Atlanta, GA

Winners and losers from an unbelievable NASCAR Cup race at Atlanta

Published

4 months ago

June 29, 2025

Winners and losers from an unbelievable NASCAR Cup race at Atlanta

Inclement weather, red flags, track-clearing pileups and a last-lap pass by the hometown hero — EchoPark Speedway put on a show for the ages on Saturday night. Some are calling it the best race of the year with non-stop action throughout the pack, even after half the field was collected in a mid-race pileup.

It was also the first race of the five-week in-season challenge, and most brackets are surely busted already. But with that being said, here’s a look at the biggest winners and losers from this weekend’s thriller in Atlanta:

WINNER: Hendrick teamwork makes the dream work

Watch: Chase Elliott makes last-lap magic to win at EchoPark Speedway

At the end of the Cup race in Atlanta, the RFK teammates lost sight of each other but the Hendrick duo of Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman stuck together. They perfectly timed the final two laps, moving up into second and third and leaving the race little nothing he could do. The No. 6 Ford tried to block, but it wasn’t enough to stop Elliott from completing a last-lap pass for the lead. And any hope Brad Keselowski had of fighting back vanished as Bowman refused to push him, allowing Elliott to snap a 44-race winless streak.

LOSER: Brad Keselowski loses his golden ticket to the playoffs

Watch: Brad Keselowski talks ‘good effort’ in runner-up finish

The only thing that could save Keselowski’s season at this point is a win. He sits 27th in points and has gone winless this year, but Atlanta was a great opportunity to rectify that. At one point, he had two teammates lined up behind him but by the time the white flag flew, they were nowhere to be seen. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time Keselowski has lost one of these Atlanta races in a last-lap pass.

WINNER: The race track for putting on one of the best shows of the year

Chase Elliott, Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

Photo by: Sean Gardner / Getty Images

Call it Atlanta Motor Speedway, EchoPark Speedway, or whatever you want. It doesn’t change the fact that it just put on one incredible show. Even a 23-car pileup couldn’t slow down the action as the lead changed 46 times. Five different drivers led the race in the final ten laps. The breath-taking race never let up with drivers constantly making huge moves throughout the pack and it seemed like no one could hold the lead for long. Atlanta has asserted itself as the best drafting track on the schedule and it’s not even close.

LOSER: Pretty much everyone involved in that 23-car pileup

Photo by: Krista Jasso / Getty Images

Might as well just group everyone into this. Of the 23 drivers involved in this mess, nine were unable to continue. The second stage had barely gotten underway when names like Denny Hamlin, William Byron, Joey Logano, and Ross Chastain had their cars destroyed. In fact, this wreck nearly guaranteed a new winner as seven of the 11 winners this year were eliminated in the wreck while others were wounded.

WINNER: Ty Dillon with the in-season tournament upset

Ty Dillon, Kaulig Racing Chevrolet

Photo by: Sean Gardner / Getty Images

Both the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds have been knocked out of the in-season bracket challenge, allowing the No. 31 and No. 32 seeds to advance. Most surprisingly, Ty Dillon moves on over Hamlin, giving him the chance to fight for a $1 million prize that would be the highlight of his Cup career. And he had the perfect response for Hamlin fans after the race, saying: “To all the Denny fans out there, I just knocked your favorite driver out.”

LOSER: Ryan Blaney at the wrong place at the wrong time again

Photo by: Sean Gardner / Getty Images

It’s a good thing Ryan Blaney managed to win at Nashville as his season has included six DNFs in the first 18 races. Last year, he had seven in 36 races. Blaney was once again an innocent bystander as he tried to avoid the first wreck of the night, but instead found himself slamming the outside wall. Blaney lamented the bad luck, noting how he always seems to get “caught up in other people’s garbage.” He finished 40th (last), which is his worst result in five years.

WINNER: The 18-year-old rookie for keeping it clean

Photo by: David J. Griffin – Icon Sportswire – Getty Images

While veterans were crashing all over the place, 18-year-old Connor Zilisch kept his car clean and stayed out of trouble, running every single lap and nearly scoring a top ten finish. He was the best of the four Trackhouse cars as his three teammates did wreck while Zilisch placed 11th in the No. 87 Red Bull Chevrolet. He drove like someone who has been doing this for a while, not a rookie in his fourth career start.

LOSER: Stenhouse battles back from a penalty, but misses out on the win

Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Hyak Motorsports Chevrolet

Photo by: Krista Jasso / Getty Images

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. had one of the best drives of anyone during the final run of the race. He had to start from the rear of the field for the last restart due to a penalty, but he quickly marched forward. Stenhouse pulled off a brilliant three-wide pass for the lead with just six laps to go, but he could not hold it as the No. 47 slipped back. He was still inside the top five on the final lap, but contact with the outside wall caused him to slip back to sixth. It was still a strong result but with how close he was to Victory Lane, he’s surely wondering what he could have done differently in those final few laps.

Atlanta, GA

Sources: Atlanta in line to get 17th NWSL franchise

Published

15 hours ago

November 10, 2025

Press Room

Sources: Atlanta in line to get 17th NWSL franchise

Jeff KassoufNov 9, 2025, 09:14 PM ET
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The NWSL has awarded an expansion team to Atlanta as its 17th franchise, sources confirmed to ESPN.

The team will be owned by Arthur Blank’s AMB Sports and Entertainment, which also owns the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and MLS’ Atlanta United FC. Both teams play at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where the NWSL franchise is expected to begin play in 2028.

A spokesperson for AMB Sports and Entertainment provided the following statement to ESPN:

“We have had productive engagement with NWSL and others in its stakeholder group on the possibility of bringing an expansion franchise to Atlanta. We have nothing to announce currently as those conversations are ongoing.”

An NWSL spokesperson declined to comment.

The Athletic, which was the first to report the news, said the expansion fee would be $165 million, up from the $110 million that Denver Summit FC paid less than a year ago. NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman confirmed in September what ESPN reported in July, that the league would shift to rolling expansion rather than formal bidding processes.

“Those conversations are ongoing,” Berman said at the time. “Each of them has a different perspective on how much time they need to launch, the investments they need to make to be successful, including potentially around infrastructure, and we want to not force a square peg into a round hole.”

The NWSL will expand to 16 teams next year with the introduction of Boston Legacy FC and Denver. Berman has said several times this year that the NWSL can eventually be as big as the 32-team NFL, at least conceptually.

Atlanta and Blank have been part of the NWSL expansion conversation intermittently for nearly a decade, with many sources describing the market as a when-not-if situation once Blank is ready to join the league.

The city was previously home to women’s professional soccer when the Atlanta Beat played there in WUSA from 2001 to 2003 and in WPS in 2010 and 2011. The WPS version of the Beat built a stadium for the team in Kennesaw, Georgia, in collaboration with Kennesaw State University.

Atlanta is the seventh-largest TV media market, per Nielsen data.

Atlanta United has been a major success for MLS since launching in 2017. The team won a championship the following year and has led MLS in attendance every season since launching (except during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020), averaging over 40,000 fans per game.

Atlanta will also be the new home of U.S. Soccer’s headquarters as of next year. Blank donated $50 million to that project.

ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle contributed to this report.

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Atlanta, GA

Gridlock Guy: Atlanta traffic study shows way more than the headlines say

Published

1 day ago

November 9, 2025

Press Room

Gridlock Guy: Atlanta traffic study shows way more than the headlines say

Metro Atlanta

How the internet got a recent traffic study wrong and why understanding this data is important.

Automobiles travel along the I-75/I-85 connector shown from the 17th Street bridge, Tuesday, May 20, 2025, in Atlanta. (Jason Getz/AJC)

Few things in the news cycle make me more skeptical than traffic studies. And this skepticism is not normally directed at the studies themselves but how they’re interpreted.

A recent Texas A&M study grabbed headlines because of media and social media misunderstanding what it said about Atlanta. But this study is very worthwhile.

Atlanta’s traffic is some of the worst in the nation, but the delays added during an average rush hour are not as profound, the annual Texas A&M Transportation Institute Urban Mobility Report said. Some outlets confused Atlanta trends with the nationwide patterns the study found.

Thursday is now the worst traffic day in the United States, the data showed. Friday, particularly afternoons, had been the worst. Work patterns have influenced that shift, the report’s senior research scientist, David Schrank, explained.

“Because of hybrid work, we think, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday have climbed in, in the amount of delay,” Schrank said.

My anecdotal observations as a weekday traffic reporter backed this up over the last decade and certainly post-COVID: More people are taking longer weekends or choosing Monday or Friday as teleworking days.

Atlanta now has its heaviest traffic in the 4 and 5 p.m. hours on Wednesday, according to the study. (Many of the outlets that reported on the study said it was Thursday, but that was the national trend, not local.)

As for the idea that rush hours are less than they were: It’s complicated. The study shows that U.S. drivers are commuting in greater numbers and spread out over more hours. This dilutes the peaks or deltas that routine morning and afternoon drive times once held.

Some construed this finding to mean that traditional rush hours were over. That is, very simply, not true and certainly not so in Atlanta.

Metro Atlanta easily saw the most delays — measured in this study as the percentage of roads that experienced congestion — from 7 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 7 p.m. on weekdays. Sounds like rush hours, right?

But the study does show both Atlanta and many other of the 101 urban areas the institute studied have more traffic in off-peak hours. “You’re going into the office on those days, but you may not go in until after the traffic kind of quiets down a little bit,” Schrank said.

Given more information (mainly through GPS apps) and flexibility, many drivers are more productive by steering away from peak drive times. That adjustment lessens but does not eliminate the curve.

Atlanta drivers certainly are filling the roads at these off or nonpeak hours, as they sat in an average of 87 hours of delay each last year. That is the ninth-worst in the U.S., behind the staggering 137 hours that Los Angeles drivers lost.

As to how Texas A&M collects this data — Schrank said that has evolved over the 40 years of this study. Scientists used to take physical traffic counts over certain roadways and then extrapolate that data. Now, connected technology over the last 15-20 years has made the research far more voluminous and precise.

“The largest contributor (to this data) now is your automobile. Any automobile after I think it’s 2018 or something like that has the data that is being pinged up to satellites,” Schrank said, noting that people often opt in to sharing this information when they sign to buy cars. “A lot of vehicles out there every three seconds send a ping to a satellite.”

Atlanta may be ninth or 19th worst in traffic jams … or 90th. That matters very little to a single driver. The worst traffic jam in the world is the one you are in right now. And, thankfully, there are teams dedicated to trying to understand drivers’ habits — and very precisely at that.

Doug Turnbull covers the traffic/transportation beat for WXIA-TV (11Alive). His reports appear on the 11Alive Morning News from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and on 11Alive.com. Email Doug at dturnbull@11alive.com.

Doug Turnbull has covered Atlanta traffic for over 20 years.

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Atlanta, GA

Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Luzia’ returns to Atlantic Station after 8-year gap

Published

2 days ago

November 8, 2025

Press Room

Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Luzia’ returns to Atlantic Station after 8-year gap

Things to do

Production transports Atlantans to a Mexican mythical dreamscape.

Acrobats dressed as hummingbirds propel their bodies through small hoops during Cirque du Soleil’s touring production of “Luzia.” The show will run through Jan. 25 at Atlantic Station. (Courtesy of Matt Beard and Anne Colliard)

The sounds of a mariachi band and sweet aroma of fried cinnamon churros greeted Atlantans on Thursday night as they strolled under a full moon toward Cirque du Soleil’s blue-and-white-striped, big-top tent for the opening night of “Luzia,” touring at Atlantic Station through Jan. 25.

The name “Luzia” — a portmanteau of the Spanish words luz (light) and lluvia (rain) — hints at the mystical and natural forces that awe audiences in Cirque du Soleil’s 38th production, which is inspired by Mexican culture, mythology and Mother Nature.

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The name of Cirque du Soleil’s show “Luzia” is a portmanteau of the Spanish words luz (light) and lluvia (rain). A custom-engineered rain machine is used in the production to shower performers in water as they perform acrobatic feats. (Courtesy of Matt Beard and Anne Colliard)

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A Cirque du Soleil performer in “Luzia” balances high atop poles, demonstrating awe-inspiring strength and agility. (Courtesy of Matt Beard and Anne Colliard)

A custom-engineered rain machine creates a curtain of water that showers over performers in “Luzia.” The water droplets are programmed to reveal whimsical shapes and patterns that glisten in the light. (Courtesy of Matt Beard and Anne Colliard)

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A giant treadmill used only in Cirque du Soleil’s production of “Luzia” propels a dancer costumed as a Monarch butterfly. (Courtesy of Matt Beard and Anne Colliard)

Hoop divers dressed as hummingbirds are propelled by a giant treadmill in Cirque du Soleil’s production of “Luzia.” (Courtesy of Matt Beard and Anne Colliard)

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Danielle Charbonneau is a reporter with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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