It’s been a steady progression by Onley since the London-born cyclist joined the Netherlands-based team, Team Picnic–PostNL, in 2023.
His first individual professional win came the following January in an uphill finish on stage five of the 2024 Tour Down Under, ultimately finishing fourth overall.
Onley, though, came into that year’s Tour de France “just trying to go for stage results, which meant there is certain days when I would sit up and take it a bit easier”.
That was with the knowledge that he was not in a position “to be fighting for a top-five finish overall”.
That all changed last year.
“It really feels like it came quite quickly in the last few months before the Tour,” he said.
“Everything started to click into place and so I was starting to gain a lot more confidence in myself as well.”
While he was initially targeting stage wins in his second Tour de France, with the general classification being a secondary aim, it soon became clear that a podium finish was a possibility.
Onley would finish just over a minute behind third-placed Florian Lipowitz of Germany. Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard was eight minutes in front in second, while winner, Tadej Pogacar of Slovenia, was 12 minutes better off.
“I still feel very far away,” the Scot said as he looked forward to the coming season. “To the front two, there is a big gap from the rest of us, but I definitely feel that, in the next couple of years, a podium finish is definitely possible if things go the right way for me.
“And there’s also two other Grand Tours in Italy and Spain where sometimes the competition’s slightly less deep. If it goes the right way, then why can’t I try to win one of those?”
Singer-songwriters Lisa Simmons-Santa Cruz and her husband Francisco Carroll Santa Cruz were going through a challenging time last March when they worked on Snoop Dogg’s 2025 gospel album, “Altar Call.”
“We were actually writing all those songs in a hotel, displaced,” Carroll Santa Cruz said.
The couple, who have worked in the entertainment industry for more than 29 years writing and producing music for artists like Kelly Rowland and television shows such as “Desperate Housewives,” had lost their Altadena home in the Eaton fire a few months earlier.
Still, the platinum singer-songwriters didn’t want to pass up the opportunity, which came up during the final week of their hotel stay when Simmons-Santa Cruz and Carroll Santa Cruz were introduced to Snoop Dogg through artists Charlie Bereal and Point 5ve. Although Snoop Dogg had also set up a donation center for fire victims, the couple chose not to share their own displacement with him or anyone else in the music industry.
“We needed something the fire couldn’t burn and that was our music,” Simmons-Santa Cruz said. “At that time, we needed something separate from the fire — something that the fire couldn’t touch, it was too traumatic to keep revisiting what we’d lost, so our work became our peace and our escape.”
Despite the loss of their home studio and the limitations of working from a hotel room, they successfully completed the project in a short amount of time. Simmons-Santa Cruz later described the experience as “divine intervention in the midst of tragedy,” saying the music gave them space to heal through faith while doing what they loved most.
“It was comforting, we didn’t have to focus on the fire or what was lost, the music gave us a moment to reflect on life, and it became a saving grace,” she said.
The couple had originally resided in the Altadena home with Simmons-Santa Cruz’s 77-year-old mother, who first bought the house in 1974. In the aftermath of the fires, the couple was forced to figure out where they were going to live as they also grappled with the immense paperwork, bills and insurance claims that came with the loss of their home.
MusiCares, a health and welfare charity for musicians founded by the Recording Academy in 1989, offered them assistance.
“They were like, the FEMA of the music industry,” Simmons-Santa Cruz said.
According to Theresa Wolters, executive director of MusiCares, the organization supports the music community through direct financial assistance for basic living, medical, mental health and substance use needs, as well as free preventive healthcare. One year after the Los Angeles wildfires, MusiCares has directed more than $15 million toward relief and recovery, reaching over 3,200 music professionals affected by the disaster.
When MusiCares stepped in to provide emergency funds for Simmons-Santa Cruz and her husband, it also offered to replace an important instrument for her. Her father, who died seven years ago, helped her pick her first guitar, but the guitar was left behind when the fire broke out.
“That guitar was very sentimental for me,” she said.
Nothing can ever replace the personal memory tied to the guitar, but Simmons-Santa Cruz says that MusiCares offered her hope through this deed, and the new guitar represents that.
“I just broke down, I just started crying, because I’m like, who replaces a guitar? … The last thing that was on my mind was replacing our equipment because we’re still in survival mode,” she said.
Drummer Darryl “JMD” Moore” getting fitted for custom ear molds for his live performances at MusiCares Altadena Health and Wellness Clinic at Grammy Museum L.A. Live
(Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
The couple is living in a rental and continuing to deal with the fallout of the fires, still unable to rebuild their house because of the financial costs. Since the fires, many other music professionals have faced similar hardships, like music producer and drummer Darryl “JMD” Moore, who still has to pay the mortgage on the home he lost while rebuilding another one “like for like” as mandated by the mortgage bank.
“I wanted to build a home for my children, and my grandchildren, my descendants, that would serve them financially and in every other way it could, because I know this property is valuable, my house doubled in value, it was worth twice what I paid for,” Moore said. “But our insurance is not paying us enough money to build the same house, it’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars short, so everybody like us, we’re in a scramble to get the money to fill in the gaps.”
After years of renting in Altadena, Moore finally bought his first home there in 2011, a purchase made possible thanks to his success in the music industry. Moore is known in both the jazz and hip-hop music scenes, having produced acts like the Pharcyde and Freestyle Fellowship while also drumming for jazz greats like Horace Tapscott. Moore originally grew up in South L.A., where he started playing drums at 13, focusing on R&B and funk before eventually being mentored by the renowned jazz saxophonist and singer Elvira “Vi” Redd.
When the Eaton fire began to crawl toward Moore’s house, he said he quickly packed his most important possessions. He took an archival hard drive which contained his music from 2004 to the present, but everything else burned: his recording studio, archival tapes and reels, and his favorite drum set, a vintage 1965 Rogers Holiday kit he bought in the ‘80s.
“I played on albums and records with that Rogers kit, when I moved to New York in ’89, I took that Rogers kit with me, and I pushed that kit down the street every night from the East Village to the West Village to work,” Moore said. “I can get one that looks just like it if I was willing to spend the $4,000, but was it in the back of the subway, did I play it on Bleecker Street?” the jazz drummer said.
Immediately after the fire took his home, Moore needed to work, but he no longer possessed the peripherals and equipment he required to record. MusiCares donated thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment he needed, including a drum set, and it also provided grants to help him pay both his mortgage and the rent where he’s currently staying. Moore has a long way to go before he completely recovers financially, but he says the organization made a significant impact in his life this past year, and he’s grateful.
“My studio’s back online, I’m able to practice, I’m able to work and do some gigs … it gave me my voice back, really, that was the beginning of everything,” the hip-hop producer said.
For Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay, a married couple raising a 16-year-old and a 9-year-old, the emotional weight has been just as significant as the financial burden that followed. The couple said they’ve been proactive in prioritizing the mental well-being and happiness of their children since losing their Altadena home.
“It was harder for them early on, when we were moving so frequently, we didn’t have any control over it, we were just trying to get somewhere stable to be, and I think they were processing the loss when they were sad that we didn’t have our home,” Sanford said.
Sanford and her husband are singer-songwriters and have scored music for television shows like “Weeds” and “Orange Is the New Black.” The couple is also in a children’s music band called Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, and they recently composed music for the off-Broadway show “Romy and Michele the Musical.”
Like many others, the couple lost their personal recording studio, making work difficult. The stress has been immense for the couple, but they said MusiCares was able to ease some of the financial burden when the organization offered them grants to cover their mortgage, which they are still on the hook for.
Darryl “JMD” Moore in front of his home that burned down in the wildfires, taken in 2023.
(Darryl “JMD” Moore)
“There’s all the red tape and hurdles and things we have to do just to rebuild our home, so that in itself is like a full-time job that we never wanted, on top of just our regular lives raising our kids and doing work,” Jay said. “So, to have the support of someone like that and have them say you don’t have to worry about this one aspect for a while, is invaluable.”
Recently, Sanford was asked to perform at a groundbreaking ceremony her former Altadena neighbor was having for a new house being built there. Sanford’s daughter had not wanted to go back to the neighborhood, but she decided to accompany her mother anyway. The return was cathartic.
“She was able to walk around our lot and have a private moment, and I asked her how she felt, and she said, ‘I feel safe here, this is my home,’” Sanford said.
At the event, Sanford sang a song she penned in 2011 called, “Acorn,” which was inspired by the grandeur of oak trees and what they symbolize in nature. The song has taken on a different meaning for her in the wake of the fires.
“The acorn is a metaphor, and I think that’s kind of where we all are right now, we have to start over, we have to start small, and eventually we’ll get back to where we were,” Sanford said.
Tennis legend Venus Williams wed Danish model and actor Andrea Preti over the weekend in Florida, the new bride announced in a shared post.
An Instagram post from Vogue Magazine’s Weddings section announced the nuptials, with the message garnering more than 30,000 likes as of Tuesday afternoon.
“We all love each other so much,” Williams, 45, said in the Vogue post. “It was just the happiest, most beautiful, sweetest day.”
The post was scant on details other than the event took place over five days in and around the couple’s home in Palm Beach Gardens.
An email for comment to representatives for Williams and Preti, 37, was not immediately returned.
The couple met at 2024 Milan Fashion Week and began texting shortly after, according to Vogue.
The couple eventually became engaged on Jan. 31 in Tuscany, according to Vogue. That detail was confirmed in July during what was a historic month for Williams.
The Compton native defeated 23-year-old Peyton Sterns 6-3, 6-4 in the first round action of the D.C. Open after a 16-month hiatus from singles matches.
In victory, Williams became the second-oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match, trailing only fellow legend Martina Navratilova, who was 47 when she won in 2004.
“Yes, my fiance is here, and he really encouraged me to keep playing,” Williams told the Tennis Channel’s Rennae Stubbs in a post-match interview. “There were so many times where I just wanted to coast and kind of chill. … He encouraged me to get through this, and it’s wonderful [for him] to be here. He’s never seen me play.”
Therapy often gets mined for comedy but we don’t often see comedy treated as sincere therapy. “Is This Thing On?” from director and co-writer Bradley Cooper, makes the case that glum dad Alex (Will Arnett), new to Splitsville after he and his wife of 20 years, Tess (Laura Dern), mutually agree to separate, may have figured out an ideal coping mechanism by signing up for open mic night.
Not that we see this by-day finance guy reject professional help in favor of some untapped passion. (Vamping for five minutes in front of strangers negates the cover charge.) But in bringing his marital woes to the stage and getting some chuckles, Alex believes he’s hit upon something: a talking cure that comes with a fresh identity, new friends, an acceptable level of risk and a way out of unhappiness.
It’s such a frisky, alluring idea for a character study — meeting failure with the potential for more failure (and night after night to boot) — that when the movie proves to actually be about whether the marriage can be saved, instead of the granular, temperamental world of stand-up newbies, it almost feels like a bait and switch. Fortunately, the divorce saga is interesting too, featuring Dern at her best, and is plenty intelligent about the nuances of couples who have built something solid (stable lives, nice 10-year-old twin boys, etc.) at the same time they’ve grown apart. “Is This Thing On?” is that rarity: a perfectly worthy dramedy that sometimes feels off because it’s trying to cram two good movies into one.
The confidence comes from Cooper, who, after only two films in the director’s chair (“A Star Is Born,”“Maestro”), has shown himself to be not only a powerful chronicler of artistic lives but especially couples in the showbiz sphere. This time, he tantalizes us with the milieu of nightclub self-expression and a group of regular amateurs Alex gets comfortable hanging with. But over two hours Cooper makes it clear he’s simply followed his protagonist into a safe space of encouragement (featuring Amy Sedaris as a helpful veteran comic), not necessarily a complex world of personality types to be navigated. It’s codified by Cooper’s visual approach, a handheld intimacy reminiscent of European movies, in which Matthew Libatique’s camera rarely strays from tight shots of Arnett’s face, looking for change — circling it, centering it, trailing it when Alex is on the move.
Though Alex is earnest if a tad hacky with his relationship jokes, Arnett (credited as a co-screenwriter with Mark Chappell, from a story they created with John Bishop) captures a fizzy, awkward energy of midlife discovery. Invariably, the movie is unconcerned with whether Alex might be any good as a stand-up because soon it’s about how this new pep in his step registers with Tess, who’s struggling with her own sense of personal fulfillment as a former volleyball legend turned mom and how it affects their on-the-brink married friends, Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper, hilarious as a spacy actor). Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds, as Alex’s parents, humorously weigh in too on what long-term togetherness entails.
After a narrative coincidence that’s entertainingly handled, “Is This Thing On?” aims to be a more serious-minded, less rom-com-ish “It’s Complicated,” with Tess and Alex seeing if there’s a new way for them to acknowledge where they went astray. The actors sell it, especially when Dern is unafraid to mix revitalized pleasure with pushing for answers. But the stand-up storyline, so promising, is dropped and it feels like a missed opportunity. Still, the highs and lows of marriage aren’t merely a punch line in “Is This Thing On?” — and that’s good.
‘Is This Thing On?’
Rated: R, for language throughout, sexual references and some drug use
