Team Sky will target stage wins for the rest of the Tour de France as their Tour leader Bradley Wiggins recovers from a broken collarbone and prepares for a possible assault on the world championships at the end of the season, the team said.

Asked where Wiggins’s departure on Friday leaves him, Geraint Thomas said simply “off the front”, meaning that he will be looking for a chance to get in any escapes.

“It would be a shame to go under the radar, get our heads down for a few days,” said Thomas. “The days when there will be breakaways will go soon, it’s the next few days, so we have to turn it round right away and race hard. If Bradley was still here we would be doing a job for him, but now we have a chance to get up the road.”

When asked what he had told the team after Wiggins’s return to Britain, Sky’s team principal Dave Brailsford said: “I said to the guys this is an opportunity for them.”

“The likes of Geraint and Edvald Boasson Hagen were going to commit themselves totally to Brad, now they have an opportunity to ride with free will, with abandon, looking for stage victories. We need to see what development opportunities there are, what people can learn for their careers in the longer-term.”

Wiggins was flown out of a military airport near Châteauroux on a private flight to Manchester on Friday night. The flight left late, meaning that it was not possible to operate on his broken left collarbone, but the operation was expected to take place on Saturday.

The fracture is clean, and while a plate will remain in place for up to two years, most cyclists with similar injuries may resume training on a home trainer after five days, returning to the road after 10 days.

There is speculation that Wiggins may race the Tour of Spain in order to prepare for the world road time-trial championship in Denmark at the end of September. The Vuelta starts on 20 August and there is speculation that a possible comeback race for the triple Olympic gold medallist could be the Tour of Denmark from 3-7 August.

“I’d fully endorse [Sky' senior sports director] Sean Yates’s thoughts on Brad riding at least one grand tour this season,” said head coach Shane Sutton, who has been responsible for Wiggins’s preparation this season together with the former Australian swimming coach Tim Kerrison. Wiggins was expected to race the Tour of Britain from 11-18 September but would have to miss it if he opted for the Tour of Spain.

Sutton said that much of the team’s racing programme for the end of the season would have to be re-evaluated in the light of Wiggins’s withdrawal from the Tour.

“I would like him to consider the Vuelta, not just riding it but being competitive. We need to see how Brad feels about it. He’s well up for the world time-trial and off the back of what he has done this year, 10 days off the road isn’t going to be a lot.”

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This article titled “Team Sky riders to be let loose as Bradley Wiggins undergoes surgery” was written by William Fotheringham at Super-Besse Sancy, for The Guardian on Saturday 9th July 2011 10.10 UTC

Team Sky riders to be let loose as Bradley Wiggins undergoes surgery is a post from: worldwormweb

They list the following new and expanded offerings:
Showtime Greats will be dropped in favour of Showtime genre channels covering action, premiere, comedy and drama. With action and comedy appearing in High Definition.  The Movie Network will add Starpics, and the Family Movie Channel (FMC) with Starpics and Movie One going HD.

On the sports front Fox Sports 1 and 2 will be HD, no word on the previously mentioned Eurosport just yet.

Fox8 and W will also go HD, other new Standard Definition channels include Nation Geographic Wild, Lifestyle You, The Style Network, Discovery’s Turbo Max, Kids CC, 13th Street and Sky News Local.

Sci-Fi, Turbo Max and Lifestyle you will get time shifted along with 5 other as yet un-named channels.

The article goes on to claim that Sport and Movies are the focus, however with only the addition of Fox Sports 2 to HD I can’t see how they claim that. Movies and Lifestyle would appear to be the main focus to me.

The channels mentioned in the article only account for 29, though some are just HD versions of current channels, new channels. This leaves 1 yet to be revealed channel. What will it be? Could it be Eurosport?

November seems a reasonable time frame for the launch of the new channels as the new satellite was only launched last Saturday, 22nd August.

Of course Foxtel have refused to comment according to the article , but as the article was published by 25% owner of Foxtel, News Limited, it is either true or a really good smokescreen. The fact it tallies with a survey sent out by Foxtel in late June, it would be a safe bet most if not all of these channels will appear.

You can read the full article here.

News Limited confirm Foxtel plans is a post from: worldwormweb

The Australian clocked one minute 32.230 to finish ahead of Brawn GP’s Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button.  Sebastian Vettel was fourth in the second Red Bull as the unpredictable weather made for a thrilling afternoon.  The improving McLaren of Lewis Hamilton will start fifth, equalling his best qualifying performance of the season.

Read More at BBC.co.uk

Webber secures maiden pole position in Germany is a post from: worldwormweb

The spots ended with Budweiser expressing second thoughts: “You do the football; we’ll do the beer.”

Now an American cable broadcaster, ESPN, is poised to “do the football” in Britain. Last month, ESPN bought the rights to show live English Premier League matches, picking them up after the British arm of Setanta, an Irish pay-TV company, collapsed. So is it time for British soccer fans to prepare for “soccertainment” when the new season begins in mid-August?

Not to worry, said Russell Wolff, managing director of ESPN International.

“We have a deep football culture within our company,” he said. “We have football fans, professionals and aficionados. We’re going to build on that experience.”

With channels in more than a hundred countries, ESPN already shows a lot of soccer. But the new agreement is different, highlighting ESPN’s push to broaden itself from an American powerhouse into a force in international sports broadcasting.

Televising Premier League matches in Asia, as ESPN does in a venture with the News Corporation, is one thing; showing matches in Britain is quite another. Imagine, for example, if the BBC were to acquire the rights to Major League Baseball games in the United States.

“It’s a big step forward for our business,” Mr. Wolff said. “We are looking to make our channels ever more locally relevant and exciting for sports fans around the world.”

ESPN, which is majority-owned by the Walt Disney Company, is already available in more than 200 million households outside the United States, twice its potential American audience. But in many international markets, particularly in Europe, it attracts only small audiences.

ESPN has tried to break into the big leagues of European soccer before, bidding unsuccessfully for domestic rights to the German Bundesliga last year. ESPN also tried three years ago to acquire English Premier League rights, but lost out to Setanta.

Setanta got its opening because European regulators objected to a long-running exclusive relationship between the league and British Sky Broadcasting, which is controlled by News Corporation. Sky has retained a majority of the matches since then, but Setanta won the rights to broadcast 46 games a season, one-third of the total, from 2007 through the 2009-10 season. Those games will now be taken over by ESPN, along with 23 matches in each of the next three seasons.

ESPN declined to say how much it had paid, though reports in Britain put the price at about £240 million, or $392 million, for the four seasons.

Analysts say ESPN’s move to acquire the Premier League rights could set up a battle between ESPN and Sky when negotiations for the next round of domestic rights agreements take place in 2012. Backed by Disney, they say, ESPN might try to wrest a larger share of the rights away from Sky.

“I think this could change the sport broadcasting landscape,” said Simon Chadwick, professor of sports business strategy at Coventry University. “Up until now, it has been a bilateral landscape.”

For now, Sky and ESPN play down talk of conflict, adding that the companies have already reached an agreement to show the ESPN games via Sky’s satellite system. “We look forward to working with ESPN to bring their Premier League coverage to Sky customers,” said Robert Fraser, a Sky spokesman.

Mr. Wolff said that with just six weeks to go until the season begins, ESPN was focusing on getting broadcast crews and announcers in place, as well as securing rights to other events to round out ESPN’s programming in Britain.

ESPN already has two channels there, one of which shows reruns of classic sports events. The other has mostly imported sports like baseball, basketball, hockey and American football. It will probably be combined with the Premier League matches and other events on a new premium-price channel, analysts say.

Can ESPN succeed where Setanta failed? Backed by Disney and the Hearst Corporation, which owns 20 percent of ESPN, the company does not have to worry about paying the bills month to month, which Setanta was unable to do. Analysts say Setanta also overpaid for sports rights, while ESPN has a reputation for being more conservative in its spending.

But ESPN will have to make its mark quickly, analysts say, because it will have fewer games after the coming season.

“If they haven’t established the coverage with the Premier League next season, then they are going to have a lot of ground to cover,” said Tim Westcott, an analyst at Screen Digest, a research company in London.

As Mr. Wolff noted, ESPN has considerable experience with international sports. It used to own 33 percent of Eurosport, a pan-European channel controlled by the French broadcaster TF1, but sold that in 2002. It showed World Cup soccer matches in Brazil in 2006 and broadcasts top cricket events in India. It produces SportsCenter, a sports news show, in 14 versions for audiences around the world.

ESPN also owns Web sites with global appeal, like Cricinfo, which is about cricket; Scrum, which covers rugby; and Racing Live, about Formula 1 auto racing.

Still, few sports fans are as demanding, or as tribal in their passions, as followers of Premier League soccer. American involvement in the game has been a sore subject at clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool, where fans objected to takeovers by American owners.

In a reference to ESPN’s controlling owner, Disney, the tabloid The Daily Mail joked that the broadcaster might try to rename the F.A. Cup, a venerable English soccer tournament, the “Mickey Mouse Cup.”

With everything related to ESPN’s coverage of the Premier League, from camera angles to analyst comments, likely to be scrutinized for signs of a hidden agenda of Disneyfication, Mr. Chadwick had some advice for ESPN: “There is a strong sense of counterculture in English football. They can’t be too glitzy, they can’t be too showbiz, they can’t be too American.”

Fans in Britain Cringe as ESPN Takes Over Broadcasting Soccer is a post from: worldwormweb

The re-broadcast of ONE HD’s content will be allocated channel number 531 when it is played out to Foxtel cable subscribers.

ONE SD will be grouped with the sports genre channels. ONE HD has already been available to cable viewers with High Definition channels.

For satellite subscribers the situation is less clear, due once again, to awaiting space on an Optus satellite due to go up later in the year.

By David Knox on June 27, 2009 at http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2009/06/one-sd-coming-to-foxtel-cable.html

ONE SD coming to Foxtel cable is a post from: worldwormweb

The threat by members of the F1 Teams Association (Fota) escalates their row with world motorsport boss Max Mosley over his budget cap proposals.

“The teams have declined to alter their original conditional entries to the 2010 F1 Championship,” said the teams.

“We’ve no alternative than to commence preparation for a new championship.”

Mosley was insistent on introducing a voluntary £40m budget cap for teams to curtail a “financial arms race” in F1.

But Fota refused to agree to his conditions, prompting championship leader Brawn GP, Ferrari, McLaren, Renault, Toyota, BMW Sauber, Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso to take their drastic action.

They announced their decision following a four-hour meeting on Thursday night ahead of this weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Read more @ bbc.co.uk

BBC SPORT | F1 teams drop breakaway bombshell is a post from: worldwormweb