Wales attacking midfielder Harry Wilson made his first outing for Leeds United as they were beaten 3-2 by Wrexham in the club’s opening pre-season game.

Wilson, who joined the Elland Road side on a free transfer in the summer after his contract at Fulham ran out, came on for the second half of the game at the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida.

Leeds found themselves behind almost immediately when Kieffer Moore put Wrexham in front in the first minute with a left-foot shot.

Joel Piroe had the chance to level from the spot after Dan James had been brought down by keeper Arthur Okonkwo, but missed with his penalty.

Piroe made amends for the Premier League side by equalising with a backheel from a Sean Longstaff ball.

Bailey Cadamarteri ran through on goal and slotted in to put Wrexham back in front before Leeds again levelled when Longstaff scored with a right-footed shot.

Wilson was introduced by Leeds manager Daniel Farke as part of his changes for a second half in which Sam Smith, who also scored Wrexham’s winner in a pre-season victory against Manchester United, netted late on for the Championship side.

Leeds went close in added time through Wilson but his shot went over.

In the aftermath of such a chaotic night, it is easy to focus only on the flaws and forget the bigger picture. Joshua was returning from one of the darkest periods of his life and carrying an immense emotional burden into the ring.

After his hand was raised, he struggled to get through his interview. His voice cracked as he spoke about his two friends and the impact their loss has had on him.

“Boxing once saved him and he needed boxing to get through this. That camp allowed him to focus his mind while he was in so much grief and pain,” promoter Eddie Hearn said.

“You don’t know what he was going through in that camp because he doesn’t talk about it.”

Whatever happens next, his place in British boxing history is already secure. He is an Olympic gold medallist, a two-time heavyweight champion and one of the biggest sporting stars this country has produced.

He has taken boxing to places few British fighters ever have. He has filled stadiums, headlined global events and become a household name far beyond the sport.

But in the build-up to his comeback, Joshua and his stablemate Oleksandr Usyk spoke about the ambition of becoming undisputed heavyweight champion.

After Saturday night in Saudi, the reality is that even reclaiming a world title would be a tough ask.

Joshua has always spoken about legacy, and there would be something fitting about walking away after overcoming one of the toughest periods of his life and producing a dramatic comeback victory.

The danger with ageing fighters is chasing one more night. Boxing history is filled with champions who stayed that one fight too long.

But then again Fury-Joshua is not one more fight. It is the fight. The one that has loomed over their careers for the best part of a decade.

The sight that brought it home was the slender figure of Valentin Paret-Peintre, slumped against the barriers on the summit of Alpe d’Huez, sobbing and mourning the loss of his polka dot jersey.

With the Tour lacking a French stage winner for the first time since 1999, the king of the mountains award was one of the country’s final hopes of bringing honor to Paris.

For many years, the mountains classification has not been the most storied of jerseys. A design loved by fans, yes, a novelty, but a footnote in the race, a way for broadcasters to fill dead air time at the beginning of Alpine stages. For four of the past six years, with highest-value points saved for mountain finishes, it has been won by the yellow jersey — three times to Tadej Pogacar (2020, 2021, 2025) and once by Jonas Vingegaard (2022).

This year’s winner, 33-year-old Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz, was not originally supposed to be at the Tour. His original goal was the Giro d’Italia this spring, a race he had almost won the previous year, only for an operation on a perineal cyst to rule him out of the battle for pink. He was unable to sit on the bike to train for three weeks.

That injury has long healed — but Carapaz is still seemingly incapable of sitting in his saddle, permanently on his pedals and on the attack, chasing rivals, stages, and the polka dot jersey.

With Pogacar all but sealing yellow less than a week into the race, the Tour’s Alpine denouement could have been anticlimactic. Instead, the battle for the other three jerseys — polka dot, white, and green — have animated this race, with the trio finally and only settled on stage 20.

“It’s been incredible this year,” said a beaming Carapaz, having become the first rider to win a stage in the polka dot jersey since Julian Alaphilippe in 2018, atop Alpe d’Huez no less.

“Not only this fight, but for the green and white as well. There have been many interests — and that has made the race harder and harder.”

Carapaz has now won the King of the Mountains competition in two of the last three editions of the Tour de France (Jeff Pachoud/Getty Images)

Mads Pedersen and his Lidl Trek team have resolved to push the pace even on easier sprint stages. For Pedersen, the green jersey was a non-negotiable, the team built around his pursuit of the points classification. GC climbers Juan Ayuso and Mattias Skjelmose were largely left to their own devices; talented riders such as Quinn Simmons and Mathias Vacek requisitioned in support of their sprinter — aiming to become the first Dane to ever win the green jersey.

Knowing he was not the fastest man in the bunch, Pedersen aimed to capitalize on the intermediate sprints — efforts midway through every stage worth fewer points (25 for the first rider) than the finishes — and backing his ability to climb better than the other sprinters in order to access the points on offer during hilly or mountainous stages.

It meant that Lidl-Trek ramped up the pace on any sprint stage with only a small bump, hoping to drop the likes of Tim Merlier and Olav Kooij, and leading to attacking racing from the front of the bunch.

Though his lead was briefly cut to seven points by Jasper Philipsen after stage 18, Pedersen’s intermediate sprint wins over the next three days secured his green jersey. The 30-year-old won 68 percent of his points in intermediate sprints — and 80 percent of the total number of intermediate sprint points on offer.

For much of the race, his fight with Philipsen and Merlier was a battle of opposites; the true fast men against one of the most versatile and powerful riders in the peloton.

There is a debate over whether it is right that a rider who was not, truly, amongst the five fastest sprinters in the race should be awarded the ‘sprinters’ jersey’ — but Merlier failed to finish the race because of his lack of climbing legs, while Philipsen was out of form. Pedersen was the deserving winner; at times, a worthy successor to the legendary Peter Sagan.

Pedersen worked heroically in the week three mountains to secure his green jersey (Loic Venance / AFP via Getty Images)

Isaac del Toro and Paul Seixas’ duel was a battle for third place, in the main, but also for the white jersey — a prize which both riders mentioned when discussing the motivations behind their own races.

“We’re in the running for the yellow jersey and then also the white jersey,” Pogacar said of his support for Del Toro.

On the mountain finishes, Del Toro finished in front five times, 19-year-old Seixas three. This was the next generation duking it out, wrestling in the mud into the final competitive stage.

Seixas, trailing by 24 seconds entering the stage, knew that one decisive attack would deliver him to Paris in white, a jersey he wore for a single stage after Le Markstein. Del Toro looked in trouble approaching the summit of the Col du Galibier, the race’s highest point, urgently speaking into his radio and dropping back.

Seixas wore the white jersey for one day only but is surely destined to win it in future editions of the race (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)

The young Frenchman reacted, with his domestiques Nicolas Prodhomme and Matthew Riccitello upping the pace, ready for Sexias to attack. And yet, when the teenager hit the front, he finally discovered his own limits, grinding and toiling through the afternoon sun as Del Toro countered, dancing up the road to seal the white jersey by over two minutes.

The Mexican revealed after the stage that he had been struggling with illness, like several others in his team, for the past three days.

The defeat will hurt and gnaw Seixas for now — a scarcely believable fact for the youngest rider to finish in the top 10 for over a century. But when the analytical teenager looks back, he will reflect on the improbability of the yellow jersey, and likely the greatest rider of all time, being pressed into domestique duties in a bid to resist his challenge.

“I tried to be stronger than usual and, in the end, I blew up,” said Seixas. “But that’s what we’d agreed with the team, we had nothing to lose.”

Yellow and white jersey, Pogacar and Del Toro, embrace as they cross the line on stage 20 (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)

And so to Carapaz, the most attacking rider in the race, who will surely see off Quinn Simmons, Baptiste Veistroffer, and Tom Pidcock to win the super combativity award on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday.

The battle for polka dots raged throughout the race — with Spanish ProTeam Caja Rural securing the jersey in emotional circumstances through Alex Molenaar in the Tour’s opening days, before first Alex Baudin, and then Paret-Peintre, battled to wrest the jersey from Pogacar’s grasp.

Carapaz knows he comes on strongest in the final week of Grand Tours; though faster than Paret-Peintre up the climbs, he lacks the Frenchman’s raw kick. His solution was to ride at a frightening pace from the outset of stages, hoping to shed his rival from his back wheel — an approach which rewarded him with king of the mountains points throughout the Tour’s final week.

After winning at Orcières Merlette on Thursday, Carapaz let an opportunity on Alpe d’Huez slip away the next day, hauled in by Pogacar in the closing kilometres. Many riders would have accepted taking a stage and the polka dot jersey, but Carapaz’s fable is the paradigm of the man unafraid to fail.

He unashamedly pursued stages and jerseys over the lower placings on GC — for him, it was clear that 15th place and a stage win would be better than seventh place without one. Several other riders could follow his lead, and in the end Carapaz has secured a top 10 finish anyway.

This Tour may have begun with yellow being decided in the race’s first week but featured arguably the most thrilling minor classification competitions of the decade. It is details that make a race and this edition of La Grand Boucle was crafted with an artist’s eye.