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maltatoday WEDNESDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2017 Sport 20 SPORTTODAY BOXING FORMULA 1 De La Hoya: I can take out McGregor in two rounds BOXING Hall of Famer Oscar De La Hoya remains confident that he still can handle him- self in the ring. De La Hoya, who is nearly a decade into retirement, said on Monday that he has been "secretly training" and called out UFC star Conor McGregor. "You know I'm competitive," the 44-year-old De La Hoya said on "Golden Boy Radio with Tattoo and the Crew," a daily digital radio show. "I still have it in me. ... I'm faster than ever and stronger than ever. I know I can take out Conor McGregor in two rounds. I'll come back for that fight. Two rounds. Just one more (fight). I'm calling him out. Two rounds, that's all I need. That's all I'm going to say." De La Hoya publicly consid- ered a comeback in June 2015, only to change his tune one week later. A 1992 Olympic gold medal winner and 10-time profes- sional world champion, De La Hoya captured titles at 130, 135, 140, 147, 154 and 160 pounds. He won bouts against Hall of Famers Julio Cesar Chavez Sr. (twice), Pernell Whitaker and Arturo Gatti. He also fought other greats, including Felix Trinidad, Hec- tor Camacho Sr., Bernard Hopkins, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Shane Mosley (twice) and Manny Pacquiao. De La Hoya has not fought since dropping a one-sided eighth-round knockout loss to Manny Pacquiao on Dec. 6, 2008. He went 39-6 with 30 knockouts in his career and was inducted into the Inter- national Boxing Hall of Fame in 2014. De La Hoya also has battled drug and alcohol ad- diction and has been to re- habilitation multiple times. However, he said in Monday's interview that he is doing well now. McGregor, 29, lost a 10th- round knockout to Floyd May- weather on Aug. 26 when he crossed over from mixed mar- tial arts for a boxing match. De La Hoya was quite vocal heading into that bout, saying it was a "circus" and a "farce." Oscar De La Hoya Gamers compete for McLaren F1 virtual role MCLAREN'S next Formula One simulator driver could be a man who has never driven a car before, let alone competed on a real racetrack. The 12-man shortlist for the job includes a Danish doctor who races on an iPad, a 41-year- old French father of two and a 23-year-old employee of Brit- ain's Department of Work and Pensions - who holds only a provisional licence McLaren, the team of dou- ble world champion Fernando Alonso and past greats like Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, are looking to tap talent from virtual racing to go faster in the real world. The finals of the "World's Fastest Gamer" competition are playing out at McLaren's Woking headquarters this week and the winner will get a one-year contract to work in one of the team's state-of-the- art simulators. Some, like Dutch 23-year- old Bono Huis who collected a $200,000 (£152,366) jackpot in January after winning a virtual race between gamers and driv- ers of the Formula E electric series, are known names. Others, like Danish doc- tor Henrik Christian Drue or French dad David Le Garff, are not. And nor is British civil servant Harry Jacks, who has yet to drive a real car. McLaren say this is a serious search for someone who can become a real asset to a team fighting their way back from troubled times. They also feel the appointment will be good for business. "We're very committed to eS- ports," says executive director Zak Brown, whose team re- cently became the first to ap- point a director of eSports. "For our entire marketing department, our technical team, it is another form of mo- torsport for McLaren. So we're taking it very seriously. We're very committed to it," the American told reporters. "We're finding a lot of our partners... want to cross over and are very relevant to the eSport space. So we're finding a lot of commercial interest in it." FITNESS TESTS Formula One launched its own eSport world champion- ship this year, with the finals scheduled for Abu Dhabi next week, but the McLaren compe- tition is multi-dimensional. Gamers are subjected to fit- ness and mental assessments as well as racing virtually on a variety of tracks from Indian- apolis to Interlagos. The competition is the brain- child of Darren Cox, whose Nissan GT Academy initiative took gamers out into the real racetrack with professional works drives, and taps into a demographic that Formula One has targeted. "The average fan of motor- sport and F1 is getting older," said Cox. "The audience for this, both in terms of the content and the competitors, is exactly where Formula One and other mo- torsports need to be. It's that genius millennial demograph- ic that everyone's looking for and can't find." The McLaren competition has shown also that reality and the virtual world are not so far apart. Formula One drivers Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen would not be surprised to see Britons and Dutch racers making up five of the final 12. There are no women, as on the real Formula One grid, even if the virtual world should offer a level playing field for the sexes without any physical constraints. That is something organisers hope to change with time. "There are a lot of female gamers. If you actually look at casual gaming, it is 50-50. It absolutely mirrors the popula- tion," said Cox. "Like in normal sport, it's all about the amount of time you spend doing it. These guys are spending six to eight hours a day, six days a week, trying to be the best online gamer. At the moment there isn't that big group of female gamers doing that. "Somewhere in the region of 85 percent of people that play racing games are male. So therefore you have a bigger tal- ent pool effectively."