The southern hemisphere rugby group SANZAR (South Africa, New Zealand and Australian Rugby) has rejected proposals for a new Twenty20-style competition planned for South Africa.

The concept was conceived by former Springbok Rassie Erasmus, and is an attempt to mirror the success of the hugely popular Twenty20 cricket format. It would have seen shorter matches with amended rules to increase excitement.

SANZAR chief executive Steve Tew said: “SANZAR’s representatives met with promoters of the competition so as to better understand what was envisaged and because we are always open to any ideas that might help promote rugby in our three countries.

“We were told we would then receive a formal proposal and this has not happened. However, having considered the concept and the way in which it has been developed, SANZAR has decided it has no interest in any further discussion of the proposed competition.

“We do not see any benefits for SANZAR and we have also expressed our strong disappointment to those involved that approaches were made to players in the SANZAR countries without the courtesy of informing the SANZAR member unions in advance.”

World Snooker has unveiled ‘Power Snooker’ a new Twenty20-style shortened format of the game, with the first competition due to take place at London’s O2 Arena in October.

Featuring eight players, the competition will be a one day-event with each match lasting just 30 minutes, the winner being the highest points scorer.

The new format has been devised by Rod Gunner, and endorsed by World Snooker chief executive Barry Hearn.

Ronnie O’Sullivan has already confirmed his attendance, with Neil Robertson, Ding Junhui, Mark Selby, Ali Carter, Shaun Murphy, Luca Brecel and Jimmy White being lined up to participate.

Gunner, who created the new format, said: “It had struck me for some time that the game of snooker needed a new and exciting transfusion.

“Having seen how Twenty20 cricket has revitalised that sport, I am delighted to have come up with the concept of Power Snooker and seen the positive reaction from within the game.”

O’Sullivan added his typically unique support for the format, saying: “To be honest I find the World Championship quite a bore. I’ve won it three times, but 17 days in Sheffield is draining. People just want to pitch up and play.

“This is the future of snooker. It is just that a few people have got to get their heads around it. We are not stuck in the 1970s anymore.”

Five countries have expressed their interest in hosting the 2015 AIBA World Boxing Championships.

Qatar, ailment Russia, there Thailand, viagra cheap Vanuata and the Venezuela will now prepare their bid document for 15 May before presenting it to the AIBA Executive Committee in July. Based on these presentations, the AIBA EC will then make a decision on the host country.

The 2015 AIBA World Boxing Championships will be an Olympic Qualifying Competition with the World Champion in each of the ten AIBA weight categories directly qualified for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

Stand-in Chairman of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Coordination Commission for the Nanjing 2014 Summer Youth Olympic Games, Lambis Nikolaou, praised the Chinese city following the Commission’s inspection visit.

“We are delighted to see the progress made by NYOGOC with just under two years to go,” Nikolaou said.

“The operational planning stage is a critical phase in which they start to turn their vision into reality.”

“The support from both central and regional Governments and local partners is very positive and together they are on the right track to delivering a successful second Youth Olympic Games.”

The Commission inspected all areas of the organisation for the event and visited key construction sites, such as the Olympic Village, which will become a housing facility, school and kindergarten after the Games.

The Commission also visited the site of the Youth Olympic Sports Park, one of the only sports venues to be built from scratch for the Games.

The Sports Park will host hockey, BMX, rugby and beach volleyball during the Youth Olympics before being transformed into a community sports facility after the Games.

Venue planning is also close to completion with 26 competition venues now confirmed.

The volunteer recruitment process for the event is also under way with an estimated 20,000 volunteers ready to offer their services.

Nanjing 2014 will be the second edition of the Summer Youth Olympics after Singapore hosted the first in 2010.{jcomments on}

Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. (MLSE) has chosen Dalet Sports Factory as the end-to-end Media Asset Management (MAM) platform for all content related to its in-house production and television broadcasts for its professional sports teams that include the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Toronto Maple Leafs, symptoms National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Toronto Raptors, Major League Soccer’s (MLS) Toronto FC, and the American Hockey League’s (AHL) Toronto Marlies.

Dalet Sports Factory combines a robust MAM platform and workflow engine with built-in Dalet tools that streamline sports production from ingest and logging through broadcasting and archiving. The Dalet MAM content catalog manages media, essence files and metadata across different systems in the organization, storing and tracking contextual sets of associated multimedia of all kinds along with metadata, including time-coded locators. The catalog provides ultimate flexibility with easily customizable metadata schemes to satisfy every type of sports and media organization and make assets available across the entire enterprise – using Dalet tools or existing/new third party business/broadcast systems.

The first phase of the project at MLSE’s Broadcast Centre in Toronto will involve aggregating years worth of existing metadata and critical information from legacy records of the four teams into the centralized Dalet MAM catalog.

“We have a tremendous amount of very valuable and historic content,” said Chris Hebb, Senior Vice President of Content for MLSE. “Over the years we’ve attempted to manage the content through a document system, but it has been a siloed process, making it difficult to search and find content when we need it. Dalet’s system will centralize our content and organize it in a meaningful way that makes it accessible and easy to distribute across multiple platforms.”

“MLSE owns some incredibly high-profile franchises and we’re excited to be working with them as they generate more exciting programming for their loyal fans,” says Frederic Roux, Director of Sales, Dalet, US. “We hear all the time about how ‘just the right clip’ can add depth and dimension to sports coverage. Remote crews, in particular, complain about how cumbersome it can be to locate previous game footage for game coverage or half-time shows. With Sports Factory, it is far easier to bring those clips into live or post production. Assets are fully searchable from the centralized catalog; all it takes is a simple browser to search, find and then preview the clip, whether you’re at Air Canada Centre or in a remote truck. The clip can be pushed to an NLE for fast turnarounds. When content is more accessible, it’s more valuable.”

There are indications that Brazil’s Maracana Stadium, one of the stadiums scheduled to be used for the 2014 World Cup has been heavily over-priced after a two month analysis of the project.

After the court audit, Rio de Janeiro state officials had to reduce the project’s budget in $60 million on the arenas’ final budget. The project cost, therefore, has changed from US$ 602 million to US$ 540 million.

The project was bided, in June 2010, for $443 million, but right after that, the budget bumped up to $602 million due to the arena’s coverage cost, that needed to be demolished.

During the consolidation process and documentation delivery to the court, Rio de Janeiro state government had already altered the project’s budget to $586 million, $16 million reduction. Despite that, the court aided by the Union General Controller (CGU) still found traces of overpricing, about US$ 103 million, on the project’s financial budget.

According to the federal court’s process official, Mr. Valmir Campelo, there has been an intense negotiation process with the state’s technical department in order to get the budget reduced $540 million. With that in place, there is no other additional barrier for the state to receive the promised federal loans ($252 million) granted by BNDES Bank (Federal) for the Maracana’s renovation project.

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Mohamed Bin Hammam, banned Asian soccer president has launched an appeal against his lifetime ban by FIFA but said he did not expect to win his case just yet due to the bias against him.

The 62-year-old Qatari was given a lifetime ban from soccer by the world governing body last month after being found guilty of bribing Caribbean officials during his bid to oust incumbent FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

In a statement on his personal blog, the former Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president said that he had appealed after FIFA released the motivated decisions of the Ethics Committee, who banned him, last week.

“I have submitted my case to the FIFA Appeals Committee, not hoping for justice to prevail but as a protocol to enable me to obtain access to the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS),” the Qatari said.

“After all, the panel from the Appeals Committee is decided by my opponent and in this case, as previously, the judge is the rival. Therefore, I should not exaggerate hope for a fair decision.

“Going through the motivated decisions, we found them to be deeply flawed and raises grave doubts on whether any decision-making body of FIFA has sufficient independence to ensure a fair decision based solely on evidences and applicable laws.

“Based on our experiences, we expect the appeal process and decision to take approximately two months, not because this time is necessarily needed but more due to FIFA’s tactical games and abuse of power, as evident throughout this case.”

Acting president AFC president Zhang Jilong of China, last month said after their executive committee meeting in Kuala Lumpur that they would not be able to replace Bin Hammam until after May 30.

The Rugby World Cup 2011 has been appointed its official market intelligence agency, physician IFM Sports Marketing Surveys (IFM SMS) by the International Rugby Board (IRB).

IFM SMS will provide all the official figures for the event on global media audiences and sponsor exposure, medstore and the consumer impact of the event in the major rugby-playing nations.

In line with other major events, IFM SMS will work in close collaboration with the rights holding broadcasters and independent auditing agencies to assess the dedicated live, highlights & repeat programming audiences for the event across multi-media channels, including digital platforms such as online and mobile viewership.

The IRB is the latest in a string of new business wins for IFM SMS which also recently secured deals with the Solheim Cup and the FA of Wales.