Bubba Wallace, the only Black driver at NASCAR's top level, was not the target of a hate crime after a noose was found in his garage stall at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, the FBI said Tuesday.
The big picture: It was found weeks after Wallace helped push for the Confederate flag to be banned from the circuit's events and properties. The FBI said in a joint statement with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Alabama that investigators found the noose had been in the garage since last October. "Although the noose is now known to have been in garage number 4 in 2019, nobody could have known Mr. Wallace would be assigned to garage number 4 last week," the statement said.
Novak Djokovic, the world's top-ranked tennis player, announced Tuesday that he tested positive for coronavirus after facing widespread criticism for organizing an exhibition tournament that also left other players and coaches infected.
Why it matters: The fallout highlights the difficulty in returning to sports in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic — even in relatively distanced sports, like singles tennis — if safety protocols aren't strictly implemented and followed.
It sure looks like baseball will finally be played in 2020.
The state of play: MLB owners voted unanimously Monday to impose a 60-game season that will begin around July 24, assuming players sign off on health-and-safety protocols and agree to arrive in home markets by July 1 to begin "spring" training.
Today marks 103 days since the last MLB, NBA, NFL or NHL game — the longest such drought since the fall of 1918, when the World Series was held in September amid WWI and the Spanish flu.
The big picture: Of course, there was no NFL or NBA back then, and the NHL had only been around for a year, so there wasn't nearly as much to miss. Television hadn't been invented, either, so unless your ancestors lived down the street from Ebbets Field, they probably didn't miss the Dodgers games.
NASCAR said in a statement late Sunday that it had launched an "immediate investigation" after a noose was found in Bubba Wallace's garage at Talladega Superspeedway in Lincoln, Alabama.
Why it matters: He's NASCAR's only black driver and helped push for the Confederate flag to be banned from the circuit's events and properties, Axios' Kendall Baker notes. NASCAR vowed to do "everything we can to identify" whomever was responsible and "eliminate them from the sport" following the "heinous act." Wallace said in a statement the "act of racism and hatred leaves me incredibly saddened and serves as a painful reminder of how much further we have to go as a society and how persistent we must be in the fight against racism."
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