This week's news on Winter Olympics.
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France can lift grand old lady
3 Febwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
The annual carnival of communal bonhomie gets under way with all the sides having plenty to prove
Fred Goodwin may have been stripped of his knighthood but the integrity of the RBS Six Nations championship is not in doubt. For 129 years the grand old lady of European sport has battled harsh winters, shifting economic times and changing fashions with sure-footed charm and considerable stamina. Those who reckon the tournament is losing some of its soul should pause and imagine life without it.
How dull and monochrome the month of February would be minus the slash of seasonal colour the Six Nations provides? In London, Paris, Rome, Dublin, Cardiff and Edinburgh there will be a communal bonhomie that this year's Olympic organisers would love to bottle. The whole event remains a remarkable institution. Try informing the cafe owners and publicans of Scotland's capital, let alone the players on Calcutta Cup duty, that the championship is in recession.
John Feehan, the Six Nations' chief executive, does concede the annual carnival is "not immune" from the cold draughts of global financial gloom. The games will be sold out but hospitality revenue is set to take a relative hit. "We don't live in a bubble," he acknowledges. To balance the equation he points to Italy's first game in the Stadio Olimpico next week, which will attract, by far, the biggest Six Nations crowd for a match on Italian soil. If Italy become major commercial players all their neighbours will benefit by association.
For Englishmen, the Azzurri's rising profile offers further reason for contemplation as they brace themselves for the Red-hot Chilli Pipers of Murrayfield. Everyone who has ever met Stuart Lancaster will tell you what a decent man he is, but he has picked an awkward fortnight in which to launch his case to be England's permanent head coach. A vengeful Scotland away from home, followed by a trip to Italy's new colosseum, is no gentle loosener. Suffer defeats in those opening two matches and England will be eyeing their first wooden spoon for 25 years.
Would this be entirely Lancaster's fault? Hardly. The lumbering, unenlightened selection policies of the previous regime were always going to store up future trouble. Lancaster has done an impressive job of rearranging the broken furniture, but some of his reshuffled England squad have barely met. For all the renewed enthusiasm Lancaster is generating, they are not going to win the title again this year.
Nor are Italy under their new coach Jacques Brunel. Mirco Bergamasco is missing with a damaged shoulder and they still struggle to turn pressure into points on a consistent basis. Any prospect of catching France cold on the opening weekend has been diminished by their victory in last year's reverse fixture. Winning their home games against England and Scotland looks more feasible, always assuming Brunel can swiftly bridge the gap left by Nick Mallett. Early success would accelerate his long-term engineering project nicely.
The same is true for Andy Robinson's Scotland. Robinson has been where Lancaster is now and can tell him plenty about the joys of working for the Rugby Football Union in lean times. Strangely, though, Robinson is in more urgent need of a win. If the home side, having departed the World Cup in the pool stages, cannot beat an English team still poking its nose out of its chrysalis then Caledonian patience will start to fray. The alternative scenario involves Ross Rennie and David Denton making alliterative hay and Edinburgh's fine form being replicated at Test level. The last four Six Nations titles have been won by four different countries and Scotland do better in even-numbered years. Mid-table should be a far from unrealistic prospect.
To some extent their fortunes are intertwined with those of Wales. If the Welsh were to come a cropper in Dublin , and pick up a couple more injuries, it will directly impact on Scotland's chances in Cardiff next week. Of all the teams Wales are the hardest to second-guess; their World Cup was a populist triumph, but they have yet to shed the habit of narrowly losing games they should win. While the sight of Sam Warburton being sent off for an early tip-tackle will surely not be repeated, they badly need a fit Rhys Priestland at No10. Watching James Hook, his leg heavily bandaged, poking kicks nervously wide for Perpignan at Exeter the other day was not a pretty sight.
Ireland? Having seen Leinster play at full tilt and watched Ulster and Munster exhibit such steely spirit, it seems impossible they will not be serious contenders. Some bookmakers have them priced at 9-2 which seems unusually generous. True, they struggle in Paris and cannot call on Brian O'Driscoll but their forwards should be a blur of wolfish fur and teeth. While Wales cleverly shut down Sean O'Brien in their World Cup quarter-final, Ireland are determined not to be defined by that tactical blip. As England found at the end of last season, Declan Kidney's teams are never more dangerous than when a perceived wrong needs righting.
That said, beating Wales and France inside six days is going to be tough. France's first two games are at home and it is hard to see Les Bleus losing to England in Paris in March. Their record at Murrayfield is much improved – one loss in Edinburgh in the past 16 years – and Philippe Saint-André is already proving a better selector than his predecessor, Marc Lièvremont. They used to call Saint-André "The Piglet". I strongly suspect he will snuffle out a French title and, perhaps, a grand slam at the first attempt. If so, rugby's equivalent of the Légion d'honneur awaits.
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Bobby White: Our winter tour of the glamour spots of central Europe
2 Febwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
The tight-knit atmosphere of the GB handball team contrasts with club life in France – house-sharing with the terminally untidy and no electricity
• Introducing the Guardian's Olympic diaristsWhile other Olympians have been off warm-weather training in Australia, Portugal and the like, the British men's handball team have been on something of a tour of central Europe for our winter training camp. Latvia, Hungary, Austria and Serbia have all been on the agenda – maybe not the most glamorous destinations but exactly what we need for our Olympic preparations.
We started in Latvia for five days in December, then came back to the UK for a few days over new year, then we were off to Hungary for three days preparing for our World Cup qualifier against Austria, then on to Austria for the game itself, then back to London for the return leg of our double-header (unfortunately two defeats mean we won't be at the 2013 world championships, but the Austrians are the toughest team we've come up against) and then on to Serbia for eight or nine days. It's meant a lot of time on trains and planes, which has been really tiring, especially when the first thing you do when you arrive at your destination is drop your bags in your room and then head out to train. So it's been quite intense, but it's necessary.
We don't get much free time off court or away from the gym, because whenever we're not training we're resting, confined to our rooms. Unlike the rugby side there was no dwarf-tossing or anything like that. There's just no time for high jinks (not that they would be on the agenda if there was) but while we were in Serbia the European Championships were on, so, frustrating as it was to be spectating rather than playing, we took the opportunity to check out the competition and sample the atmosphere – the support the home nation got was fantastic, very boisterous. Hopefully that's what we can expect in six months' time.
So we haven't really had much chance for any team-building exercises yet, although I think there will be some when we kick off the final preparations in May, which will be important. When we're thrown together for three and a half weeks during the Games it'll take its toll on people for sure. Some people can get a bit ratty. Everyone's got their own issues away from handball. We all have our moments, as you can imagine. But we're almost like a little family. For me it's tough going away from that tight-knit group to head back to my club in France.
After spells with clubs in Denmark, Greece and now France I've got used to life on the road. I'm comfortable being on my own for long periods and not having contact with my friends – it's something I've just got used to. With modern technology your friends are never far away. But it's been particularly difficult just lately. We've just moved apartments in France which meant leaving Nelson Mandela House behind, but brewed up a few new issues. We didn't have electricity for four days, there was no internet for a week and my GB team-mate and housemate Seb Prieto moved back to the UK for rehab. That left me stuck on my own with my two French housemates. No cooker, no lights, I ended up sitting in the dark twiddling my thumbs for hours every night.
The club sorted the electricity and the internet out in the end, but my new housemates are still an issue. The two French lads are 18 and 21 and, frankly, they're useless. They look after themselves but not the flat – the place is often left for me to clear up. Usually I do the cooking, Seb does the washing up, so we had a domestic relationship that worked but now it's a bit like living with a couple of stereotypical students.
I was like them once, but I like to think I was never that bad, in terms hygiene and living habits. You've got to give them a bit of space, accept that they're a pair of young lads and hope that eventually they become a pair of responsible adults but when you're training as hard as we are sometimes you get a bit of a short fuse. It's not without its challenges.
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Classic YouTube | Terrific timelapses, a happy horse trainer and Steve McClaren spooked
2 Febwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
This week's round-up also features Levellers v Blur on the football pitch, snowmobile superiority and Six Nations starlets
1) Everyone loves some timelapse footage and, with Sunday's Super Bowl taking place between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, why not have a stop-motion look at the last time these two sides met in the NFL season finale back in 2008. While we're on the subject of season finales, here is a nice clip, with the help of a little tilt-shift animation, of FA Cup final day at Wembley last year, plus a video showing the construction of the Olympic velodrome in Stratford. And there are more: ever wondered how to turn a naval destroyer into a basketball arena? Of course you have. Or how a football stadium is turned into a concert venue overnight. Barcelona's passing is metronomic at the best of times, but how about in stop-motion, while here is a taste of matchday, Corinthians-style. Finally, while we're on the subject of timelapses, Walter Pandiani …
2) Jubilant Irish trainer Peter Casey provides the post-race interview to end all post-race interviews. [Warning: includes bad word].
3) Scorpion backheel kick goal of the week … assist of the week … and our new favourite game: spot the goal.
4) Out with the old and in with the new could be the motto of this season's Six Nations. Of the newcomers at Stuart Lancaster's England disposal, Saracens fly-half/centre Owen Farrell is the one tipped to make the biggest impact. After their display at the World Cup, Wales don't need to change much and will rely on the young players who took them to the last four in New Zealand, led by inspirational captain Sam Warburton. France have changed coach, but still have 2011 IRB Player of the Year Thierry Dusautoir, while Luca Morisi is one of the newcomers to an ever-improving Italian squad. Scotland will hope Richie Gray continues his development into one of the northern hemisphere's most effective forwards, while Ireland have a settled side which knows it must perform especially with the likes of Munster sensation Simon Zebo waiting in the wings.
5) Into the random football archive: Levellers beat Shed Seven but then lose to Blur in the final of the 1997 Soccer Six final; Schalke 6-6 Bayern Munich (aet) from the 1984 DFB Pokal semi-final; Watford win the 1993 Evening Standard London Fives; Wolves' Neil Masters makes it snow at Molineux; and Gary Lineker's Super Skills on the Atari ST in 1988.
6) And if you haven't seen it, we are also running our new Classic YouTube lost and found feature, with readers attempting to uncover seemingly long-departed clips for other readers. Some of the gems dug out: the BBC's review of World Cup '94, Oh So Sharp winning the 1985 1,000 Guineas in a photo, Ronnie Whelan's own goal for Liverpool against Manchester United and Jack Russell claiming a stumping victim off Gladstone Small.
Our favourites from last week's blog
1) The first ever snowmobile front flip at the Winter X-Games. But then there's the worst cross-country skiier ever. And for a cheap chuckle: balance ball + balance beam = inevitability.2) Returning FC Twente boss Steve McClaren v ghosts. Schpooky!
3) Novak Djokovic's Australian Open final win over Rafael Nadal was epic in every way possible, including the meanness on display when the victor attempted to offer his shirt to a young female fan afterwards.
4) The 25 best Argentinian attacking midfielders of the 1970s. Parts one, two and three.
5) The best basketball three-point own goal yet? Plus Kendrick Perkins gets posterized by slam-dunk merchant Blake Griffin, and quite possibly the worst NBA free throw ever.
6) André Villas-Boas (and a Special guest) in his first Chelsea TV inteview in 2005.
Spotters' badges: richardsmall, nidhogg, olenino, pexteballa, dotser.
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Six gymnasts, a knotted ribbon and one big headache for Olympic selectors | Owen Gibson
31 Janwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
The British women's rhythmic gymastics team are fighting their exclusion from the Games after apparent mix-up over rules
The consequences of a single knotted ribbon have spiralled into a wide-ranging debate about Team GB's selection policy for the 2012 Games and the degree of leeway that should be afforded to sports for which it may be a once-in-a-generation showcase.
The week after Britain's male artistic gymnastics team qualified for the Games in front of a packed crowd at the O2, the women's rhythmic gymnastics group narrowly missed out on qualification – thanks in part to that knotted ribbon – for a "home nation" place at the Games.
Despite narrowly failing to achieve the required score on the Tuesday of the competition, they easily attained the mark the following day. They appear to have believed they could achieve the score during any one of the three days, whereas the governing body British Gymnastics insists it was made clear that they had just one shot at reaching the score.
Quotes from the gymnasts on the Tuesday back up their version of events, with each appearing to believe they had one more shot at qualification. Given the high stakes, it would seem bizarre if no one at the governing body had noticed and taken them to one side to correct them.
Almost every sport qualifies for a home nation place at the Games (barring one or two such as basketball that are at the discretion of the international federation), allowing British representatives to take part in many sports for which they wouldn't normally qualify. Handball is the most oft-mentioned example but there are others, such as volleyball, who are looking to 2012 to provide a shop window for their sport in terms of elite ambitions and grassroots participation.
The British Olympic Association has laid down guidelines for each sport, insisting on not only a minimum level of performance but also for the governing body to demonstrate that it has a workable plan to develop the sport beyond 2012.
It says the rules are there to guard against athletes turning up to "get the T-shirt" but in the case of rhythmic gymnastics the BOA has not even been required to make a decision because British Gymnastics has not put the team forward for selection.
The team, largely self-funded, have lodged an appeal with British Gymnastics and have launched a petition calling on it to reconsider.
Most of the public would doubtless like to see Team GB enter as many athletes in as many sports as possible, but there are wider considerations, not least the cost of doing so and the potential effect on the team dynamic of having hundreds of athletes with no chance of a medal living alongside those who do.
In the curious case of the rhythmic gymnasts, it would seem harsh to exclude them given that they achieved the necessary qualifying mark under competition conditions. On the other hand, rules are rules. It would seem to be in the interests of both British Gymnastics and the BOA – not to mention the athletes and their families – to get to the bottom of just what the team were told as soon as possible.
Grey-Thompson relives Atlanta's roadblock shock
As if the hall in which we were gathered opposite the impressive remodelled St Pancras station wasn't cold enough, an extra shiver went through the room when Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson raised the "horrific" spectre of the 1996 Atlanta Games. The equivalent of mentioning the Scottish play in the company of luvvies, the reputation of that Games was blighted by the two big imponderables that make Games organisers come out in a cold sweat: a bomb attack and transport meltdown. Thompson recalled how some of her fellow competitors missed out on competing because buses got lost or delayed and that others were mired in gridlock.
The Vancouver Winter Games in 2010 suffered similar early adverse publicity before winning over the public and competitors alike. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson (who may or may not be mayor of London by the time of the opening ceremony) is merrily insisting that transport will be the 2012 dog that doesn't bark and that fears of gridlock will turn out to be this year's Millennium Bug scare.
But it will be another Millennium nightmare – that of the opening night of the Dome – that is keeping organisers awake at night. Much depends on commuters and spectators following the pleas from transport chiefs to change their habits and follow different routes, as dictated by a campaign that launched this week.
History suggests that most travellers will do so, but only after they've been burned once. Organisers, despite their determination to maintain Johnson's air of insouciance, will be desperately hoping that the day of the opening ceremony is not the one on which they all decide to ignore the warnings.
Cycling success just around the corner
The announcement of the British team for the UCI Track Cycling World Cup has ratcheted up anticipation for the event, which will be the first held in the Olympic velodrome and begins on 16 February. The venue – universally praised for its form and function by critics and competitors alike – will be one of the stars of the Games. But it is not the venue but the performance of the British team, so crucial to the goal of hitting fourth in the medal table and the mood of the nation, that will be under the microscope. The designers of the building hope the team's chances will be boosted by the fact that, unlike at most velodromes, there are seats all the way around the track – a design feature recommended by Sir Chris Hoy to enhance the effects of home support.
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London 2012: Beijing heroine Nicole Cooke facing life on the fringes | Richard Williams
31 Janwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
Nicole Cooke's propensity for solo glory may cost the gifted 28-year-old the chance to defend her Olympic title in London
All the talk is of whether the cyclist Mark Cavendish, the BBC's sports personality of the year, can get Britain's medal count going on the first day of the London Games with a victory in the Olympic road race. If he were to bring it off, it would be a wonderful moment for the Manxman and, in motivational terms, for the team as a whole. But it would only reproduce the achievement of Nicole Cooke in 2008, when the Welsh woman emerged out of the drizzle under the Great Wall of China to overpower her rivals in the final stretch and take a gritty win that kicked open the gate for a rush of medals.
Three and a half years after Beijing, and six months ahead of London, there is a nice little dilemma brewing up for Dave Brailsford, the head of British Cycling, and his performance manager, Shane Sutton. Will Cooke, the reigning Olympic champion, be given the chance to defend her title on home ground, or will she be asked to stand aside?
At 28, she should be in her prime. But although she followed the Olympic victory by winning the world championship a few weeks later, the last four years have not been consistently kind to her. She has found herself on the outside of British Cycling's charmed circle, a position underlined by her performance in the World Championships in Copenhagen last autumn, when she was heavily criticised for a lack of team spirit that, it was said, lay behind a failure to match Cavendish's historic success in the men's race the following day.
Cooke was one of seven British women riders in Denmark that day. The plan was for the team to work in support of Lizzie Armitstead, then 22 years old, a gifted Yorkshirewoman who had shown outstanding form throughout the season and was judged by the coaches to have the best chance of profiting from a bunch sprint. Among the other riders were Emma Pooley, Sharon Laws and Lucy Martin, then fellow members of Armitstead's trade team, Garmin‑Cervélo.
The riders did their jobs according to the schedule until towards the end of the last lap, when Armitstead found herself momentarily delayed behind a crash. Cooke, who had been delegated to lead her out for the final sprint, could not see her. Instead of waiting to locate the team leader, she launched her own sprint, finishing just out of the medals in fourth place. Without assistance, Armitstead recovered to cross the line in seventh position, which suggested that with the benefit of the planned assistance she might have achieved her ambition. Tears were shed in the team bus afterwards, and strong language was used back in the team's hotel later on.
That the dispute was not resolved by those exchanges became clear before Christmas, when Armitstead gave an interview to the monthly magazine Cycle Sport, in which she pulled no punches when asked a couple of blunt questions. How did Nicole ride? "For herself." How often does Nicole work for other Great Britain team-mates? "I've never seen her work for a team-mate."
It needs to be remembered that unlike Armitstead, who is a product of British Cycling's Olympic Podium Programme and honed her skills – as did Cavendish – with the superb track team, Cooke became a professional bike racer at a time when Britain had very little going for it, certainly nothing like the beautifully oiled development machine available to today's talented teenagers. She was offered a chance to join up, but balked when told that she would have to conform to a regime which insisted on participation in the track programme. She wanted to be a road cyclist, and didn't see the point of spending most of her time in the velodrome. That decision revealed a rift which not even an Olympic gold medal and a world title have managed to close.
Cooke is an independent soul. She turned pro at 19, joining a team in Italy and learning to speak the language in order to be able to function effectively. But she sometimes makes terrible career decisions, and perhaps her rejection of British Cycling's proposal was the first of them. In recent years she has flitted from team to team, seldom spending more than a season with any of them, wasting a year on an abortive attempt to start her own outfit and never building profitable relationships with fellow riders.
There is an obvious contrast with Armitstead, Pooley, Laws and Martin, who learned at the end of the year that the Garmin-Cervélo women's team was being disbanded. At the beginning of January it was announced that all four of them will race this year for a Dutch team, AA Drink-Leontien, an arrangement that will delight British Cycling's coaches since it keeps them working together all season, strengthening the sort of bonds that could pay off on the Mall in July.
Cyclists like to spend the European winter putting the miles into their legs in warmer climates, and at the moment Cooke is in Australia, where she sprinted to a win in the recent Noosa Grand Prix in Queensland. In Britain in six months' time, however, she may find herself out in the cold, unable to defend on home territory the title she won so proudly and dramatically in a distant land. She won so proudly and dramatically – and, she may care to remember, with the help of Pooley and Laws – in a distant land.
richard.williams@ guardian.co.uk twitter.com/@ rwilliams1947
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Hurdler Andy Turner's tendon injury raises Olympic concerns
29 Janwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
• European champion requires injection after Glasgow flop
• 'He's 31 and 31-year-old hurdlers don't have great achilles'Six months out from the Olympics, Andy Turner is in the one place no athlete wants to be – hospital. On Monday morning Turner will go for a scan on his right achilles tendon, and will then, if the prognosis allows, have a cortisone injection to try to ease the pain that he has been feeling for the past two months.
Turner, the European and Commonwealth 110m hurdles champion and world bronze medallist, had a terrible time in the 60m hurdles at the Aviva International in Glasgow on Saturday. He was slow out of the blocks and finished last in 7.74sec, 0.22sec off his personal best. He limped off the track and looked a forlorn figure amid all the excitement of the opening event of the Olympic year.
The performance attracted a barrage of abuse on Twitter. He was accused of faking an injury, told he should be ashamed of himself, and that his lottery funding had made him "too comfortable". Turner refuted the insults, saying: "I always try to do my best and do not fake injuries … I'm the first to admit if I just ran shit so please keep your opinions to yourself."
Turner suffered from a similar problem last year but found that it was fixed by a cortisone injection. He had one before this race but it obviously failed to do the trick. "It's the same thing that was bothering me last year," Turner said. "It's been killing me every time I run and when I land off a hurdle I can really feel it."
He is unsure about whether he will be able to run again in the indoor season, which culminates in the world championships in Istanbul between 9 and 11 March. "After Glasgow, I'm unsure what I'm doing as yet. The World Indoors aren't directly on my horizons at the moment – I'd rather finish indoors early and prepare myself for outdoors."
Charles van Commenee, played down concerns over Turner's fitness. "Andy Turner has had an achilles problem since 2004. It's nothing new," Great Britain's head coach said. "He's in pain 60-70% of the time throughout the year. It's a case of managing the problem. It's not the end of the world. We're in January. There's time for him to come back from this. He's 31 and 31-year-old hurdlers don't have great achilles."
Turner spent the winter training in Florida with the USA's David Oliver, who won the 110m hurdles bronze medal at the Beijing Olympics. "I'm in decent shape despite this," Turner said. "I'll run a few minor races over the next few weeks to test where I am then I'm due to go on warm-weather training from early March, which will be when I begin to see things coming together ahead of a pretty important date I've got at an event in London at the beginning of August." Despite his optimism, you guess he will not be sleeping easy given what is at stake.
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Super League ready to keep on trucking with some eye-catching changes
29 Janwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
With new sponsorship, a new stadium at St Helens and a rebranded London Broncos, Super League is going places
Visibility has been rugby league's biggest problem since well before the switch to a summer Super League season in 1996, and the clash with the London Olympics – an unavoidable and unwinnable issue for all other sports that are operating this July and August – presented the threat of the code's lowest profile yet. But on Wednesday the faces of some of the game's leading players will become more familiar to anyone who has the misfortune to spend a large chunk of their time on UK motorways, as a fleet of Eddie Stobart lorries rumble along the M62 from their Widnes base to Old Trafford to launch a controversial new sponsorship deal, and the 17th Super League season.
Anyone stuck behind a smiling Sam Tomkins or Kevin Sinfield might briefly wonder if this is a strange new form of fuel protest, and Castleford are so short of players they might consider asking the former Great Britain prop Dean "Diesel" Sampson to come out of retirement. But the Super League clubs who voted 9-5 to accept the Stobart deal, which does not involve any hard cash, ahead of an alternative offer from Betfair coming in at around £750,000 per year should be congratulated for having the vision to allow the sport to enjoy a rare spell on the moral high ground.
The winter's major controversy – Hull's cover-up of a positive drug test for the former Great Britain centre Martin Gleeson last season – provided a reminder of Gleeson's previous spell in the headlines and the dangers of aligning too closely with the sports-betting business. Gleeson and Sean Long, the mostly lovable rogue who has made an intriguing switch from poacher to gamekeeper by joining the coaching staff at Salford – literally in his case, as he used to make night raids on the fields of south-west Lancashire as a lad, looking for rabbits with his father – used Stan James rather than Betfair when they bet against their own St Helens team in a game at Bradford on Easter Monday 2001.
By choosing Stobart over Betfair, the clubs have gained access to marketing exposure worth up to £2.5m per year, according to professional experts, in exchange for less than £50,000 each in cash – the cost of a jobbing overseas player. There are plenty of those around already, with the usual bunch of unlikely and undistinguished imports joining the clubs who have tended to occupy Super League's lower reaches as they scramble to strengthen their squads sufficiently to challenge for a play-off place.
But there are some attractive additions, too, especially at the top end of the table, as fears that the growing financial strength of the National Rugby League and the Australian dollar would prevent any high-calibre overseas signings have so far proved alarmist, with nine former NRL Grand Finalists on the move.
Warrington, who finished top of the table, for the first time, in 2011 only to be denied a first Grand Final appearance by Leeds, have signed Trent Waterhouse, a tall ball-playing forward who played five times for Australia, and 12 for New South Wales. St Helens, for whom the pain of a fifth consecutive Grand Final defeat last autumn has given way to excitement about a new era in their stylish new Langtree Park stadium – complete with a halo-shaped roof – have bolstered their backs with the experienced New Zealander Lance Hohaia, and their pack with the tough Australian Anthony Laffranchi. They should be the early pacesetters, despite the loss of their irreplaceable captain James Graham to the Canterbury Bulldogs in Sydney, with Warrington, Wigan, the champions, Leeds, and possibly the Catalan Dragons the most likely challengers as the season goes on.
Even battling Wakefield Trinity have signed Steve Southern, a nuggety second-row from Newcastle Knights although his Grand Final appearance came with the North Queensland Cowboys back in 2005. Southern and Trinity will open the Stobart Super League at the Stobart Stadium in Widnes on Friday night as the Cheshire club, who have been backed for a while by the pukka truckers, have been awarded the first televised fixture of Sky's new five-year deal to mark their return to the elite after a six-year absence.
But the most eye-catching recruitment has been carried out further south. London Broncos have not only been rebranded, after six seasons as Harlequins, but also refinanced, and their dozen new signings include five former NRL Grand Finalists – Michael Robertson and Shane Rodney, who were both members of the Manly team who beat Hohaia's New Zealand Warriors last September, plus Antonio Kaufusi, Mark Bryant and most intriguingly Craig Gower, an Australia tourist as far back as 1997 who returns to league after four years in rugby union in which he won 13 caps for Italy.
The reborn Broncos take on Saints at The Stoop next Saturday afternoon in one of the highlights of the opening round.
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Jason Kenny beats Chris Hoy in lastest twist of epic sprint duel
28 Janwww.guardian.co.uk - sport
• Lapse of concentration by Hoy allows Kenny to snatch victory
• Hoy exacts revenge with emphatic win in keirinThe battle for the single match sprint slot in the Great Britain Olympic team has been a tight contest between Sir Chris Hoy and Jason Kenny for the last two and a half years, and it took another couple of twists on Saturday. First, Kenny, silver-medallist to Hoy in Beijing, overcame the Scot in the semi-final of the sprint here, after which Hoy rode a dominant keirin motorpaced race with his British rival on his heels.
In the match sprint, Hoy had qualified fastest in a rapid 10.099 for the 250m – a time that delighted him, given the slow atmospheric conditions in the velodrome – and he overcame the talented Frenchman Mickaël Bourgain and the up and coming Briton Philip Hindes in the first round.
Kenny, however, is something of a bete noire for the triple Beijing gold medallist, having beaten Hoy to take the national championship in 2010, although he could manage only bronze last year. He is also now the defending world sprint champion, having been elevated from the silver medal slot after the title holder Gregory Baugé of France was stripped of gold. He went on to take a 2-0 victory over the European keirin champion, Matt Crampton, in the final.
On Saturday, however, although the Great Britain sprinters are in heavy training – Hoy said he has been doing one interval session this week that left him in "a hell of a state" – the semi-final was where the psychological points were to be scored. Hoy versus Kenny was a repeat of their encounter at the world sprint championship in March, albeit in a single round rather than best of three .
Again Kenny ran out the winner, taking advantage of a moment's loss of attention by the Olympic champion a lap and a half from the finish. Hoy gave the Lancastrian a couple of metres lead too many as they played cat and mouse, and Kenny pounced, opening a gap of five bike lengths, with Hoy unable to close him down before the line.
Kenny had been disappointed with his qualifying time – he feels his form is not consistent from one day to the next – so he was not going to miss the opportunity of putting one over the Olympic champion. "It wasn't body language or a plan or anything, it's down to the gap. When he left a gap that size, I know how fast I can accelerate and the chances were he was on a gear as big as me if not bigger. It's all about the first 20 metres, just getting as far ahead as possible."
Even the delight of an emphatic keirin win could not prevent Hoy expressing his disappointment with his tactical lapse. "It's annoying, I felt sharp, I did a good time trial. I want to stop making these mistakes. I don't struggle as much in the keirin, it's a clearer approach to it and I'm more confident. You can't say in the sprint I have difficulty but tactically it's more of a challenge. Jason wasn't going that well but he always races well."
With Hoy, Kenny and Crampton topping the bill along with Bourgain, a multiple medallist for France in major championships, the final meeting of this winter's Revolution series was a sell out, with the atmosphere electric, as Hoy roared to victory in the keirin, turning on the power in the final lap.
It all bodes well for the final round of the World Cup series, in London in February, which doubles as an Olympic test event for the new velodrome in Stratford, and where the sparring between Hoy and Kenny will take on far greater significance.
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