Kentucky Derby on Sept. 5 that he would like his colt to make the Preakness. After the Derby, trainer Barclay Tagg said his preference would be to skip the Preakness.

However, with no chance for Tiz the Law to sweep the Triple Crown, he can be freshened to run in the Breeders’ Cup at Keeneland in Kentucky on Nov. 6-7.

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TENNIS

FRENCH OPEN: Bianca Andreescu, last year’s U.S. Open champion, will sit out the French Open and the rest of 2020.

The 20-year-old Canadian announced her decision to remain sidelined this season via a post Tuesday on social media.

“I have come to the difficult decision to skip the clay court swing this year and will be taking the remainder of the season off to focus on my health and training,” Andreescu wrote.

“As hard as it was to come to this conclusion, I have so much to look forward to in 2021, including the Olympics; I want to use this time to focus on my game so I can come back stronger and better than ever,” she said.

At New York in 2019, Andreescu became the first tennis player from Canada to win a Grand Slam singles championship. She also reached a career-high ranking of No. 4 last year.

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• A tennis coach who failed a coronavirus test for the French Open, forcing his player’s withdrawal from qualifying for the Grand Slam tournament, sharply criticized organizers on Tuesday for their handling of the case.

Damir Dzumhur, a former top-30 player from Bosnia now ranked 114th, traveled to Paris for this week’s qualifying tournament. But his coach, Petar Popovic, failed pre-tournament testing this past weekend. Dzumhur’s test was negative but he was excluded from the draw because they had shared a room together, the coach told The Associated Press in a phone interview from his native Serbia.

Popovic said organizers informed him Saturday of the failed test. He said a tournament doctor told him his result was “borderline.” As a consequence, Dzumhur was kept out of the draw for qualifying as a contact case, he said. Qualifying play started Monday. Matches in the main draw for the 15-day clay-court tournament begin Sunday.

Popovic said he pleaded to be allowed to take a second test, convinced the result was wrong, in part because he already contracted the virus more than two months ago. He said he also doubted the result because he had a blood test one month ago that found COVID-19 anti-bodies, suggesting he has some degree of protection against infection.

“It was all so quick. Really. Without any discussion or anything,” he said. ”The world collapsed on me and, most of all, on Damir, too.”

“We had no chance of proving our innocence and that they had made a scandalous mistake,” he said. “It’s really inhuman.”

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Tournament organizers defended their health measures put in place with the government.

“They are our rules,” they said in a short statement.

HAMBURG OPEN: Third-seeded Gael Monfils was eliminated in the first round of the Hamburg European Open, losing 6-4, 6-3 to 103rd-ranked Yannick Hanfmann.

Hanfmann needed just 1 hour, 13 minutes to wrap up the win and the German will next face Cristian Garin, who swept past Kei Nishikori 6-0, 6-3.

Garin is bidding to win his third trophy on clay this year.

Fourth-seeded Roberto Bautista-Agut won 6-4, 6-3 against two-time defending champion Nikoloz Basilashvili to set up a second-round meeting with Dominik Koepfer.

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SOCCER

U.S. MEN’S TEAM: The U.S. men’s soccer team has given up trying to play matches in October due to the coronavirus pandemic and will be limited to a maximum of three games in 2020, its fewest since 1987.

The U.S. Soccer Federation said it had abandoned its attempt to schedule home exhibition games for next month. It is attempting to schedule a pair of friendlies for Europe in November.

The team is considering a December training camp along with its January camp.

The only match this year was a 1-0 win over Costa Rica on Feb. 1 at Carson, California, with a roster mostly from Major League Soccer. Exhibitions in March at the Netherlands and Wales were canceled along with the CONCACAF Nations League final four in June and the start of World Cup qualifying in September.

BASKETBALL

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KOBE BRYANT: Vanessa Bryant, the widow of basketball star Kobe Bryant, has filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles County sheriff claiming deputies shared unauthorized photos of the crash that killed her husband, their 13-year-old daughter and seven others.

After the Jan. 26 crash, reports surfaced that graphic photos of the victims were being shared. Vanessa Bryant was devastated by the reports, her lawyer said.

The suit seeks damages for negligence, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva previously told news media that eight deputies took or shared graphic photos of the scene and he ordered the images deleted. The sheriff said the department has a policy against taking and sharing crime scene photos, but it does not apply to accident scenes.

The sheriff’s department did not immediately have a comment Tuesday.

GOLF

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USGA: Mike Davis spent the last decade running the USGA, where he set up golf courses to provide an extreme test for elite players and searched for solutions to increasing distance.

Now he wants to build golf courses, a lifelong passion.

Davis announced Tuesday he will retire as CEO at the end of 2021, ending a 32-year career with the USGA that began with him overseeing ticket sales and transportation. He became the seventh executive director in 2011 and the USGA’s first CEO after an organizational shakeup in 2016.

 

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