From over 300 competitors Dereham TSKR took home three first-place trophies.

Iain Paterson was first in Junior Kata (Forms), Gaynor Wagg was first Senior Female Kata, Mario Moutinho first in Men’s Kumite (Sparring).

Hannah Coole, a first-timer to the competition scene, gained a well-deserved fifth place in Junior Kata, just missing out on a medal by a few points.

Traditional Shotokan Karate Ryu (TSKR) is under the instruction of national coach and examiner Terry Wittkopp 4th degree Black Belt.

He currently trains with the England squad, with some of the best competitors in the UK.

Wittkopp said: “I have been gaining some valuable experience whilst training with the squad and I always enjoy passing on the skills to TSKR members, and it seems to be paying off.

“I am very proud of them and they are well deserved trophies.”

Darren Webster 2nd Dan assistant coach, says that all students performed really well, considering most were on their first outing in competition and handled the pressure very well.

Competition improves confidence and they will improve each time they compete.

TSKR has some really good karate students and it is planned to channel these individuals into national and international events and possibly make the England squad.

TSKR have many more competitions coming up this year and hope to improve on their recent success with more silverware.

Dereham Club trains four times a week at the leisure centre, with additional sessions in Swaffham, Watton and Fakenham.

TSKR are currently looking for new members to join the clubs and are offering a free trial lesson at any of the clubs with a month’s free insurance.
Originally posted at the Dereham Times.

Following a decision of the Technical Synchronized Swimming Committee, a new competition session truly unique to this year’s Trophy has been added to the Program on Day 1 following the Duet Free event. A Thematic Duet, which will be performed to music reflecting the culture of the Host Country with a duration of 2 minutes plus/minus 15 seconds, will be presented. Exceptionally, the use of accessories in costuming will be allowed for this duet, as it has been specifically included to increase the beauty and creative appeal of the event for the benefit of the audience.

Teams from Canada, China, Egypt, Spain, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and Russia will take part in the 2008 World Trophy. In this group, we find all the medalists of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing (CHN). Russia, winner of the World Trophy in the first two editions (2006 in Moscow and 2007 in Rio de Janeiro) and Olympic champion in duet and team, is naturally the team ‘to beat’ in the Spanish capital, but taking into account that the competition does not reward for technical merit (in which the Russians are clearly above the rest of the field), this circumstance renders the final outcome more difficult to predict. Furthermore, and according to the latest entry list received from Russia, the stars Anastasia Ermakova/Anastasia Davydova (Olympic, World and European champions) will not swim in Madrid.

In Rio, in 2007, Spain was very close to securing the final victory (in fact, the overall ranking of the Trophy is done by adding the notes in each of the events), having won the team event. In the end, Russia triumphed with 296.333 against Spain’s 295.000. At home, Gemma Mengual and her teammates will certainly look for first place on the podium, after a quite successful Olympic Games, where they took the first medals ever for their country in this discipline – two silver.

Besides this European duel, the other two medaled teams in Beijing – Japan and China – will also try to display their best performances in Madrid. At the Olympics, Japan took the bronze in the duet, while China was third in the team.

The FINA World Trophy, streamed live on the FINA website www.fina.org, will distribute US$ 154,500 in prize money, distributed as follows: 1st place – US$ 50,000; 2nd place – US$ 30,000; 3rd place – US$ 20,000; 4th place – US$ 15,000; 5th place – US$ 12,500; 6th place – US$ 10,000; 7th place – US$ 9,000; 8th place – US$ 8,000

Originally posted by Swimmingworldmagazine.com

May 5 (Bloomberg) — Dressed in business garb on a steamy summer afternoon in the Hamptons, Philip Schwalb and Sameer Ahuja pitched their concept of a sports museum for the financial district in New York City to swimsuit-clad investors at the Surf Club of Quogue.

“We had absolutely no idea that we would be out at the beach and certainly were not dressed at all appropriately for it,” said Ahuja of that day in 2003 on New York’s Long Island. “It was a surreal experience.”

The $7 million in seed capital the pair raised from their beachfront pitch grew to $100 million in three years and gave birth to the 45,000-square-foot Sports Museum of America opening May 7 in John D. Rockefeller’s former Standard Oil Building, steps from the Charging Bull statue in Bowling Green Park near Wall Street.

In addition to individual investors’ cash, the museum is backed by $52 million in Liberty Bonds, the tax-exempt financing program created to foster economic development after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that destroyed the World Trade Center.

The museum, which will charge $27 for admission, is designed as a tourist attraction in a neighborhood still on the mend.

“People come down here and can see something tangible that we’ve created for lower Manhattan,” said Ahuja, 33, the for- profit museum’s chief financial officer. He predicted the site will attract 1 million visitors annually. “We stand as one of the significant tourism improvements and that’s really important.”

Brandi’s Bra

The Sports Museum’s 19 galleries display the American flag that was draped around Olympic hockey goaltender Jim Craig after the U.S. won the gold medal in 1980 and the sports bra that California soccer player Brandi Chastain bared after her penalty kick led the U.S. to victory over China in the 1999 Women’s World Cup final.

College football’s Heisman Trophy and its annual award ceremony will now be based at the museum. It is also the home of the Billie Jean King International Women’s Sports Center, the only Hall of Fame dedicated to females.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, are two of 62 partners of the museum, which will also feature items from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

The idea for the museum was born during a visit to the Basketball Hall of Fame on Sept. 10, 2001, when Schwalb, 45, was managing a holding company for the family of Caroline Kennedy and her husband, Edwin Schlossberg.

The excursion prompted Schwalb to conclude that sports museums are in hard-to-reach places and run as nonprofit institutions that are under-funded and difficult to market.

`Lying Dormant’

“The epiphany for me was that this was just a great business idea waiting to happen,” Schwalb said in an interview. “Sports, in my view, had been really tapped in terms of being a business, and I saw this one piece of it which was lying dormant.”

Following the next day’s terrorist attack, Schwalb sought to locate the museum near the destroyed World Trade Center to help the neighborhood rebuild. Placing it in lower Manhattan was first suggested by former Senator and New York Knicks basketball star Bill Bradley, Schwalb said.

He and Ahuja got the project off the ground with the networking skills of George Motz, mayor of Quogue, New York, and president and chief executive officer of the investment advisory firm Melhado, Flynn & Associates Inc.

Beach Pitch

For the pitch at the beach club, Motz assembled Brendan Ryan, chairman of Interpublic Group’s Foote Cone and Belding unit; Edward Horowitz, a former executive at Time Warner Inc.’s HBO, Viacom Inc. and Citigroup Inc. who is now a part-owner of the Tennis Channel; and Matthew Blank, chairman and chief executive officer of Showtime Networks Inc. All three agreed to invest.

Schwalb and Ahuja later tapped Robert Kapito, president of BlackRock Inc., and Michael Ryan, former chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co.’s Global Equity Capital Markets unit, who pitched the project to their Wall Street friends.

One hundred investors provided at least $250,000 apiece. The backers include Daniel Tully, Merrill’s retired chairman; BlackRock Chairman Laurence Fink; Goldman Sachs Group Inc. President Gary Cohn; and Robert Wolf, chairman of UBS Group Americas, according to the museum.

`The Sizzle’

“Very few of them invested because they were excited about the sizzle of sports,” Ahuja said. “Most of them put us through the wringer very, very extensively in terms of due diligence.”

Investors were united by a desire to support the financial district, said Ryan, the former Merrill executive who co-founded the closely held financial-services software company Ipreo LLC.

“They had worked in lower Manhattan and were upset after Sept. 11, and they all had either children that played sports or were themselves athletes — either real or imagined,” Ryan said.

While New York is building a memorial to those killed at the World Trade Center, the district will need other projects to bolster tourism, said Dan Doctoroff, the former New York deputy mayor who supported the museum’s bond financing. Doctoroff is president of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

Originally written by Mason Levinson, New York

Trophy News from ESPN

Kobe Bryant recently said he would rather win an Olympic gold medal than the NBA championship. Was he merely saying what was politically correct before the Olympics? Did he say it only because it sounds better than “I would rather win an Olympic gold medal than lose the NBA championship”? Or does an Olympic gold medal really mean more to him than a professional championship?

Only Kobe knows for sure but what about you? What sporting trophy means the most to you? Of all the things you could win in sports, which would you choose? A Super Bowl ring? The Masters green jacket? The Heisman Trophy? The Cy Young Award? A World Series? A Final Four? There are dozens upon dozens of championships and awards to win, but which would you most want to claim?

Here are a few quick caveats on my rankings:

The form of the award matters. Trophies top plaques, and the bigger the better. After all, you want the damn thing to look impressive in your trophy case.

Names count, too. Awards named in honor of a person (such as the Cy Young) just resonate more than those that, while prestigious, are named something boring and generic like the “MVP award.”

Durability counts. Generally, the longer the award has been around, the more it means.

Originally Written by Jim Caple for ESPN