Sprint

US Sprint said yesterday that its share of Philadelphia long-distance telephone customers has grown as much as two percentage points in its battle to overtake MCI Communications, the second-largest long-distance company here, after AT&T. Gabriel A. Battista, president of US Sprint's Atlantic division, also said that, by the end of the year, the company should be able to "set up" calls in six to seven seconds, one-third the time it took last spring. The set-up time is the period between the finish of dialing and the start of ringing at the other end of the line.

US Sprint, the nation's third biggest long-distance company, is preparing to oppose Bell of Pennsylvania's plan to deregulate much of its business, contending the idea would be far too costly to consumers and others. A state Senate committee has scheduled a hearing for Monday on Bell's proposal. Under the proposal, the phone company would contribute $100 million during five years for state economic development if the state approves the partial deregulation plan. In December, the company called for revised regulations for its non- residential services to allow Bell to better compete with unregulated firms that have entered the field since the court-ordered breakup of the Bell system.

With all the attention devoted to the $3,990 Yugo and the $4,995 Hyundai in recent times, another new little economy car has been kind of lost in the shuffle. And that's a shame, because the $5,660 Chevrolet Sprint deserves a better fate than that. The quality of this car is much higher than the Yugo's and at least as good as the Hyundai's. And when it comes to gas mileage, the forte of any minicar, the other two aren't even close. The Yugo and Hyundai have city EPAs in the 20s. The Sprint has an EPA city rating of 44 - which is 6 miles per gallon less than this driver obtained.

The spirited Friday morning talk in the color-splashed Jamaican sector of Franklin Field's north grandstands had been all about whether Olympic hero Usain Bolt would be in Philadelphia this weekend. Then suddenly, as a heat of the Penn Relays' boys' small-school 4x100 drew near, the conversation stopped. The men and women in green-and-gold T-shirts, jackets and hats rose in unison, as if they'd just heard the first notes of their island nation's anthem. "Where is Nickel?" whispered a man whose prodigious dreadlocks were piled beneath a knit cap. Nickel Ashmeade, the lanky, euphoniously named runner, wearing Jamaica's ubiquitous green and gold, would be on the second leg in a heat St. Jago's should have dominated.

His goal once was to someday ride wheel to wheel with Europe's finest cyclists as all of France cheered him from the side of the road. While most of the adolescent males of America pray for a football player's physique, Ken Carpenter bemoaned his every extra inch. "I wanted to do the Tour de France and all that," said Carpenter, who finished third to eventual champion Scott Berryman last night in the John E. duPont National Cycling Championships at the Lehigh County Velodrome. "But my junior year I weighed 175. The next year I was 200. And then I got up to 220. " When he reached his full height of 6-4, his dream gave way to hard reality.

The West Catholic girls' sprint medley team ran the nation's fastest time this season at the Simplot Games at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, yesterday. At the university's Holt Arena, the West Catholic quartet of freshman Tiffany Bradley, sophomore Sara Hatchett, junior Renee Fortune and freshman Evelyn Dwyer posted a time of 4 minutes, 4.07 seconds, taking the lead in the final 800-meter leg over Utah's Kearns High School, which finished second in 4:06.22. The winning time - the ninth-fastest time ever run in the event, Burrs coach Lenny Jordan said - bested this indoor season's previous top time in the nation, 4:06.

Down at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark., they're getting the idea that Tim Ritchey might make a pretty fair poker player. The Delaware Park-based trainer of top Kentucky Derby contender Afleet Alex kept it pretty hush-hush that he wanted to put his colt in a six-furlong race tomorrow. But when the entries came out yesterday for the $50,000 Mountain Valley Stakes at Oaklawn, Afleet Alex was among them. He is ready to make his 3-year-old debut, with Jeremy Rose riding, in Afleet Alex's first race since placing second in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile.

While most of the riders in yesterday's $110,000 CoreStates U.S. Pro Cycling Championship spent Saturday resting up for the 156-mile race, Italy's Roberto Gaggioli was winning a 40-mile contest in Washington, D.C. And, after most of the riders in yesterday's race had dropped out by the ninth lap, Gaggioli, of the Pepsi-Fanini team, produced a furious sprint in the final 200 meters to edge Norway's Dag-Otto Lauritzen of the 7-Eleven team and...

GTE Corp. said yesterday that it planned to sell for $600 million most of its half of US Sprint to its partner in the unprofitable long-distance telecommunications venture, United Telecommunications Inc. The companies also announced that US Sprint president Robert H. Snedaker would take early retirement effective Aug. 15. William T. Esrey, United Telecom president and chief executive, will take on Snedaker's duties, at least temporarily....

Thousands of long-distance-telephone customers probably thought they had found the best of all toll bargains when they received their recent GTE Sprint Communications Corp. bills. But, no such luck. Sprint has acknowledged that because of a computer glitch, $10 million or more in long-distance calls were not billed between late February and late last month. And now the third-largest long-distance carrier is trying to reconstruct the list of calls so it can bill customers.

  Quicken Loans 400 Michigan International Speedway Brooklyn, Mich. When: Sunday, 1 p.m. TV/Radio: TNT/WNPV (1440-AM) Course: 2-mile oval Distance: 200 laps/400 miles Forecast: isolated thunderstorms, high 70s Last year's winner: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Last year's pole: Marcos Ambrose Track qualifying record: Ambrose, 203.241 mph (June 2012) Track facts: Dale Earnhardt Jr. led 95 laps, including the last 30, in winning last year's race.

THIS WEEK'S RACE NASCAR Sprint Showdown and All-Star Race Charlotte Motor Speedway Concord, N.C. When: Saturday, 7 p.m. TV/Radio: Speed/WNPV (1440-AM) Race course: 1.5-mile oval Race distance: For the All-Star race: four 20-lap segments, followed by a mandatory four-tire pit stop and a 10-lap segment. Race forecast: scattered thunderstorms, high 70s Last year's winner: Jimmie Johnson Track facts: The All-Star race winner will collect more than $1 million . . . Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Sr. are three-time All-Star winners . . . Mark Martin has the most All-Star race starts (24)

Penn State is more than a three-hour ride from Franklin Field, but the Nittany Lions like to think of the Penn Relays as a home game for their track team, especially those runners who have been competing at the carnival since high school. The Lions certainly felt right at home Friday. They received a gutty 1,600-meter anchor leg from sophomore Robby Creese and picked up a hard-earned victory over Villanova and Oregon in the men's distance medley relay, their first win in the event since 1959.

Here are some championship events at Friday's Penn Relays. For the complete schedule, go to Inquirer.com: College men's 400-meter hurdles championship, 9 a.m. College women's 4x100 Championship of America, 12:50 p.m. High school girls' 4x800 Championship of America, 1 p.m. College women's 4x1500 Championship of America, 1:10 p.m. High school girls' 4x100 Championship of America, 2:15 p.m. College men's distance medley Championship of...

KANSAS CITY, Kan. - Matt Kenseth captured his second consecutive race at Kansas Speedway on Sunday, holding off Kasey Kahne in the STP 400 to become the third straight Sprint Cup driver to win from the pole. Points leader Jimmie Johnson was third with a car that kept getting better during green-flag runs. Martin Truex Jr. finished fourth, and Clint Bowyer was fifth.   IndyCar LONG BEACH, Calif. - Carlos Munoz won the crash-filled Indy Lights race at Long Beach. Gabby Chavez was second.

The temperatures were cold and the wind was howling Saturday at the third annual Upper Darby Relays, but there was no stopping the Strath Haven girls' track team from a hot start to the season. Junior Jamie Kenney kicked off the Panthers' winning ways with a victory in the first event, the girls' 300-meter hurdles. "It was cold, and it really wasn't that fun," said Kenney, who finished in 47.76 seconds. "But we worked through it and I ran good times, so I can't complain. " Despite missing some runners, Strath Haven showed why it has won the Central League title in nine of the past 12 years.

Doug Collins feels your pain. After 51 games - and with 31 left in what will be a sprint of a second half to the season - the 76ers coach is as disappointed as anyone with his team's results to this point. "I'm a little disappointed with where we are right now because I thought this could be a special year," Collins said of the Sixers, 22-29 and four games out of the final spot for the Eastern Conference playoffs. "Especially with Andrew [Bynum] healthy and with all our guys healthy, I thought we would win 60 percent of our games, win 50 games, be a top 4 team in the East, and have a chance to do something really special.

WASHINGTON - America set an off-the-charts heat record in 2012. A brutal combination of a widespread drought and a mostly absent winter pushed the average annual U.S. temperature last year up to 55.32 degrees Fahrenheit, the government announced Tuesday. That's a full degree warmer than the old record set in 1998. Breaking temperature records by an entire degree is unprecedented, scientists say. Normally, records are broken by a tenth of a degree or so. "It was off the chart," said Deke Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which calculated the temperature records.