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Springboks recall Steyn for Lions, keep bulk of WC winners

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Morne Steyn may get a second chance to break the hearts of the British and Irish Lions.

South Africa recalled the 36-year-old flyhalf on Saturday to a 46-man initial squad for the Lions series, 12 years after his last-gasp penalty won an epic 2009 contest between the teams.

Steyn hasn’t played a test in five years but has been “the most consistent” No. 10 in South African domestic rugby this year, Springboks coach Jacques Nienaber said at the squad announcement.

Handre Pollard is still South Africa’s first-choice flyhalf but Steyn has been pushing hard after returning to domestic rugby following a spell in France.

Crucially for the Springboks, they also have 14 of the 15 men who started and won the Rugby World Cup final against England in November 2019 back in their squad. Only prop Tendai Mtawarira, who has retired, is missing. All but three of the entire 2019 World Cup squad return to duty.

Incredibly, that World Cup final in Tokyo was South Africa’s last test as the coronavirus pandemic and a long and strict lockdown ruined their schedule last year.

“We’ve been really hungry to play,” said director of rugby Rassie Erasmus, who has moved upstairs after coaching the Boks to World Cup glory two years ago.

Nienaber, Erasmus’ assistant at the World Cup, was named head coach in January 2020 but hasn’t yet led the team in a test. This was his first squad after more than a year in the job, although he knows most of the players well having been part of the coaching staff since 2018.

“If you look at the squad, there is a lot of experience there,” Nienaber said.

There was one serious doubt for the Boks, however, after experienced No. 8 Duane Vermeulen, man of the match in the World Cup final, injured his left ankle playing in the Pro14 Rainbow Cup on Friday night. Erasmus said Vermeulen, who was named in the squad, needs a scan.

“Duane is a big worry for us,” Erasmus said. “It looked bad.”

Erasmus said World Cup-winning locks Lood de Jager and RG Snyman should recover from injuries in time for the Lions series.

While the Springboks will rely on the core of their World Cup-winning group, there were eight uncapped players in the squad, which will also provide the players for the South Africa A vs. Lions tour game.

Those uncapped players included hooker Joseph Dweba, lock Nicolaas Janse van Rensburg and loose forward Jasper Wiese, who all play for European clubs and are relatively unknown. The most exciting newcomer might be fullback Aphelele Fassi, who is highly-rated.

Nienaber and Erasmus, who work as a team on selection, also added twin brothers Jean-Luc and Dan du Preez of Sale Sharks to further beef up an already hefty forward pack.

Morne Steyn is one of two survivors of the 2009 Lions series in the squad. The other, utility back Frans Steyn, continues an international career that began with a 2006 debut for the Boks at the age of 19.

The Springboks and Lions will play three tests, one in Cape Town and two in Johannesburg, in July and August. The Lions will also play five games against South African domestic teams before the tests.

The tour is almost certain to be played without any fans and sadly robbed of a central part of its tradition because of the virus, unless the government has a late change of heart and eases a ban on spectators at major sports events.

South Africa will warm up with two home tests against Georgia on July 2 and July 9 before the first test against the Lions on July 24.

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More AP sports: https://apnews.com/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Hendrick train rolls into Sonoma seeking 4th straight win

The Hendrick Motorsports train rolls into Sonoma Raceway on a three-race winning streak that pushed it past Petty Enterprises as NASCAR’s winningest organization.

Think the juggernaut will be stopped Sunday at NASCAR’s first visit to California in nearly two years?

It’s going to be tough.

Sure, Martin Truex Jr. is the two-time defending race winner dating to 2019, the final time before the pandemic that NASCAR stopped at the picturesque rolling road course in wine country. In the time since, though, reigning Cup champion Chase Elliott has become king of the road and the four Hendrick cars have hit a different dimension.

“I think we all look at them as being a really strong team and having really strong race cars consistently,” Truex said. “I think across the board they’ve been strong, all their teams, all their drivers at different tracks have been strong and winning races.”

Truex is the last non-Hendrick driver to win a race, nearly a month ago at Darlington Raceway. Since then it has been all Hendrick Motorsports, starting with an Alex Bowman 1-2-3-4 sweep at Dover. Elliott then got the win at Circuit of the Americas in Texas over teammate Kyle Larson when the race was called for rain, and Larson last Sunday beat Elliott at Charlotte to give Rick Hendrick his 269th Cup win — one more than Richard Petty-owned cars.

Out in wine country, Elliott will be seeking his first career victory at Sonoma. But six of his 12 career wins are on road courses, including five of the last six stops. Those six wins tie him for third on NASCAR’s all-time road course win list with Bobby Allison, Richard Petty, Ricky Rudd and Rusty Wallace.

Sonoma was not good to him in four previous visits, with a fourth-place finish in 2018 Elliott’s best result. He led the first three laps of his career at Sonoma in 2019 but dropped out of the race 30 laps short of the finish with an engine issue.

“Sonoma is a place that I haven’t done a very good job in the past,” Elliott said. “It’s been a pretty big challenge for me. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve been there, so it’s been a while. When we were there in 2019, I felt like we were doing a great job and in a good position before we had our mechanical issue, so I’m looking forward to getting back and having another shot at it.”

AROUND THE CAROUSEL

NASCAR has raced at Sonoma 31 times since its inaugural 1989 event on two different configurations of the track.

The famous Carousel was eliminated in 1998 in favor of a chute that shortened the track to 1.949 miles, but Speedway Motorsports scrapped that after the 2018 race. Now the Carousel is back and the multi-elevational layout is 12 turns over 2.52 miles with several high-speed sections.

NASCAR used a higher downforce package when it raced Sonoma last in 2019, and it returns with lower downforce and no practice or qualifying because of pandemic precautions. The Carousel goes down from Turn 4 through Turns 5 and 6 before leading into the course’s longest straightaway and the Turn 7 hairpin.

Truex went to the Toyota simulator earlier this week “just to kind of reacclimate myself to the track,” but drivers aren’t sure what to expect with this downforce package and the Carousel.

“I think it’s just a really awkward corner, and it doesn’t feel like a corner a race car should be going through,” said Cole Custer, who has only run a K&N Pro Series West race on the configuration.

“It’s really tight, really downhill, off camber. It’s just a really tough corner, and it’s something that you never go through there and feel like you did it right. It never feels natural, so it’s one of those things you just kind of have to hit your marks and make sure you don’t overdo it through there.”

ODDS AND ENDS: Elliott is the 11-5 favorite to win Sunday, according to FanDuel Sportsbook. … Truck Series regular Ben Rhodes will make his Cup Series debut driving for Spire Motorsports in the No. 77 Chevrolet. He won the truck race on the Daytona Road Course earlier this year and is the fifth different driver to pilot the No. 77 for Spire this season. … There are five California natives in the field, including Cole Custer from Ladera Ranch and Tyler Reddick from Corning, both making their Sonoma debuts.

New England’s success against COVID-19 could be a model

BOSTON (AP) — For Dr. Jeremy Faust, the moment he realized the pandemic no longer dominated his workday came over Memorial Day weekend, when he didn’t see a single coronavirus case over two shifts in the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Kerry LaBarbera, an ER nurse a few miles away at Boston Medical Center, had a similar realization that same weekend, when just two patients with COVID-19 came through her unit, one of the busiest in New England.

“The past year and a half has been like going through a tornado or something terrible,” she said. “You’re holding on for dear life, and then you get past it and it’s like, ‘What just happened?’”

Massachusetts and the rest of New England — the most heavily vaccinated region in the U.S. — are giving the rest of the country a possible glimpse of the future if more Americans get their shots.

COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the region have been steadily dropping as more than 60% of residents in all six states have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

The Deep South states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, in comparison, are the least vaccinated at around 35%, and new cases relative to the population are generally running higher there than in most of New England. Nationally, about 50% of Americans have received at least one shot.

In Massachusetts, health officials this past week determined that none of the state’s cities and towns are at high risk for the spread of COVID-19 for the first time since they started issuing weekly assessments last August.

In Rhode Island, coronavirus hospitalizations have hit their lowest levels in about eight months. New Hampshire is averaging about a death a week after peaking at about 12 a day during the virus’s winter surge. And Vermont, the most heavily vaccinated state in the U.S. at more than 70%, went more than two weeks without a single reported coronavirus death.

“It’s an incredible change over such a short period of time,” said Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious disease physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington.

Public health experts say the rest of the country could take some cues from New England as President Joe Biden pushes to get at least one vaccine dose into 70% of American adults by July 4, dangling the promise of free beer and other goodies.

One thing the region appears to have done right: It was generally slower than other parts of the country to expand vaccine eligibility and instead concentrated more on reaching vulnerable groups of people, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director under President Barack Obama.

New England leaders for the most part also embraced the recommendations of public health experts over economic priorities throughout the pandemic, said Dr. Albert Ko, who chairs the epidemiology department at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut.

That parts of the region were among the hardest hit in the early days of the outbreak also played a significant role.

“We really went through it in those early moments,” Ko said. “That’s left a big imprint on the population generally.”

To be sure, some of the improvements in COVID-19 numbers can be attributed to warmer weather that is allowing New Englanders to socially distance outdoors more, experts say.

States such as California and Nebraska are also doing as well as if not better than some New England states when it comes to new cases relative to population. And racial disparities in vaccinations persist in the region, as they do in many other corners of the country.

In a series of tweets last weekend, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island, contrasted the relatively low vaccination rates in Springfield, Massachusetts, one of the region’s largest, poorest and most racially diverse cities, with the near-complete vaccination of his hometown of Newton, an affluent, largely white Boston suburb.

“So if you are in a high vaccination state, your job is not done,” Jha wrote. “Because across America, there are too many people and communities for whom vaccines still remain out of reach.”

Nationwide, new coronavirus cases are down to about 15,000 per day on average, while deaths have plummeted to around 430 a day — levels not seen since late March 2020, during the very early stages of the crisis. The overall U.S. death toll is just short of 600,000.

Even with cases down dramatically, New England hospitals are in many ways busier than ever, as patients return in droves after postponing medical care for more than a year.

Dr. Katherine Gergen Barnett, head of the family medicine department at Boston Medical Center, said it has been “energizing” to reconnect with regular patients but also taxing, as many have a year’s worth of mental trauma to work through, on top of their neglected physical ailments.

“There’s definitely a little bit of exhale happening,” she said. “We ran that marathon, but now there’s this other long race ahead of us in terms of getting people back to healthy.”

Paul Murphy, an emergency department nurse at Brigham and Women’s, said wait times for patients in his unit often exceed six hours these days, and the staff is feeling tired and burned out.

Still, the 54-year-old Warwick, Rhode Island, resident said it has been refreshing to step away from the work grind as the region comes back to life. Gone are the 50-hour-plus workweeks of the pandemic, with time now for his children’s sports practices and other commitments, Murphy said.

Faust, the emergency physician at Brigham, said he clocked in nearly an entire day of guilt-free sleep recently, something he couldn’t have dreamed of during the throes of the pandemic.

But like other health experts, he worries that the slowing pace of vaccinations could leave the nation vulnerable to newer, stronger virus mutations.

“We’re playing roulette if we continue to let the virus infect so many people,” Faust said. “That’s what keeps me up at night now.”

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Associated Press reporters Lisa Rathke in Marshfield, Vermont; Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Mark Pratt in Boston contributed to this story.

Mangiapane, Canada beat US 4-2 in world hockey semifinals

RIGA, Latvia (AP) — Andrew Mangiapane scored two goals to help Canada beat the United States 4-2 on Saturday in the semifinals of hockey’s world championship.

Mangiapane has seven goals and four assists in six games since joining Canada midway through the preliminary round. Canada started the tournament with three straight losses, but has five wins and a shootout loss since Mangiapane was added to the mix.

“It is crazy how we were able to battle back in this tournament,” said Mangiapane, who plays for Calgary in the NHL. “We have been the underdogs in most of our games, but we just keep proving people wrong.

“It is great to see, and great to see the character of our team and the level of competitiveness we have. We know we are not done yet and we have one more game to take care of business.”

With Saturday’s win, Canada heads to the final for the fifth time in the past six tournaments. Canada’s last gold medals came back to back in 2015 and ’16.

Canada will face Finland in Sunday’s gold-medal match. It’s a rematch of the 2019 final, which Finland won 3-1. The 2020 tournament was cancelled because of COVID-19.

Finland, which defeated Canada 3-2 in a shootout in their final preliminary-round game, beat Germany 2-1 in the semifinals.

Brandon Pirri also scored for Canada, while Justin Danforth added an empty-net goal in the final minute. Ottawa Senators teammates Connor Brown and Nick Paul each had two assists, and Darcy Kuemper made 36 saves.

Colin Blackwell and Sasha Chmelevski scored for the U.S., and goalie Cal Petersen blocked 29 shots.

Pirri opened the scoring just over two minutes into the first period, but Blackwell responded for the U.S. at 17:17.

Mangiapane scored the only goal of the second period, and then put Canada up 3-1 early in the third.

The U.S. got one back when Chmelevski scored 3:36 into the third, but Kuemper made 13 saves in the final frame to help Canada hold on. Danforth then capped the scoring with Petersen on the bench in favor of an extra attacker.

“It would have been nice to get my first goal earlier than the eighth game of the tournament, but I just wanted to play the right way and I knew my opportunities would come,” Danforth said.

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More AP sports coverage from Europe: https://apnews.com/hub/sports-europe and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Hungary: Plan to build Chinese university branch protested

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Several thousand people rallied in Hungary’s capital Saturday against plans by Prime Minister Viktor Orban to host a Chinese university in Budapest.

A strategic agreement that Hungary signed with Shanghai-based Fudan University envisages opening a branch in the city’s 9th district. Plans call for the Budapest campus to be completed by 2024. It would enroll international students and represent the school’s only foreign outpost, as well as the first Chinese university campus in the 27-nation European Union.

The protesters marched from Heroes’ Square toward the Hungarian parliament building, defying a pandemic ban on gatherings of more than 500 people. The crowd carried banners reading ‘No Fudan,” flags and posters.

Budapest authorities have opposed the university branch idea. They argue the $1.9 billion project would place a huge burden on taxpayers and send the wrong political message because of the alleged human rights abuses in China.

Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony had a huge photo of a protester facing a tank in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square projected behind him during Saturday’s demonstration. Chinese troops opened fire on protesters in the square on June 4, 1989, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands.

“Let’s make it clear whom we are not protesting against,” Karácsony said. “We have our problem with dictators…. And we are not in the least protesting against Chinese people who live together with us peacefully in this marvelous city.”

“What we want is the student city,” Karácsony added. “What we don’t want is the 500 billion forint ( 1.45 billion euro; $ 1.6 billion) Chinese elite university paid from the taxpayers’ money. It is as simple as that.”

Orban, a right-wing populist, has fostered closer ties with Russia and China as he faces European Union criticism for his authoritarian ways and staunch anti-immigration stand.

Hungarian officials have insisted that Fudan, ranked among the top 100 universities in the world, will help raise higher education standards in Hungary. But the university’s links to China’s Communist Party have sparked outrage among liberal-minded Hungarians.

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