FAMILY TRIP ...
A big weekend ahead for the Downie family as sisters Becky and Ellie head to the European Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Montpellier, the first time the pair have competed together. It will be business as usual in France for 23-year-old Becky, who won three golds and a silver at the European Championships and Commonwealth Games last year, but a real step up for 15-year-old Ellie, for whom it is her first Europeans and her senior debut for Great Britain. She’s in fine form, however, having won two silvers and importantly taking third place in the all-around at the British championships last week. (BBC, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, times vary.)
F1 HISTORY LESSON ...
As a precursor to the Bahrain Grand Prix next Sunday, the BBC opens its season of Formula One Rewind retrospectives with a look at title fights that went to the wire. This week, (at the rather peculiarly programmed time of 3pm on Friday) Murray Walker enjoys some classic finishes from James Hunt against Niki Lauda at Japan in 1976, through Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet and Alain Prost vying for the title at Australia in 1986 to Lewis Hamilton’s joy and Felipe Massa’s heartbreak in 2008 at Brazil. Elsewhere in motor sport, the FIA World Endurance Championship begins on at Silverstone on Sunday (Motors TV, streaming at fiawec.com, 12pm), where another fine season of sports car racing is on offer. Sadly, new works challengers Nissan will not make this race or the second at Spa but will bring their radical new front-wheel drive prototype to the series’ big event, the Le Mans 24 Hours in June. In the interim a fine battle looks to be shaping up between last year’s champions Toyota, and Audi and Porsche, with the last of these seeming to have the edge in pre-season testing.
TOP SNOOKER ...
To the Crucible for the big one on Saturday as the world’s top 32 players meet for the World Championship (BBC2/red button). Mark Selby defends the title he won by defeating Ronnie O’Sullivan 18-14 last year. The latter is looking for his sixth win and rather typically this fascinating and mercurial talent recently admitted that snooker occupied increasingly little of his time and that he was practising as little as two hours a week. Which fact, it being Ronnie, may only make his opponents nervous.
