World Best Sports

The 2010 Soldiers Beach Pro presented by Beachin’ Surf will be the 2nd event on the 2010 IBA World Men’s Tour and will also be dual sanctioned as an IBA Australian Rebel Sport Pro Tour 5 Star event. The event will also be coupled with round 1 of the NSW State titles so the week will see some 300 competitors taking to the waters off Soldiers Beach.

Amaury Lavernhe of Reunion Island will be one of the stars that will attend the event and is coming off a win at the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii in the first Grand Slam of the season. "I am so stoked, I still can't believe it" said Lavernhe of his win at Pipe. "I really am looking forward to competing at Soldiers Beach". Laverhne finished 2nd in the 2008 World Tour ratings behind Ben Player so a world title is in his sights for 2010.

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Surfers on this year's ASP World Championship Tour, including Kelly Slater, and Satellite Beach twins C.J. and Damien Hobgood, will be facing a different kind of pressure.A new format will slice the 45-man field to 33 surfers halfway through the 10-event season, which gets under way today in Coolangatta, Australia, with the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast contest.

Slater, the sport's nine-time world champion from Cocoa Beach, finished sixth last year with one victory (Brazil), although much of his time was spent riding self-shaped, experimental designs that yielded mixed results.

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But Airini and Sarah Mason will have to put the supportive sibling role on hold on Friday as they compete for the last remaining place in the season-opening event of the women's world tour. The southern Gold Coast girls are among a field of 12 vying for the event wildcard. Winning a wildcard in to the Roxy Pro is a massive boost for aspiring surfers – four years ago a Tweed schoolgirl named Steph Gilmore was granted the wildcard, and the rest, as they say, is history.Junior prodigy Sarah Mason won a wildcard in to the event last year as a 13-year-old, while her 20-year-old sister has made it to the qualifying round four times without ever cracking the main draw.

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The first official day of competition has run at the 2010 Turbo Bodyboards Pipeline Pro Presented by Body Glove.

This multi-cultural bodyboarding event attracts competitors from all four corners of the globe, with Brazil, USA, France, Australia, Israel, South Africa and Canada among the many. Waves were large in the 6 to 8 feet range and winds varied from light offshore to strong cross shore, pushing the riders in a variety of testing waves.

Drew Innocend of Queensland Australia, was the most impressive surfer of the day. Innocend notched up a 17.60 combined wave total in his round three heat, the highest of the day. This included a near perfect 9.83 score for being spat out of a huge Backdoor Barrell and launching into a massive backflip. All of Innocend's waves were executed with a beautiful precision. Finishing second in the heat was Tom Smith also of Australia with 14.83 and in third Daniel Fonesca of Portugal in 10.74.

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If you are interested in surfing at all, you will know that the famous big-wave Mavericks event was finally held last Saturday, February 13. The waiting period that started on November 1, 2009 and was due to end on March 31 of this year was finally over when the participants, all invited top surfers, gave the nod at last.

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To kick start 2010, Pride has collected the highly lucrative signature of WA super Grom Lewy Finnegan. He joins one of the hottest young teams in the sport including Cade Sharp, Sam Bennett, Mitch Woodland, Ben Veitch, Nick Perry, Shaun Pyne and Jimmy Williamson.

Before departing on another surf trip (try getting hold of him – its a nightmare), we caught up with him on the new signing and surfing: Welcome to the team Lewy. Your signature was pretty hot property over the last few months so why pride? Thanks mate. I chose Pride because I've seen plenty of the boards in EBB as I work there, and I reckon they seem like they're the best boards. They all have really narrow templates, which I like. Also, the rest of the Pride team motivates me to push myself in bodyboarding because they are some of the best riders in the world.

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Just when we thought there was a softer version of Bode Miller, the U.S. ski team said yesterday the sometimes-wild child of the World Cup circuit is back, cocky and full of self-confidence as ever. Miller plans to race all five alpine events at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, U.S. men's coach Sasha Rearick said, starting with the Feb. 13 downhill. He'll also compete in the super-combined, super-G, giant slalom and slalom.

Miller thinks he's fast enough to challenge for medals. Does that make him a favourite, or just the old Bode?

"He hasn't had much time skiing, and the setups are still a challenge," Rearick told The Associated Press from the team's pre-Olympic training camp at Park City, Utah. "Right now, in downhill, he's going pretty good, and he knows what he's going on; slalom is getting close. But in super G and GS, we've got a lot of work to do.

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A 92-year-old North County man has been identified as the suspected hit-and-run driver whose car struck and killed a teenage skateboarder on a Vista street over the weekend, a sheriff's official reported Monday. Deputy Ed Macken said he was conducting traffic control near a memorial at the site of the fatal accident when the senior citizen approached him on Saturday evening and said his car had struck something in the area the previous night.

About 7 p.m. Friday, an eastbound sedan hit 15-year-old Lucas Giaconelli as he was skateboarding with friends in the 1700 block of Thibodo Road. The boy died at a hospital about an hour later. The elderly man told Macken he didn't stop following the crash because he believed his vehicle had struck an animal or a bird. He said he only realized a person had died there when he saw the roadside candlelight vigil, Macken said.

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The decent snow conditions and the heady buzz of anticipation should have been a good omen for the Grimsby, Ont., group when it hit the slopes of Revelstoke Mountain Resort. Steve Babb, 46, his son Colin, 16, and family friend Sam Vogl, 17, visited the B.C. mountain town as an exam week getaway and had limited time to enjoy the freedom of whizzing down the hills.

Around 1 p.m. on Thursday the midget hockey coach and the teens, both talented minor hockey players, glided off the Ripper Chair ski lift and into the powder of the mountain's north bowl, a moderately difficult run. For reasons unexplained, they decided to go out of bounds – off the run and into a steep, wooded area with a hard-packed surface, said Sergeant Art Kleinsmith from the Revelstoke RCMP detachment. They took off their skis and tried to ascend the icy chute, an inclined trough on the mountainside. But they slid down 100 metres on the rough ground and then over a cliff.

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If you exercise often, you’ll begin to build your strength and enhance your endurance in the muscle groups used in downhill skiing. You’ll be preparing yourself for the rigors of skiing in the expert zones where both staying power and explosive power are of the utmost importance. First, we’ll get into the why and when you need to exercise, before moving onto the five essential elements of ski-specific exercising.

The ultimate body for an expert skier is powerful, from strong ankles to strong shoulders, and every finely-tuned muscle in between. Remember the last time you watched someone effortlessly weave through a mogul field and wondered, "How does he do that?" It’s partly due to practice, and partly to the body awareness and balance that strength training provides. The expert skier, who is physically strong, instinctively cues every part of his or her body. A fit body is like a well-tuned sports car. It handles effortlessly, acting on subtle intuitions.

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