• October 29 down the years

Poults follows in Sergio's footsteps

Ian Poulter landed an early European Tour win © Getty Images

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2000
British golfer Ian Poulter emulated Sergio García by winning an event in his debut year on the European Tour. García won two the year before. Today in Cagliari, Poulter won the Italian Open the hard way. Opening rounds of 66 and 67 were followed by a 65 which gave him a three-stroke overnight lead. But he lost that in the first four holes on the final day, when he couldn't buy a birdie for the first 12 holes. And he seemed to have completely blown it when he found the water at the 12th. But he did well to take five there, which left him two shots behind but still in contention. Birdies at the 15th and 17th and Gordon Brand junior's bogey at the last left Poulter needing a four for victory. It was Brand's only dropped shot of the round, and cost him the title by a single shot.

2006
When Valentino Rossi won his ninth world title in 2009 (October 25), it should have been ten. He'd been MotoGP champion five years in a row, but Yamaha got things wrong for most of the 2006 season. A combination of a more powerful engine, stiffer chassis, and new tyres made the bikes literally harder to ride and led to poor qualifying results and a series of race retirements. Rossi finished only 14th in the opening Grand Prix, and although he won three of the next six, he dropped out of two others, plus another later on. Then, when Yamaha sorted things out, he suffered a wrist injury. At one stage, he was 51 points behind American rider Nicky Hayden. When everything settled down, the difference in class came out. Rossi finished on the podium in five consecutive races - and luck turned his way in the penultimate Grand Prix, when Hayden was barged out by his Honda team mate Dani Pedrosa. Going into the final race in Valencia, Rossi led Hayden by eight points. But then he suddenly proved he was human. By his own admission, Rossi made a mistake at the start and another on lap five, when he slid off the track. He got back on and worked his way through, but could finish only 13th. Hayden came third and took the title by five points - but he admitted Rossi deserved to be champion. The stats don't lie in this case. By the end of the 2009 season, when Rossi took the title for the seventh time, he'd won 77 World Championship races at 500cc or MotoGP. Hayden had won three! They were team mates at Honda in 2003, and Rossi signed to rejoin Hayden at Ducati for 2011.

1987
Tommy Hearns became the first boxer to win a world title at a fourth different weight. He began at welterweight (August 2 1980), took a light-middleweight title from the talented Wilfredo Benítez in 1982, then leapfrogged up to light-heavyweight when he realised Britain's Dennis Andries was an easy target (March 7 1987). In his next fight after that, Hearns dropped down to middleweight and came to Las Vegas to meet Juan Domingo Roldán of Argentina for the vacant WBC belt. Like so many of the Hit Man's fights, it was never likely to last long. With his shorter reach, Roldán had to come forward to get inside Hearns's long leads - which made him an easy target for one of the great punchers. Hearns survived a brief early storm, then knocked Roldán down twice in the first round, once in the second, and for the full count in the fourth. The following year, Tommy got greedy, winning a world title at a fifth weight.

By 1960, Tunney Hunsaker had lost his last six fights. A journeyman heavyweight, he was picked as an opponent for up-and-coming boxers because he was durable but unlikely to hurt you. Case in point: the year before, he'd lasted the full eight rounds against big Ernie Terrell, later a world champion of sorts. Today Hunsaker went the distance again. Only six rounds this time, but against a rather well-known boxer, one who later deprived Terrell of his ersatz title. Tunney never made it big, but he'll always have a footnote in history as the first professional opponent of Muhammad Ali. Or Cassius Clay, as Terrell insisted on calling him (February 6 1967).

1993
The WBO heavyweight title has never been worth much. But British big-boy boxers have usually had to take what they can get. And if you're going to win it at all, you might as well win it quickly. Michael Bentt was born in London before moving to Jamaica as a kid then on to New York. After an excellent record as an amateur, he was knocked out in the first round of his professional debut. He maintained that neither he nor his trainer, the famous Emanuel Steward, had known his opponent was a southpaw! Bentt didn't fight again for 22 months, then won only ten fights against nobodies before today's fight with WBO champion Tommy Morrison. Morrison was touted as the latest big white hope - but the WBO was his level. A basic bar-room brawler, he had a few big names on his list of victims, including former WBC champion Pinklon Thomas. But he'd had to go the distance to win the vacant WBO title against George Foreman - and big George was 45 by then. Tommy's trouble was his chin. He didn't really have one. The first time he fought for the WBO belt, Ray Mercer destroyed him with a series of punches in the fifth round. That was the only defeat on Morrison's record before tonight's fight in Tulsa, but that chin was a lump of glass waiting for something to shatter it again. And it didn't take Michael Bentt long. Morrison came out throwing haymakers as usual, and he shook the challenger with a wild left hook. But then Bentt started aiming straight - and that was the end of that. When Morrison went down for the third time, the fight was automatically stopped - after just 93 seconds. The crushing defeat put paid to his big payday against Lennox Lewis, though he did fight him two years later. It ended in Tommy's last defeat before he was forced to retire after a positive HIV test (October 7). Bentt's next fight was his last, only the 11th of his professional career, when he lost the title and nearly his life (March 19).

2005
Second-row forward Paul Johnson achieved a rare feat in international rugby league by scoring three tries for the losing side. In a Tri-Nations match against New Zealand at Loftus Road, Great Britain were beaten by their own errors. Vice-captain Brian Carney was responsible for two of New Zealand's early tries, and new boy Rob Burrow dropped the ball near the opposition try line. Paul Deacon gave GB an early lead with a penalty, but a series of errors led to deficits of 12-2 and 24-8 at half-time. A try by Keith Senior and Johnson's second brought Britain to within four points early in the second half, but Clinton Toopi also scored his second to put New Zealand 30-20 ahead. Johnson completed his hat-trick to reduce the gap to four again, but New Zealand pulled away to win 42-26 with a try from Paul Rauhihi and a second from Toopi. All-time great scrum-half Stacey Jones converted all seven of their tries.

1908
Britain's first Olympic medals in a winter sport were both won at home. Winter sports in London? Well, until 1924 figure skating was held in the same city as the summer events. And Madge Syers was one of the outstanding favourites in any sport. In 1902, she finished second in the World Championships - which were open to men as well as women. She won the first two world titles for women, in 1906 and 1907, and here in London she had the most technically difficult programme and embroidered it 'with her own particular dash and finish'. All five judges awarded her first place. Germany's Elsa Rendschmidt won silver and Syer's team mate Dorothy Greenhough-Smith the bronze.

Syers also won bronze in the pairs. Which wasn't hard: only three couples took part. She skated with her husband Edgar, whom she'd beaten at the 1904 British Championships. Their performance 'was at its best...but they did not show the dash of Mr and Mrs Johnson', James and Phylis, who won the silver. Gold went to Heinrich Burger and Anna Hüber of Germany, whose routine swapped the Johnsons' jumps for perfect execution. They were placed first by all the judges.

The skater who beat Syers in that 1902 World Championships was Sweden's Ulrich Salchow (born August 7 1877), who won ten world titles in all. Before 1908, he would have been hot favourite for gold at the Olympics. But early in the year he lost to Russia's Nikolai Kolomenkin, who used the pseudonym Panin. At the Olympics, two judges placed Panin first after the compulsory figures, but the other three voted for Salchow - so Panin dropped out, claiming the judging was prejudiced against his style of skating. Salchow won the gold - and so did Panin. He entered a 'special figures' event, which was allegedly introduced for his benefit. Skaters had to perform on only one foot, and Panin was 'undoubtedly the best performer in the world at this form of skating'. This time he won all five judges' votes, ahead of the only other two competitors, both from Britain.

1991
To keep a Lonsdale Belt in boxing, you had to win three British title fights in one weight division. Today Colin McMillan did it quicker than anyone else. He took the featherweight title from Gary De Roux in May, defended it against Kevin Pritchard in September, and outpointed former champion Sean Murphy at the Albert Hall tonight. McMillan's skills and improvisation were so good, often switching to southpaw, that he won almost every round, especially the last four, when Murphy began to tire. In 160 days, McMillan won the Lonsdale Belt and fitted in a non-title fight. He won the WBO title the following year.

2008
The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series for only the second time and the first in 28 years. They beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 after heavy rain forced Game 5 to be suspended, the first time this had happened in any World Series. Tampa Bay did well to reach the finals for the first time: the previous year, they had the worst record in Major League baseball. 2008 was their first season in which they won more games than they lost.

2003
Al Charron was a versatile and world-class forward who played for a country that wasn't one of the very best at rugby union. So he finished on the losing side in 36 of his record 76 matches for Canada. But at least he ended on a winning note. Today's World Cup match with Tonga took place at Wollongong in New South Wales. Charron was 37 by now, but there was enough left in the tank to captain the team to a 24-7 win after they led only 9-7 at half-time. Fly-half Bobby Ross, who was also winning his last cap, kicked four penalty goals to reach 400 points in international rugby.

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