Snooker: Ali Carter has withdrawn from his planned comeback at a Players Tour Championship event in Bulgaria next month following advice from his doctor. The two-times World Championship runner-up has been undergoing an intensive course of chemotherapy for lung cancer and although he said earlier this month that “he was not out of the woods”, he was keen to make his playing return at an event which runs from October 3-5. But the 35-year-old, who had already beaten testicular cancer last year and suffers from Crohn's disease, has admitted he will be unable to play his first tournament since May on medical orders.

Motor Racing: Three-time NASCAR champion Tony Stewart has been cleared by a grand jury investigating a dirt-track incident in upstate New York in August that killed a young driver, a county prosecutor said. Stewart, 43, struck and killed Kevin Ward Jr., 20, during a non-NASCAR sprint-car race on August 9 on a dimly lit part of the Canandaigua Motorsports Park track.

Cycling: Cadel Evans, the only Australian to win the Tour de France, will retire next February. The 37-year-old, who won the tour in 2011, told a news conference from the world championships in Ponferrada, Spain, that he would call it quits after riding Tour Down Under and the inaugural Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road one-day race on February 1. “The chance of winning another Grand Tour is probably past me, something I have to accept. Now is a good time to say stop,” said Evans, who was also twice runner-up on the Tour in 2007 and 2008.

Tennis: Top seed David Ferrer was bundled out of the Shenzen Open second round by Serb Viktor Troicki yesterday. To compound the Spaniard’s misery, the 6-3 6-4 defeat will not help his chances of reaching the year-ending ATP World Tour Finals in London. Ferrer, 32, is currently seventh in the race to qualify for the November 9-16 event in London.

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