Eurosport - Tue, 10 Feb 08:42:00 2009

Norway’s Aksel Lund Svindal held his nerve to master a treacherous slalom course and win the super-combined gold medal at the World Championships.

Svindal posted the fastest time in the downhill section and managed to reach the bottom of a slalom run in which many favourites stumbled to clock a combined winning time of two minutes 23 seconds.

France’s Julien Lizeroux, in 22nd position after the downhill, thrilled the home fans with a remarkable comeback, clocking the best slalom time to win silver 0.90 seconds back.

Croatia’s Natko Zrncic-Dim took the bronze, 1.58 seconds behind the winner, after a tricky slalom staged under floodlights with snow falling hard on this French Alps resort.

The 26-year-old Svindal, who won bronze in the super-G here last week, crowned a sparkling comeback after being seriously injured in a downhill crash at Beaver Creek in December 2007.

The Norwegian all-rounder stunned the skiing world by winning a downhill and a super-G on the same Beaver Creek piste a year after his accident but had not expected to do so well.

“I came here to progressively get back to my best level but I really wasn’t thinking about winning a title,” he said.

“It was tough because Lizeroux put a lot of pressure on me with a sensational slalom run.”

Continued here

STE. ADELE, Que. — If a champion is defined in part by a thirst for rewarding experiences away from the competition, Jenn Heil fits the bill.

The reigning Olympic freestyle skiing moguls champion spent most of last year away from international competition to rehabilitate an injury and reconstruct her skiing technique. But she also took advantage of an opportunity to travel to West Africa in support of equal rights for young girls.

The journey for the 25-year-old Spruce Grove, Alta., native, who now calls Montreal home, was with Plan Canada and its Because I’m a Girl campaign. It took Heil to a remote desert village in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world. The majority of the population there lives in tiny adobe houses and spends most of the day tending to crops, for which they travel great distances to find the water needed to grow them.

Continued

Transport chaos hit London as children built snowmen in gardens, schools were closed and postal workers skied down high streets during the British capital’s biggest snowfall in decades.

The usual noise of peak-hour traffic and the hum of the city succumbed to a magical quiet as the British capital disappeared under a mantle of pristine powdery snow and airports were closed and train and bus services were halted.

Huge tracts of Britain slowed down but London was the hardest hit as the snow kept falling. A total of 30 centimetres was expected in the next 24 hours.

Most flights at London’s Heathrow airport were grounded after one jet slid off a taxiway.

A Cyprus Airways plane with 104 passengers came off the icy taxiway at Heathrow, the world’s busiest international airport, airport operator BAA said. No injuries were reported.

Continued

London Snow February 2009 video