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Tim Duncan, the long-time star of the San Antonio Spurs, announced today that he is retiring. He helped the team win five NBA titles since he joined the franchise in 1997.

Duncan’s reserved personality kept him largely out of the spotlight, despite his consistently stellar performances with the Spurs, who made the playoffs every year that Duncan played for the team. Duncan was voted most valuable player five times, two of them regular-season M.V.P. awards and three others for his performances in NBA finals.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement that Duncan had earned, “a place among the all-time greats, while his understated selflessness made him the ultimate teammate.”

In keeping with Duncan’s low profile, the announcement of his retirement came in a press release heavy on statistics and light on personal details.

“The 40-year-old Duncan comes off of a season in which he led the NBA in Defensive RPM (5.41) and became just the third player in league history to reach 1,000 career wins, as well as the only player to reach 1,000 wins with one team. He helped the Spurs to a franchise-best 67-15 record and also became one of two players in NBA history to record at least 26,000 points, 15,000 rebounds and 3,000 blocks in his career (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).”

Many fans on Twitter followed suit, sharing more of Duncan’s many impressive career statistics. Duncan’s name was trending, even though he doesn’t have a personal account on the social media site.

Spurs coach Gregg Popovich told Sports Illustrated earlier this year, “Timmy’s never been a very outspoken or emoting sort of individual on the court. Everybody does it differently.” Together, Popovich and Duncan won 1,001 games, more than any other coach-player pair in NBA history.

Former teammates and fellow NBA stars reacted to news of the 15-time All Star’s retirement with words of praise.

Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr played with Duncan for four seasons.

LeBron James, who recently led the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first NBA title in decades, expressed his admiration for Duncan.

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Portugal overcame the loss of injured captain Cristiano Ronaldo to beat France 1-0 in the European Championship final on Sunday, with a goal in extra time from substitute Eder securing their country’s first football title.

Just as the final looked destined for a penalty shootout, Eder cut through the French defense and struck a low shot from 25 yards past goalkeeper Hugo Lloris in the 109th minute at the Stade de France.

Twelve years after losing to Greece on home soil in their last final appearance, it was Portugal’s turn to spoil the host nation’s party. And they achieved it by winning only one of their seven games at Euro 2016 inside 90 minutes.

It was dull and stodgy at times but the record books will only show that Portugal went from third-place in its group to champion, with little help from Ronaldo in its last match.

European football’s biggest match lost its biggest name midway through the first half of a cagey final on the outskirts of the French capital.

Ronaldo went down under Dimitri Payet’s ninth-minute challenge and was twice forced off to receive treatment on the touchline.

However determined Ronaldo was to lead Portugal to glory, his left knee could cope no more and he was carried off on a stretcher midway through the first half.

Ronaldo was in tears but he returned just before extra time to address his weary teammates. They seemed to be inspired by Ronaldo’s re-emergence and the Real Madrid forward was soon leaping off the bench in celebrations.

Then he was lying on the turf again at the final whistle, this time in disbelief rather than pain.

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If she wasn’t already one of the best tennis players ever, Serena Williams solidified her case Saturday by winning Wimbledon in straight sets for her 22nd Grand Slam title.

Williams defeated Angelique Kerber 7-5, 6-3 to win her second consecutive and seventh overall Wimbledon title, according to The Associated Press. The two women played against each other in the Australia Open in January, with Kerber taking that win.

But on Saturday, the 34-year-old tennis star celebrated her latest victory by raising two fingers on each hand to symbolize “22.”

“I love playing her,” Williams said of Kerber. “She’s such a great opponent.”

Williams ties Steffi Graf with 22 Grand Slam titles in the Open Era. This seventh title also means Williams is closing in Martina Navratilova’s nine trophy wins.

“It makes the victory even sweeter to know how hard I worked for it,” Williams told ESPN following the match. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m so excited.”

Reuters reported the first set was a fierce back-and-forth battle, but that Williams capitalized midway through the second set for the victory.

“At the end, I was trying everything, but she deserved it today. She really played an unbelievable match,” said Kerber, who hadn’t appeared in a major final until beating Williams in Melbourne. “I think we both play on a really high level.”

It was a day of wins for Serena. Hours after winning the singles title, she competed alongside her sister Venus in the doubles title match, and the two walked away with their sixth Wimbledon championship and 14th Grand Slam title. The sisters hold the doubles title for 2000, 2002, 2008, 2009 and 2012.

“It’s a privilege, it’s an honour,” Venus said, according to Reuters. “When you enter the doubles draw, you dream of winning. Then we enter the singles, we dream of winning.

“To have Williams on both of those, somehow in 2016, it’s another dream come true.”

The Williams sisters plan to compete in singles and doubles at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro next month.

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The Olympics are less than a month away, and there’s still no final decision on whether some Russian track and field athletes will be allowed to compete in Rio. Russia has appealed a ban imposed after evidence of wide-ranging, state-sponsored doping. The Court of Arbitration for Sport is expected to decide by July 21 whether individual Russian track and field athletes can compete.

This case, and the larger question of doping, is a hot topic of discussion at the U.S. Olympic Trials in track and field trials currently underway in Eugene, Ore. In fact, it was impossible to ignore.

On the first day of the trials, July 1, shot putter Adam Nelson was honored with an unusual gold medal ceremony.

Such a ceremony is normally is a happy occasion, but this was bittersweet. Nelson smiled as he stood above the crowd in a stadium end zone, a victory wreath on top of his head, to receive an Olympic medal he should have been given way back in 2004.

Nelson was given the silver then. But in 2012, the gold medalist in the 2004 Games, Ukranian Yuriy Bilonoh, tested positive for banned anabolic steroids in a re-test of his urine sample from 2004. (Samples are sometimes frozen and retested years later as technology gets more sophisticated.)

Bilonoh was stripped of the gold and Nelson was named the retroactive winner of the 2004 competition. In what had to be one of the most underwhelming Olympic victory moments ever, the medal was hand-delivered to Nelson in a food court at the Atlanta airport.

Track officials in Eugene thought Nelson deserved better. So did the thousands of fans who cheered Nelson last week at Hayward Field.

Mixed Opinions

Fans demonstrated more mixed feelings the next day, when Justin Gatlin, America’s best sprinter, blazed down the track in 9.80 seconds to win the 100 meters on Sunday. It was the best time in the world this year, and it earned Gatlin a spot on the Olympic team.

But along with the excitement on the track, there was a quiet protest in the stands. Over the weekend, about 30 people at Hayward Field wore T-shirts bearing the slogan “Runners Against Doping.”

The action targeted Gatlin, as well as fellow sprinter Tyson Gay, who tried but didn’t qualify for the 100 meters. Both men have served doping suspensions. Gatlin, 34, was suspended twice, testing positive in 2001 and 2006.

There’s still a debate within track and field whether or not Gatlin cheated. Gatlin has claimed there were valid reasons behind his positive tests that had nothing to do with performance enhancement.

Gatlin was willing to talk about the Russian scandal. He was asked whether Russian athletes, if they prove they’re clean, should be able to go to Rio even though the Russian Track Federation is banned.

“You gotta think about ‘fair is fair,'” he said. “If an athlete has come and he’s been tested or she’s been tested, and they’ve passed the test, I don’t think they should be, y’know, basically prosecuted or make a statement with other people who’ve done wrong.”

Oiselle, the women’s apparel company that organized the T-shirt protest, sponsors distance runner Stephanie Bruce. She’s more skeptical of Russian athletes who claim innocence.

“How long have you been running in a culture like [in Russia] and you don’t know that it’s going on? And you haven’t come forward?” Bruce says. “Like you’re totally oblivious that coaches or organizations [are involved in illegal doping] … so that seems strange to me.”

‘It Sends A Mixed Message’

Adam Nelson, the man unfairly denied a shot put gold medal back in 2004, takes the hardest line.

“I think it kind of undermines the decision [to ban Russia],” Nelson said, referring to the possibility that some Russian track and field athletes may be allowed to go to Rio.

“I’m an ‘athletes’ rights’ person, so I want to give them every opportunity to compete,” he added. “But the reality is, you make a ban on a country and then you allow the athletes to compete, it sends a mixed message.”

Nelson wasn’t in Eugene just for his medal ceremony.

At age 40, he came out of retirement and attempted to make his fourth Olympic team. But there was another motivation as well: anger about the Russian doping scandal.

“When I hear about corruption to the scale that was going on at that point, this is only one instance that we found out about,” he said. “How many times did it happen before that we didn’t find out?”

Nelson finished seventh in the shot put, and only the top three finishers made the team. But he still took home a well-deserved gold medal, even if it was 12 years late in coming.

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The question of where one of the NBA’s biggest stars will play next season is now over: Kevin Durant is leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder to join a fellow superstar in Stephen Curry, whose Golden State Warriors narrowly missed out on repeating as NBA champions last month.

In May, Durant and the Thunder had pushed Curry and the Warriors to a Game 7 of their Western Conference playoff before the Oklahoma squad was eliminated from contention.

Durant was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player after the 2013-14 season; in Curry, he’ll be joining the player who won the award for the past two seasons.

“Durant will play beside Steph Curry and Klay Thompson on a loaded Warriors team that set the NBA’s regular season record for victories, but fell one win short of the championship,” Jacob McCleland reports from member station KGOU. McCleland adds, “ESPN reports the two-year deal is worth over $54 million.”

Durant, who had been courted by nearly as many teams as the number whose fans yearned for him to revitalize their local NBA franchise, made his announcement in a post for The Players’ Tribune. In it, Durant, 27, said his free agency had brought on an emotional and careful process.

From his post:

“The primary mandate I had for myself in making this decision was to have it based on the potential for my growth as a player — as that has always steered me in the right direction. But I am also at a point in my life where it is of equal importance to find an opportunity that encourages my evolution as a man: moving out of my comfort zone to a new city and community which offers the greatest potential for my contribution and personal growth. With this in mind, I have decided that I am going to join the Golden State Warriors.

“I’m from Washington, D.C. originally, but Oklahoma City truly raised me. It taught me so much about family as well as what it means to be a man. There are no words to express what the organization and the community mean to me, and what they will represent in my life and in my heart forever. The memories and friendships are something that go far beyond the game. Those invaluable relationships are what made this deliberation so challenging.”

Durant’s choice quickly gained the endorsement of Lil B, a rapper whose sobriquet is The BasedGod.

More than five years after leveling a curse on Durant that stated the talented forward would never win an NBA title, Lil B — who is a Warriors fan — rescinded that punishment today.

That famous curse had been prompted by Durant’s surmising that Lil B was “a wack rapper.” But now, all is forgiven.

“As life unravels and superstars make decisions that change lifes, welcome home KD the curse is lifted,” Lil B tweeted shortly after Durant announced his decision today.

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There are two types of people in this world: those who know their Stalder Shaposhnikovas from their Pak Saltos — and those who have absolutely no idea if the first half of this sentence was even written in English.

For the group that does know though — the hardcore gymnastics fans — a set of blogs, podcasts and resources have been emerging to fill a gap in the major broadcast coverage of women’s gymnastics. Call it the “gymternet,” an alternative group of sites that are shaking up the ways the sport is covered.

Specifically, these superfans are moving to correct what they see as condescension in broadcast coverage of the sport.

“It was very much focused on these ‘little girls dancing on a playground.’ That’s a cliche you would hear on NBC over and over again,” says the reporter and gym fan Elspeth Reeve, who wrote about the gymternet in the New Republic. “Even at the 2012 Olympics, you had the Russian gymnasts referred to as ‘divas’ and ‘temperamental.’ It was honestly a bit sexist.”

Reeve points to one example in particular, when an NBC commentator compared a gymnast’s injury to getting a tear in her wedding dress right before walking down the aisle.

But starting around 2008, Reeve says, blogs began popping up to give gymnastics addicts the in-depth coverage they craved. The gymternet was born around the same time as Tumblr — the site popular for sharing animated GIFs — perhaps because watching a gymnast do a backflip works out to be a good GIF length.

Sites like The Gymternet and the site and podcast GymCastic “provide the real necessary pushback that’s not about the sparkles and the girlishness,” Reeve tells host Ray Suarez on All Things Considered. “It’s about the crazy workouts, the incredible athletics, the injuries, coming back from injuries.”

The Gymternet website covers gymnastics from all over the world, not just the U.S. You’ll find results from competitions in South Korea, South Africa, Turkey, Russia and more.

But here in the U.S., the big action is the upcoming Olympic trials in San Jose on July 8 and 10, which will determine the members to represent the country in the Olympic Games in Brazil next month.

Nineteen-year-old Simone Biles leads the way, and is expected to rack up gold medals in Rio de Janeiro. Last weekend she won a fourth consecutive national title at the P&G Championships in St. Louis. She’s already a three-time world champion.

“If she stays mentally healthy and physically healthy, she could walk away with five golds,” Reeve says.

The athletes embrace the clout of the gymternet too. Biles has almost half a million followers on Instagram, and more than 57,000 on Twitter. Reeve writes that McKayla Maroney, a gold medalist, announced her retirement on the GymCastic podcast instead of a major network.

Women’s gymnastics qualifying in the Olympics starts Aug. 7 — and there’s a good chance the gymternet will have full coverage.

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The Sonoma Stompers say they are making sports history Friday. Stacy Piagno and Kelsie Whitmore are in the starting lineup, adding their names to a very short list of women who have played for a professional baseball team. In fact, with Piagno on the mound and Whitmore in the outfield, this will mark the first time since the days of the Negro Leagues in the 1950s that there will be two women on the field in a professional baseball game, according to MLB.com.

Theo Fightmaster (yes, that’s his real name), the vice president and general manager of the Stompers, tells NPR this is not a publicity stunt. “They’re gonna be here tomorrow and they’re gonna be here the day after and the day after that.” Fightmaster says the two women are a part of the team. “They’re gonna get an opportunity to earn playing time based on their performances.” And he adds both women are “really good at baseball.”

Whitmore is just 17 years old and plans to play softball for Cal State, Fullerton next year. Piagno is 25 and played on the U.S. women’s national baseball team, which won a gold medal in last year’s Pan American Games. Both women will be playing for Team USA in the Women’s Baseball World Cup in South Korea later this year.

Still, Piagno says she was surprised when she got the call from the Stompers saying they were interested in her joining the team. “I was just kinda like, OK, yeah, you know, sounds good but probably won’t happen.”

But when she realized this was serious, and this formerly men’s baseball team wanted to sign her, she says she thought well, “Why not?”

Just how many women have played in professional baseball falls into the byzantine realm of sports statistics and depends on what you consider professional. SB Nation puts Whitmore’s and Piagno’s debut this way:

“A United States professional baseball team will carry women on its roster for just the third time since the 1950s.

“They will be the first players on a professional co-ed baseball team since Eri Yoshida pitched in the Golden Baseball League in 2010.

“Before Yoshida, Ila Borders pitched in a minor league game in 1997, and Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson and Constance Morgan played with the Negro Leagues in the ’50s.”

Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn, draws a line between minor league teams that are affiliated with MLB teams, and all other teams, which he puts in a lesser category. “There’s baseball and there’s baseball,” Thorn tells NPR. And by that standard, he says, there’s only been one woman ever to play on a major league or minor league team, and that was in a single minor league game more than 100 years ago:

“July 5, 1898: Lizzie (Stroud) Arlington, with the blessings of Atlantic League president Ed Barrow, later famous as the general manager of the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, pitches an inning for Reading against Allentown. She allows two hits but no runs in this first appearance of a woman in Organized Baseball.”

That’s an excerpt from Thorn’s pictorial history of women in baseball, which you can see here.

But by whatever definition, the number of women who have played on professional baseball teams is small. And for those who think that’s unfair, Piagno and Whitmore will be swinging their bats against that history of exclusion.

That history has been on the mind of the owner of the Sonoma Stompers, who happens to be the movie director Francis Ford Coppola.

“When watching Major League Baseball, I always wondered why there couldn’t be a co-ed team. It’s the one major sport in which weight and strength come less into play,” Coppola said in a press release. “I had the opportunity to turn this thought into a reality and recruit these amazing women capable of playing alongside men.”

For her part, Whitmore says she is hoping to learn a lot playing alongside the men. She told NPR in an interview just before her first game, “Being surrounded by these guys who have played at higher levels than this is great because I get more feedback and information.” And Whitmore says that will help her be a better ballplayer.

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Instead of the Arizona Wildcats claiming their second championship in five years, the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers broke through to win their school’s first national title, holding on for a 4-3 win in the decisive Game 3 of the 2016 College World Series.

A national championship is a big deal for any college; this one is huge for Coastal Carolina, a school in Conway, S.C., that reported total enrollment of 10,263 students (graduate and undergraduate) when classes started last fall. By contrast, Arizona reported having 43,088 students.

It’s the first time since 1956 that a team has won the College World Series in its first appearance, according to the AP, which adds that Minnesota was the last team to record the feat.

“We’re not the most talented team in America,” Coastal Carolina’s coach Gary Gilmore said as his players hugged and celebrated after the game. “We’re just the national champion. That’s all I know. That’s all that matters.”

The only player from Coastal Carolina who’s currently on an active roster in Major League Baseball is the Tampa Bay Rays’ Taylor Motter — who was watching today’s game during a stretching session on the field at Tropicana Field. As the final out was shown on the big screen, Motter pulled off his Rays jersey to reveal the teal of a Chanticleers shirt underneath.

The championship was in doubt until the final at-bat, which started at midday after bad weather forced a postponement Wednesday night. Trailing 4-2 in the ninth inning, Arizona used a sacrifice fly to score a run and a double from Ryan Aguilar to put runners on third and second base, threatening to tie or win the game outright. But on a 2-2 count, the game ended on a swinging strikeout.

Coastal Carolina seized the title by winning two games in a row; the Chanticleers had lost the series opener Monday, 3-0.

On Tuesday, a tense Game 2 ended in a 5-4 victory that was built on Gilmore’s unconventional decision to have Coastal Carolina’s closer, Mike Morrison, start the game. Morrison struck out 10 batters over 6-2/3 innings to keep his team’s season alive.

Coastal pitcher Andrew Beckwith – who went from performing a bullpen role earlier this season to dominating as a starter during the playoffs — was named the most outstanding player of the series.

Both Beckwith and Wildcats starter Bobby Dalbec lived up to their elite reputations Thursday, keeping the game scoreless through five innings. But neither pitcher would survive the sixth, when nearly all the game’s runs were scored.

After Arizona committed two errors that led to runs, Coastal’s G.K. Young crushed a 415-foot home run to put his team out of reach. Arizona answered with two runs in the bottom of the inning to chase Beckwith.

After the game, many Coastal Carolina players dedicated the win to Gilmore, who’s coached at their school for 21 years. Gilmore said the title should put to rest any doubts about his program.

“They just thought we played in a small conference and couldn’t get this done,” an emotional Gilmore said after the game. The players, he said, “wanted to prove everyone wrong.”

The title game brought Gilmore the 1,100th win of his career; it also capped a month in which he was named the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association National Coach of the Year.

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