Turpin won, pts 15.Robinson won the title back 64 days later.* Lloyd Honegan v Donald Curry World welterweight, Atlantic City, 27 September 1986. Honeyghan won, rsf 6th.Curry moved up to light-middleweight afterwards.* Nigel Benn v Gerald Mcclellan WBC super-middleweight, London Arena, 25 Feb 1995. Benn won, rsf 10th.McClellan debut at weight.* John H Stracey v Jose Napoles WBC welterweight, Mexico City, 6 Dec 1975 Rsf 6th.Napoles retired afterwards.. Deginald Erskin led Leicester Riders with 23 points as they broke a nine-game losing streak to defeat Guildford Heat 76-58 on Saturday night, to strengthen their grip on fifth place. The Riders, weakened by Joel Burns and Robert Reed recently quitting, have also lost Steve Bucknall to England’s team preparing for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. But on Saturday they rekindled the early-season defensive intensity that took them to the top of the table. The Heat slipped back to sixth.
Erskin was supported by 19 points from Ryan Huntley.

Chad McKnight led the Heat with 18 points.Chester Jets, last season’s champions now scrambling to qualify for the play-off quarter-finals, climbed to ninth by beating the bottom club Birmingham Bullets 94-72 in Solihull Phillip Gilbert led the Jets’ scoring with 22 points.. The onerous privilege of getting the best from the most expensive thoroughbred ever sold at public auction has fallen to the top American trainer Todd Pletcher. The colt by Forestry was last week purchased for $16m (£9.14m) by the Coolmore boss, John Magnier, and his partners at a breeze-up sale at Calder, Florida.
Pletcher, 38, set a prize-money record last year and has made a record 38 nominations for the US Triple Crown. His patrons plainly expect this colt to prove eligible for the 2007 series. Assistant to Wayne Lukas for seven years, Pletcher has been training for 10 years and has yet to win a Classic, but did win two Breeders’ Cup races in 2004.. There is nothing like sport to expose the fundamental absurdity of so many political, social and religious divisions. Even the bloody partition of Ireland has long been cheerfully overlooked by rugby fans either side of the border.

And certainly the Cheltenham Festival is far too serious a business for anyone to dream of importing ancient feuds from the same island. After all, one of the most cherished horses in Ireland – one that has already plundered sterling from the Cheltenham bookmakers three times, and will confirm himself one of the great modern steeplechasers if repeating those depredations next week – is trained by a Protestant aristocrat.
When Moscow Flyer first won the Queen Mother Champion Chase, three years ago, Jessica Harrington received her trophy from Princess Anne. That was nice, she said, because they knew each other from their eventing days. Her father was an Anglo-Irish landowner, a brigadier in the British army, an Olympic medallist in polo. She was educated by a governess.Yet the Irish betting proletariat would sooner swear by Harrington than at her. In fact, depending on how things turn out next week, she is eligible to become one of the most popular women ever to make her home in Co Kildare.Along with Moscow Flyer, Harrington is responsible for Macs Joy, second favourite for the Champion Hurdle. Their supporters in Britain and Ireland alike know them to be in remarkably dependable hands.

Of the first six horses she ran at the Festival, four won.This time round, however, she would understand if their faith were to waver. In winning the Champion Chase a second time last year, Moscow Flyer maintained a record over fences that easily surpassed that of Best Mate Whenever he had jumped round, he had won. At Aintree the following month, he extended that record to 19 races. He was entering Turf folklore, and Harrington agreed to write a book about him. Sure enough, he has not won since.His loss of form was matched in midwinter by the entire stable Harrington saddled 97 consecutive losers over 12 weeks. There has been a palpable revival since Moscow Flyer last ran, at Christmas, but at the time it was harrowing “Self doubt does creep in,” Harrington confessed. “Hell, you think, I’ve done the same thing for all these years and it has always worked, why isn’t it working now? You start to wonder if they were all just bad horses Moscow Flyer might have aged, Macs Joy gone backwards Eventually I did change the hay, and stopped feeding oats.

Whether that made the difference, I don’t know, but everything else we did was exactly as always.”Nor was this the gravest crisis since publication day. Last autumn, Harrington was fortunate not to have been paralysed by a fall during a horseback safari in Kenya. “In hindsight, it frightened the life out of me, but at the time you just get on with it,” she reflected “If anything, you wonder why everyone’s making a fuss OK, I thought: I’ve got a broken neck, but I’m grand I’m not dead, or in a wheelchair. Sometimes I’d feel a bit sorry for myself, but then I’d go to the hospital and see people far worse off, and reproach myself. I was lucky, but unlucky as well – to think of all the squishes I’ve had eventing, schooling, hunting, getting pinned under horses in ditches I should have broken my neck 100 times And then to go and do it trotting. .”Her father survived Passchendaele, so a lingering stiffness in her neck was never going to stop her skiing last month.