NEW YORK — A year after tearing his Achilles tendon on Yankee Stadium’s outfield grass, legendary closer Mariano Rivera made a triumphant return to Old-Timers’ Day.

“Injuries are gonna happen, and I’m OK with that,” a smiling Rivera said Saturday, as his fellow retirees took batting practice behind him. “It was tough, it was tough. I still have to deal with it. I’m moving better, and I’m here. I’m good enough to be here.”

It was this time last year that Rivera, now 56 years old, crumpled to the ground while trying to field a fly ball off the bat of Willie Randolph. He went to the hospital that day, and ultimately went on to have surgery to repair the injury.

Players who participate in the game are required to sign liability waivers from the Yankees. The team jokingly announced on its social media platforms Saturday morning that it had “reinstated RHP/UTIL/HOF Mariano Rivera (#42) from the 364-day injured list.”

“We are keeping an eye on him,” said Jorge Posada, Rivera’s longtime catcher. “We’re not putting him in center field. He says he’s gonna pitch. I don’t know, his arm looks good.”

Rivera, who is the game’s all-time leader with 652 career saves, spent his entire 19-year career with the Yankees. He was a 13-time All-Star, finished top five in American League Cy Young voting five times and was named World Series MVP in 1999. The five-time World Series champion became the first unanimous selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2019.

He threw some batting practice prior to the start of the 78th Old Timers’ Day, looping in pitches to former teammate Hideki Matsui.

Rivera recalled using Old-Timers’ Day as a player to speak with the greats who came back to visit. “That was meaningful,” he said. “Whitey Ford. ‘Whitey, how do you do this thing?’ He did it before us.”

Not many current young players, however, take him up on those same opportunities nowadays.

“I wish they’d do it more,” Rivera said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen that way. But it’s OK to me. I’m not the one that needs it.”

Rivera also expressed frustration at the team’s inability to win a World Series since 2009, when Rivera was still New York’s closer.

“You’re telling me. If you have the answer to that, I would like to hear it,” Rivera said. “It’s been hard. It’s unbelievable. Hopefully this year is the year. It’s not easy, winning championships is not easy. It’s hard. But we have the team.”

Rivera is one the most decorated champions in Yankees history, so he would know what it takes. On this day, he was only there to prove that in a different sense. To show that one devastating injury wouldn’t keep him getting back out there, and playing on this field once again.

“I love this game,” Rivera said. “I am here because I love this game. That’s it. Nothing else.”

Demi Vollering raced clear to win stage eight of the Tour de France Femmes and snatch the leader’s yellow jersey with just one stage remaining.

The race lead has changed hands for the second day running, with Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney having won on Mont Ventoux to replace Marlen Reusser at the top of the general classification.

That gave the Polish Canyon-SRAM rider a 15-second lead over Vollering heading into Saturday’s penultimate stage, a mostly flat 171.9km ride from Sisteron to Nice.

It was the longest stage of this year’s race and looked set to suit the sprinters, but they were dropped on the Cote de la Ginestiere – the final climb of the day – about 8km from the finish.

Dutch FDJ-Suez rider Vollering then attacked in a bid to drop Niewiadoma-Phinney and Elisa Longo Borghini, and went clear right before she crested the final climb, with 6km to the finish.

That allowed the 29-year-old to immediately stretch her lead on the descent and open up a gap that was too much for Niewiadoma-Phinney or Longo Borghini to bridge.

Vollering held on to claim her second win of this year’s race and set up what promises to be a thrilling finale on Sunday.

The chase duo crossed the line 17 seconds after Vollering which, with time bonuses, means the 2023 Tour winner carries an eight-second lead over 2024 champion Niewiadoma-Phinney into the last stage.

Reusser is 72 seconds adrift in third heading into the 99.2km mountain stage that begins and ends in Nice.

“In a stage race, you live day by day, so you can be disappointed overnight but the next morning you have to put on a new mask and go again,” said Vollering.

“The funny thing was that this morning I had a kind of deja vu [to earlier this year]. I saw that I would take yellow here but it didn’t make sense [at the time].

“I reminded myself during the race that I can do it and I had to dig so deep, to go through so much pain, but somehow we made it happen.

“Tomorrow is going to be super hard, anything can happen on the last day, but at least I start in yellow.”

Defending champion Pauline Ferrand-Prevot, who finished more than 10 minutes behind Niewiadoma-Phinney on stage seven, pulled out of the race on Saturday morning through illness.

Puck Pieterse is set to claim the polka-dot jersey as leader of the mountains classification, while sprinter Lorena Wiebes has a commanding advantage in the points classification.