Nelly Korda on track to make golf history 🏌️‍♀️

Happy Monday – I hope everyone had a great weekend! I still can’t get over the drama we had in the Women’s Super League yesterday. Just four days after Emma Hayes said her team were out of the title race, Chelsea are now only three points behind Manchester City with a game in hand and a superior goal difference. It’s still all to play for!

It’s been three weeks since the last newsletter, so there’s a lot to pack into this one. Let’s get started…

Winning Women

Celebrating the impressive achievements of female athletes across the world

• We’ll start with the London Marathon. I was among those to take part and it was an absolutely unbelievable day as always! A long, long, long way ahead of me was Peres Jepchirchir, who broke the women-only world record in 2:16:16. The ‘women only’ record is different to the standard women’s marathon world record, as it only applies when the elite women run a separate race to the elite men.
  
  

• I mentioned Nelly Korda in the last edition of the newsletter and I’m going to have to do it again, as the golf star has now won five tournaments in a row on the LPGA Tour. She also earned the second major of her career as she triumphed at the Chevron Championship. No LPGA player has ever won six successive titles – I bet Korda can break the record.
  
  

• The Women’s Six Nations came to an end last month, with England earning a sixth straight title and third consecutive Grand Slam with a dominant 42-21 victory against France. Ireland secured their qualification for the 2025 Rugby World Cup with their third-place finish.

Bits and Bobs

Women’s sport news and content you may have missed

• There’s been so much going on in football – as always! It looks like the 2027 Women’s World Cup will be heading to Brazil, the cumulative attendance for this season’s Women's Super League and Women's Championship has surpassed one million, Leah Williamson stars in the new Pepsi advert alongside Jack Grealish, Vinicius Jr and Son Heung-min, and WSL legend Fran Kirby has announced she will be leaving Chelsea at the end of the season.
  
  

• Last month also saw the launch of Project ACL, a collaboration between FIFPro, England’s Professional Footballers’ Association, Nike and Leeds Beckett University. Women’s Super League clubs will be part of this three-year research initiative designed to find ways of reducing the incidence of anterior cruciate ligament injuries. This really couldn’t come soon enough. Female football players are still disproportionately impacted by ACL injuries and clubs often don’t do enough to help – as Stoke’s Kayleigh McDonald can testify.

• There’s been a couple of high-profile retirements in the world of women’s sport over the past few weeks. Candace Parker, a two-time WNBA MVP, has announced last week that she is quitting basketball. We also say goodbye to tennis ace Garbiñe Muguruza, who won the French Open in 2016 and Wimbledon in 2017.
  
  

• Drive to Survive resulted in a boom of interest in Formula 1 – now Netflix are hoping to have the same impact on the F1 Academy. The streaming service will produce a docuseries on the competition driving female participation in motorsport, which will be released in 2025. Exciting!

• It’s been absolutely amazing to witness a boom of women’s sports bars in American cities and here in London. One women’s sports bar in particular has attracted investment from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The Sports Bra in Portland is gearing up to expand after Ohanian, husband of tennis legend Serena Williams, became the company’s first-ever investor.
  
  

• We’re now just mere weeks away from the Paris 2024 Olympics, but it won’t be possible for French athletes to wear a hijab while competing at the Games. BBC Sport produced a feature on this exclusionary policy that is well worth reading.
  
  

• Let’s finish off with an incredible young athlete I stumbled across recently – Katie Cox. The supremely talented 18-year-old is a goalkeeper for Chelsea and England youth teams, and also plays for basketball team London Lions. Take a look at Katie’s average month below. 🤯

That’s all for today’s newsletter. If you enjoyed it, please share with your networks and anyone else you think may be interested. Thank you!