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Victor Wembanyama enjoyed “one of the best wins” of his career as he helped the San Antonio Spurs make a 25-point comeback against the Los Angeles Clippers.

The French star claimed 27 points and 10 rebounds as the Spurs fought back from 75-50 down in the third quarter to win 116-112 on Friday.

The 22-year-old grabbed the go-ahead score with 16 seconds remaining to secure San Antonio’s largest comeback of the season and their 14th win from 15 games.

Wembanyama said in a post-game on-court interview that he was “about to pass out. I’ve got zero left right now”.

The Spurs improved to 46-17 and are now 2.5 games behind Western Conference leaders the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Slovenian star Luka Doncic scored 44 points as the Los Angeles Lakers won 128-117 at home to the Indiana Pacers.

The Lakers were without LeBron James (elbow, foot) as Doncic scored his 10th 40-point haul of the season, breaking a tie with Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards for the most this season.

London-born forward OG Anunoby scored a season-high 34 points as the New York Knicks won 142-103 at the Denver Nuggets.

Denver’s star guard Jamal Murray missed the second half after rolling his left ankle when he stepped on team-mate Nikola Jokic’s foot.

The Knicks remain third in the Eastern Conference behind the second-placed Boston Celtics, who won 120-100 at home to the Dallas Mavericks as Jayson Tatum played his first game of the season.

George Russell said he believed a “perfect storm” accounted for the chasm between Mercedes and their rivals in qualifying at the first race of the new Formula 1 season.

The Briton’s remarks were a reference to the fact that Max Verstappen, whom Russell said Mercedes believed was their closest rival, crashed without setting a time.

But it may also be that the remark works as a more general reflection of an Australian Grand Prix grid that looks as if it was a function of possibly the most controversial set of new rules F1 has ever seen.

McLaren’s Lando Norris, the world champion, said after qualifying sixth in Melbourne: “We’ve come from the best cars ever made in Formula 1, and the nicest to drive, to probably the worst.”

Norris was talking about the impact of electrical energy management on the way drivers operate their new cars, with engines that have a 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical power, and the unusually large impact optimising that has on lap time.

“You just decelerate so much before corners,” Norris said. “You have to lift everywhere to make sure the (battery) pack’s at the top. If the pack’s too high, you’re also screwed.”

Not having the information one needs to maximise the engine has an impact on this – and Norris had lost out by reliability issues on Friday.

“It’s certainly just not been an easy weekend for me,” he said. “Just not a lot of laps, a lot of issues.

“The problem is now, it’s not like you can just get back in the car and drive what you once knew and just click. This car is just odd.

“Just getting into the rhythm of lifting everywhere to go quicker and using gears you don’t want to use and just understanding that when you lift more, you brake later but you have to brake less.

Russell ended the day leading a Mercedes one-two from team-mate Kimi Antonelli and 0.785 seconds quicker than the first driver not in a Mercedes, Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar.

Russell said: “We knew we had a fast car beneath us. I don’t think we ever anticipated it to be this fast, but Max wasn’t there.

“We had him down as our top rival and if you look at his pace difference historically over the last seven years to his team-mate, you would have expected him to be in that mix as well.

“It was a bit of a perfect storm.”

There may be a significant element of truth to that, but there is no doubt that Mercedes have the fastest car and that they are going to take some beating for a while.

McLaren also have a Mercedes engine but their fastest driver, Oscar Piastri in fifth, was more than 0.8secs slower than Russell.

Most of McLaren’s time loss was on the long ‘straight’ run between Turns Six and Nine of the Albert Park circuit. Mercedes were simply able to deploy more energy along there – because they arrived at Turn Six with their battery more highly charged.

Team principal Andrea Stella said that the Mercedes was also faster in most of the corners but added: “How you exploit these power units to the best of their potential, this moves quite a lot of lap time.”

Why can McLaren not compete in this way yet? Because Mercedes are the works team. They built the engine, so for now have a more complete understanding of how it works.

Mercedes’ advantage is not just in power-unit management, however. They have also built a very good car.

Stella said: “Mercedes are quick in the corners, not only in the straights. There are a few corners in which we can compete with them, but overall they are faster in the grip-limited sections.”

But he added that this could also be partly to do with engine usage.

The fact that qualifying was run in cool conditions, when achieving the optimum tyre temperature is more difficult, could also have influenced this – as Russell pointed out, the Mercedes is better the cooler the conditions become, as it was for the past two years.

“We saw that McLaren, probably Ferrari as well, they kind of lost performance in relative [terms] through this qualifying as it got colder and colder,” Stella said.

Many of the drivers have made it clear they are not fans of these new rules, and the way they affect the use of engines – the need to lift before corners, or for speed to drop towards the end of the straights to harvest energy at full throttle and so on.

Norris said: “It’s certainly different, not like it was last year. Not like, ‘push this corner more,’ because sometimes if you push more, you lose the battery and go slower. You have to understand how to do things.

“Mercedes have obviously understood that, they are a good team and it’s their own engine. We will get there, it just takes time.”

Russell said: “There are lots of mixed views on the new regs as a whole, but I do think the car regulations for everyone are definitely a step forward.”

The new engines could also have an impact in the race.

Starts are known to be difficult, because the removal of the motor that recovered energy from the turbo, which was also used to spin it up, has made it harder to get the turbos up to the right speed and get the cars off the line.

Some believe Ferrari have an advantage on this front with their engine, although not all agree.

But Charles Leclerc, 0.8secs slower than Russell in fourth place, does not sound optimistic that he can challenge the Mercedes in the race, even if by some electric start he can get into the lead.

Leclerc said that he had thought Mercedes would be ahead – but the size of the gap had surprised him just as much as it had Russell.

“It’s very surprising but at the same time we can only respect what they have done with their engine and the amount of performance they have found compared to the others,” he said.

“In the race, I can’t do anything. Yesterday in practice they were super strong and they didn’t have the engine turned up as much as this morning [in final practice].

“I don’t even know if they were full power in qualifying. Maybe they left a little bit because this morning was just crazy.

Para-alpine skier Varvara Voronchikhina won Russia’s first medal of the Milan-Cortina Winter Paralympics with downhill bronze – marking the first time the Russian flag will appear on the medal table at a Games since 2014.

Voronchikhina and her Russian team-mates only returned to international competition in January after their country won an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) against FIS, the international governing body for skiing and snowboarding.

That ban had been in place since 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the eve of the Winter Paralympics four years ago, although it was softened the following year to allow athletes to compete as neutrals.

The Russian flag has not been flown at a Paralympic Games or shown on the medal table since Sochi 2014, firstly because of the country’s state-sponsored doping scandal, before the Ukraine war led to those further sanctions.

Voronchikhina, 23, finished 2.47 seconds shy of the gold medal-winning time set by Sweden’s Ebba Aarsjoe in the standing downhill event in Cortina, while France’s Aurelie Richard took silver.

“It’s a really long time when we were without the flag, and I’m really glad [now],” Voronchikhina said. “All my country and all my team-mates, we [are] glad also.”

Because of the outright ban on all Russian athletes from the Beijing Games four years ago, Voronchikhina is competing at her first Paralympics, despite being a two-time world champion in the Para-alpine skiing events.

She will compete in five further disciplines during these Games.

The inclusion of six Russian and four Belarusian athletes, able to compete under their national flag and in their country’s colours, at the 2026 Winter Paralympics has caused uproar, with seven nations – including Ukraine – opting to boycott Friday’s opening ceremony in Verona.

Earlier on Friday, IPC president Andrew Parsons told BBC Sport that Russian soldiers injured in the war with Ukraine will be allowed to compete at future Paralympic Games.

An investigation by Poland-based news outlet Vot Tak, as reported by the Moscow Times, found Russia is fast-tracking injured soldiers into Para-sport.

The Russian Paralympic Committee has reportedly said that “at least 70” veterans are now competing in national teams.

Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych, who was disqualified from last month’s Winter Olympics because he wished to compete wearing a helmet featuring images of Ukrainian athletes killed during the Russian invasion, later responded to the BBC’s interview with Parsons on X.

“The head of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) literally stated that they don’t care about what Russian soldiers did in Ukraine. The problem is that we do care,” he said.

“They are killing Ukrainians on the battlefield, bombing our cities, and committing genocide. Now, with this step of allowing them to compete, the IPC is giving them the opportunity to continue committing genocide by spreading Russian narratives with Russian flags and symbols.

“This whole story is just getting worse and worse.”