, known more commonly known as heli-skiing is skiing in specially selected places far less effort and equipment needed for skiing in these areas. Access to these areas is not a lift, but a helicopter.

On the way to the heli

. Heliskiing is one not of this world experience for fans of extreme skiing So if you are an expert who is comfortable in the back country roads and difficult to manage with confidence, go ahead and book a heli-ski trip, it becomes an unforgettable experience you will never forget.

With this success, free agency has produced a flurry of spending. As the only major winter sport enjoying labor peace, owners were eager to spend to produce a winning team come October. The signing period opened on July 1 and most top names were claimed within days. Here’s a look at five of the most intriguing signings.

Tomas Vokoun, G, Washington, 1 year, $1.5 million: Statistics reveal the 35 year old is one of the best goalies in the game. But he has languished for the past four years on a bad Panthers team. Though Florida attempted to retain him, Vokoun wanted the chance to win and took a discounted deal. The Caps got a steal. Look for Vokoun to supplant fellow Czech Michal Neuvirth as Washington’s top net-minder.

Michael Ryder, RW, Dallas, 2 years, $7 million: Losing Richards, the Stars added some much cheaper firepower in stealing the forward from the Stanley Cup champion Bruins. Ryder is a consistent goal scorer, who has tallied 30 goals twice in his seven year career. He also stays healthy and appears to be entering his prime.

Erik Cole, LW, Montreal, 4 years $18 million: Cole spent most of his nine year career with Carolina, where he won a Stanley Cup in 2006. The veteran is a reliable scorer and coming off a 26 goal campaign. Cole is also a physical presence, delivering 225 hits last year. The left wing hails from nearby upstate New York and will be reunited with Team USA mates Brian Gionta and Scott Gomez. All signs point towards a solid pickup for Montreal.

Brad Richards, C, NY Rangers, 9 years, $60 million: Not surprisingly, the Rangers landed the top prize on the market and spent the most to get him. Richie is a great leader, who is also a former Stanley Cup champion and Conn Smythe Playoff MVP. It remains to be seen how he will do with the pressure of this contract in the Big Apple.

Sean Bergenheim, LW, Florida, 4 years, $11 million: The 27 year-old former first round pick is loaded with potential. He displayed it in the 2011 playoffs, scoring 9 goals during Tampa Bay’s semi-final run. However, Bergenheim was inconsistent during his stint with the Lightning and fizzled out in five seasons with the Islanders. The four year deal is high risk, high reward for the rival Panthers, who completely retooled their roster.

Sources:

Yahoo! Sports, Espn.com, Nhl.com, Nesn.com

More by Jeff Briscoe from Yahoo! Contributor Network:

Three considerations on Yao Ming’s NBA retirement

Jeff Briscoe is a freelance writer from Florida who covers sports for the Yahoo! Contributor Network and the ECHL’s Florida Everblades for the Miami Examiner.

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[Reporter : Song Ji-sun
song@arirang.co.kr] “People can enjoy ice climbing in any season of the year, but it is important to be equipped with all the essential instruments.”

Avid ice climbers from their 20s up to their sixties come here to reach the summit, especially in summer when the rest of the city is overheated.

[Interview : Lee Yong-dae, President
Kolon Alpine School] “This is possibly the best way to get away in the summer as we keep the ice frozen at minus 10 degrees.”

[Interview : Park Young-mi, Seoul resident] “Unlike rock climbing, I can create my own route in ice climbing.
It gives me a great feeling of achievement.”

Now switching to another winter sport of a slightly larger scale.
This indoor slope sits in the city of Bucheon, just 20 kilometers west of Seoul.
The 270-meter slope even offers a rail and kickers for snowboarders and a mogul course for freestyle skiers.
And since these riders couldn’t wait until Christmas they chose to polish their spins in July.

[Interview : Mark Backhurst, New Zealander] “Well, it’s pretty awesome to come here when it’s over 30 degrees outside.
I love snowboarding, so being able to do so in the summer time is really great.”

Even if you are not into extreme riding, you can still enjoy the slide.. as this side of the slope caters to those who are less aggressive and prefer sledding.
Children can enjoy the snow just as much as the riders do.
It seems the season is not an issue to winter sports enthusiasts here in Korea.
Song Ji-sun, Arirang News.

JUL 20, 2011

 
Reporter : song@arirang.co.kr
 

Koreas 4-man bobsleigh team led by Kang Kwang-bae, right, competes in the World Cup in Igles, Austria in the 2009-10 season. / Korea Times file
By Yoon Chul

PyeongChang is a small largely unknown town in Gangwon Province. When it first announced its bid to host the Winter Olympics, most foreigners confused it with Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

Thats why the bid committee capitalized the C, in order so the name is not confused.

Now, thanks to Jacque Rogges announcement on, the Korean winter sports center aims to become one of the best in Asia.

When I competed in other countries, many foreign skaters asked why didnt Korea host the Winter Games, Korean speed skating legend Lee Kyou-hyuk told The Korea Times.

Now posterity and some Asians can benefit in their training thanks to the new facilities (that will be built).

Lee probably couldnt have said it better because not only Koreans but also other Asians may be favored with Koreas new Winter Olympic town.

Koreans wont have to train overseas during the winter season when the pledged facilities are completed. Korea will revamp seven existing facilities and build six new ones in time for the Winter Games.

Now I expect to train on home soil with the right facilities, Korean freestyle skier Seo Jung-hwa said.

Those competing in snowboarding, freestyle, skiing and sledding events will be able to remain in their home country for training.

Japans Nagano, host of the 1998 Winter Olympics, and PyeongChang will both have facilities for top-class sledding competitions once a venue is built in Korea by 2017. This could attract world cup events to Asia.

We will try to host the bobsleigh world cup. And we will open a bobsleigh school to spread the sport throughout the world, especially in Asia, said Kang Kwang-bae a former Korean international bobsledder and current vice president of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (FIBT).

The Korean government and the Korean Olympic Committee (KOC) has secured about $500 million for the Drive the Dream program and part of the money will be used to promote winter sports in Asia.

It is the first of the pledges that the PyeongChang Winter Games Bid Committee gave IOC members and the committee and government have kept their word over the last 12 years.

The swift action and the readiness to commit to their promises is a sign that Korea and PyeongChang are serious about making the 2018 Winter Games a success.

At the time of the Nagano Games, Japan was restrained by economic factors and not able to fully invest in winter sports.

But now, the scale of the economy in Asia has expanded and more countries are looking to become challengers in winter sports.

The other advantage that PyeongChang will have is its better accessibility for athletes as they move from their accommodation to the venues. The aim is for visiting teams to be able to reach all the venues within a 30 minute drive, making it easy for them to manage their schedules. The bid committee has already pledged to build a bullet train linking Incheon International Airport, Seoul and PyeongChang, shortening the travel time to the Olympic town to under 70 minutes.

PyeongChang was only known in Korea before winning the right to hold the Games but now the name is poised to spread across the world.

With better circumstance I will challenge to become an international ski jumper. And I will stand at the top in the world renown city PyeongChang in the 2018 Winter Olympics, said Korean ski jumper, Kim Hyun-ki.

Jeff Pain spent his Olympic career sliding down sheets of ice with his body as close to the floor as possible. But now the former skeleton competitor will be helping Canada’s women ski jumpers fly high at the Sochi winter games.

Ski Jumping Canada hired Jeff Pain as its high performance director Wednesday. With women ski jumpers winning a battle to be included in Sochi earlier this year, Pain will help shape Canada’s first Olympic team in the sport as part of his duties.

With a budget of $300,000, the Olympic silver medallist who was famous for competing with the “angry beaver” helmet, said he will waste no time using his own experiences in “ramping up” every aspect of the program.

“It’s just taking the next step of coming from an amateur sport into a professional sport and thinking of themselves as professional athletes now,” said Pain. “Making that jump from ‘this is a fun thing I can do’ to ‘this is my job.”‘

Pain knows it will not be easy to reach the Olympic podium in a sport dominated by Europeans. The current world champion is Austrian Daniela Iraschko, 27, and the runner up, a fresh-faced 16-year-old Coline Mattel of France.

Pain is placing a lot of faith in a youth movement, with Calgary teenagers Charlotte Mitchell and Taylor Henrich expected to do well.

“There’s a huge window of opportunity,” Pain said. “If we can keep these girls in the sport longer then we can really move the program forward.”

In the past, many of the Canadian women ski jumpers would quit after high school since the sport wasn’t a part of the Olympics.

Now, with ski jumping’s inclusion on the Olympic roster, Pain hopes the sport will gain exposure and additional funding on top of the initial $300,000.

“If you look at my budget there’s definitely more money needed,” he said. “Much like in skeleton, we had some results, we had world champion Ryan Davenport, we had myself, then we got Olympic medals and it grew from there … it’s the chicken and egg thing.”

Ken Read, Director of Winter Sport for Own the Podium, said that it’s a relatively short time line and what appears to be a ‘modest budget’ to expect podium results, but medals are possible.

Using the success of the ski cross program as an example, he says that the first step is to identify podium potential, establish direction and build the resources from there.

With ski jumping and nordic combined comprising ten per cent of the overall medal count at the Olympics, the inclusion of the women’s event may mean more than just a victory in equality. By putting these athletes on the Olympic podium, Canada’s shot at topping the medal table at the Games increases substantially.

“We saw that there were 90 plus medals sitting there and Canada was winning none of them,” Read said. “That represents nearly 40 per cent of the Olympic program. If we have an overall goal of trying to finish first we can’t simply walk away from such a large group of sports.

“If we end up just focusing on what we call the ‘low hanging fruit’, the (sports) that we’re very competitive in or it’s going to be relatively easy to win medals, and shy away from ones that are hard, then we’re going to end up finding ourselves very limited.”

Winsport Canada has committed to upgrading facilities at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary, including relocating the chairlift closerto the jump and adding another one, improving drainage issues, creating a women’s locker room and a weight training area.

“Realistically we’re only here to do one thing, be the best in the world. If our athletes are going to compete somewhere in the world and our facilities aren’t the best in the world then we’ve let them down. Its just not fair,” said Winsport President Dan O’Neil.

“We’re here to help people win.”

© The Canadian Press, 2011

SpeakingUp

LAURA WALDEN / Sports Features Communications

TAMPA/ATLANTA, Jul 18: Terrence Burns, president of Helios Partners, takes time out to talk to SportsFeatures.com about the complex strategy behind Olympic bidding and the PyeongChang 2018 bid presentation.

Helios Partners developed the bid’s overall communications strategy and managed an extensive network of Olympic Games experts, drawing upon the team’s experience to create a winning bid.

They joined the bid in mid-2009 and ceo Yang Ho Cho commented about their input, “Helios has outstanding success helping cities bidding for major international sporting events. Their expertise and know-how were crucial to our selection.

“Our technical bid was strong, but Helios helped make the difference by creating and managing our brand – ‘New Horizons’, key messages, presentations and providing overall strategic advice.”

Burns went into detail about painting the picture behind the mechanics of a home run bid.

How exactly do you work with potential bids to define the main compelling focus point of their message?

Terrence Burns: That’s a bit of a proprietary question to be honest but we do a lot of qualitative research, and some quantitative, to determine the strengths, weaknesses and perceptions of the city, the nation and the culture in question. 

We compare and contrast that with our competitors.  Those two parts are fairly easy.  The hard part is finding the unique selling proposition that is ALSO valuable to the IOC…then we turn that into a narrative for the bid. 

For example, it was fairly easy to determine the functional or hardware differences between PyeongChang, Munich and Annecy – the hard part is to determine the emotional or software differences – and then – to determine what if any of those are valuable to the IOC.  

We actually create a new brand for each bid city – separate and distinct from the touristic brand, if one exists.  A brand is truly the only thing one owns because it is based in emotional attributes – not functional ones; all else is duplicatable.

When Helios takes on a bid – how many parts of their image do you manage?

Terrence Burns: We have refined and evolved our approach over almost ten years of bidding; to be honest, we have to be the brand manager for the bid or it doesn’t work. 

The story, the graphical representation, the key messages, the presentations – all of it we have to impact and manage in order to be most effective. 

We work closely with the communications and PR teams to ensure consistency of message and continuity of the brand promise’s context.  We work closely with the IR team on messaging to hear and learn if our message is breaking through to the Olympic Movement and how effective – or not – it is so that we can make adjustments. 

For PyeongChang we were told early on that we were focusing too much on Asia, so we broadened our messaging to “new regions”.  It seemed to have worked.

What do you think was the key component to this PyeongChang 2018 bid that you were able to utilize to the best advantage? What made this one so different from the other two?

Terrence Burns: We gave them the story of “New Horizons”…we gave the IOC a reason to believe in this bid that was not based on “peace between North and South Korea” because frankly, that message from the 2010 and 2014 bids was nonsensical to most IOC members. 

It’s that simple – we said “here is what we can do for you and for the Olympic Movement that our competitors cannot do”.  And we stuck to that message all the way to Durban.  It was powerful.  It was durable and in the end, it was irrefutable. 

We have been told that our final presentation picked up between 6-10 votes…but, who really knows?  I can say it was the first time I have had multiple IOC members tell me “that presentation moved me.”  And I’ve done a lot of presentations.

Now that PyeongChang has won the Games, how do you see their New Horizons message and branding being expanded througout the actual Games graphics and merchandising?

Terrence Burns: The bid phase is distinct from the OCOG phases in that they both have two different missions…thus, the positioning for PyeongChang 2018 OCOG should be an evolution of New Horizons – not a repetition of it.  Now they have to “put meat on the bones” and give life to the rhetoric and lofty statements we made in the bid. 

This means refining “New Horizons” to something else but with a similar, broader reaching meaning for the Movement and it means taking that understanding of “who we are” and developing a new set of visual identity and imaging for the OCOG.

The IOC has chosen to branch out to the first South American Games with Rio 2016, and is now opening the winter sports market for Asia with PyeongChang 2018. Do you think they will go for a more traditionally established bid or do you think they will once again go to a new area?

Terrence Burns: I think that continental rotation is an old fashion notion.  I think that the IOC’s process is so thorough that now, once a city gets into the finals, it’s anyone’s race to win – or lose. 

The city that wins now is the city that can touch the hearts of the IOC membership with a message that is inspiring yet at the same time answers the very real needs of the Olympic Movement.   

Like we wrote in PyeongChang’s Durban presentation – “this isn’t a race about geography, it’s a race about dreams…it’s a race about human potential…” 

Whichever city can articulate that best wins.  If you have a great narrative, virtually any counter message that the competition tries to make, actually reinforces your message.  “New Horizons” was almost impervious to attack because of its simplicity – and its truth.

What advice would you give to cities considering a YOG bid?

Terrence Burns: The YOG is still in its infancy as an event…so I would challenge any city looking at hosting a YOG to be as creative as possible…The YOG is really a test-tube for the IOC; cities need to understand this and help the IOC define the future of the event itself not by looking at what went before, but by pushing the envelope in all areas – the sport program, the promotion and presentation of the YOG and most importantly take a sobering look at how, and if, it really impacts young people around the world. 

Right now, the only to measure that is via media consumption.

Keywords
· IOC
· Helios Partners
· Terrence Burns
· PyeongChang 2018

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by sportswriters Gao Peng, Sun Liping

SHANGHAI, July 17 (Xinhua) — A day after the 10th anniversay of his election as the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Jacques Rogge said on Sunday that he is not satisfied with his job over the past decade.

“I have the mentality of an athlete as I used to be an athlete. Athletes are never satisfied with their performance. You can always do better,” said Rogge, who competed in yachting in the 1968, 1972 and 1976 Olympics and played on the Belgian national rugby union team.

“There is, for me, an inner desire for perfection. Perfection is very difficult to get,” he said to Xinhua in an interview during his visit to Shanghai for the 14th FINA World Chamionships.

Rogge was elected on July 16, 2001, at the 112th IOC Session in Moscow and is the IOC’s eighth president after the 21-year leadership of Juan Antonio Samaranch who passed away last year.

“I would say the worst day was when the Georgen luge athlete (Nodar Kumaritashvili) died in Vancouver. This is the worst moment in my Olympic life,” said Rogge.

After taking over the IOC he has strived to keep the Olympic Games at the pinnacle of world sport and to further enhance the value of the Olympic brand.

The Youth Olympic Games (YOG) were launched and Singapore successfully hosted the first summer edition in 2010 and Innsbruck, Austria is preparing to stage the first winter edition in February of 2012. Nanjing of China will host the second summer edition in 2014 utilizing the sports on the London 2012 program.

The IOC has decided to explore new areas by choosing Rio de Janeiro to host the first South American summer Games in 2016 and Russia is in the process of developing Sochi for the 2014 winter edition. PyeongChang was just elected for the 2018 winter Games and will undoutedly boost the development of winter sports in Asia.

Rogge said that the tremendous positive effects brought by the Olympic Games result in a growing global enthusiasm for hosting the world’s premier sport event.

“It allows not only the staging of great competition, but also it allows for the development of the city – new sport venues will be built, and there will be better transport and infrastructure, maybe a new airport, maybe new ring roads, so it is a legcy for the citizens of the city,” said the 69-year-old Belgian.

“It’s not just a competition of one or two weeks. It will leave a lasting legacy. Look at the changes after the Beijing Olympic Games, the people of Beijing are benefiting from that.”

With the 2008 Olympics still lingering in the memonies of millions of Chinese people, there are already speculations about the possibility of a second bid for the event.

“I think in future there is a possibiltiy, but you know, you just organized the Games in 2008, so if Shanghai has the ambition to stage the Games, you have the potential to do it, that’s not an issue, but time will be needed,” said Rogge.

“You can’t get two Olympic Games within a couple of years. There is a lot of competition with other countries around the world … Certain time will be needed, because we have to distribute the Games to the entire world, not just to one country,” added the IOC chief.

Rogge watched the men’s 10-meter platform synchronized final Sunday afternoon at the Oriental Sporst Center and he said that he was impressed by the atmosphere.

“I would say, from what I’ve seen now, these are definitely truly friendly championships, ” he said.