On a hot summer's day in 1998, when Dave Bidini found himself watching Martha Stewart rather than the Stanley Cup playoffs, he knew that something was seriously amiss: The game he loved had crossed the line. It was now an entertainment, not a sport. A passionate hockey fan and rec player, Bidini immediately resolved to follow Canada's best export to the rest of the world, to find out whether the true game still existed elsewhere.
His quest took him to a rink on the eighth floor of a shopping mall in Hong Kong-a rink encircled by a fierce dragon-headed roller coaster-to the gritty city of Harbin in Northern China, where a game much like hockey has been played for six hundred years; to Dubai, in the desert of the United Arab Emirates, where hockey is brand-new, and incredulous Bedouin drop by the Al Ain rink to wonder at the ice; and to Transylvania, where the game was introduced in the 1920s by a ten-second newsreel of Canadians chasing after a puck, and where it is now played as a vicarious war between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians.
In TROPIC OF HOCKEY, Bidini weaves hilarious stories of encounters with odd-sized rinks and players of wildly different talents and experiences with tales of his travels and spot-on observations about the game and players in North America. And he discovers that the tropic of hockey connects players and fans around the world in a celebration of the game-not to mention the profanity, the exhilaration, and the moments of grace that enrich it.

Harnessing nature's most powerful forces, elite downhillers descend icy, rugged slopes at speeds cresting 90 miles per hour. For decades, American skiers struggled to match their European counterparts, and until this century the US Ski Team could not claim a lasting foothold on the roof of the Alps, where the sport's legends are born. Then came a fledgling class of American racers that disrupted the Alpine racing world order. Led by Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso and Ted Ligety, this band of iconoclasts made a place for their country on some of the world's most prestigious race courses. Even as new technology amplified the sport's inherent danger, the US Ski Team learned how to win, and they changed downhill racing forever. The Fall Line is the story of how it all came together, a deeply reported reconstruction of ski racing's most dramatic season. Drawing on more than a decade of research and candid interviews with some of the sport's most elusive figures, award-winning journalist Nathaniel Vinton reveals the untold story of how skiers like Vonn and Miller, and their peers and rivals, fought for supremacy at the Olympic Winter Games. Here is an authoritative portrait of a group of men and women taking mortal risks in a bid for sporting glory. A white-knuckled tour through skiing's deep traditions and least-accessible locales, The Fall Line opens up the sexy, high-stakes world of downhill skiing-its career-ending crashes, million-dollar sponsorship deals, international intrigue, and showdowns with nature itself. With views from the starting gate, the finish line, and treacherous turns in between, The Fall Line delivers the adrenaline of one of the world's most beautiful and perilous sports alongside a panoramic view of skiing's past, present, and future.

The ancient, elegantly useful snowshoe has taken the outdoor sports scene by storm. With sales of snowshoes more than doubling every year this decade, snowshoeing rivals its trendy cousin snowboarding as the fastest growing winter sport in the United States.

In this indispensable guide, avid snowshoer Larry Olmsted enumerates the many reasons for snowshoeing's meteoric rise. Advances in design and construction-including quick-entry, high-performance bindings-have made snowshoes even easier and more enjoyable to use. Scores of enthusiasts are hitting groomed cross-country ski and snowmobile trails across the snowbelt, running on scaled-down versions of traditional 'shoes. Snowshoeing explains how to experience this recent evolution of the sport.

Even greater numbers of snowshoers come from the ranks of America's hikers and backpackers, who have discovered that wintertime can be the best time to hit the trail: no bugs, no mud, no crowds. And backcountry Alpine skiers and snowboarders climb to their summits on snowshoes, the most reliable, versatile mode of travel across snow.

No new use or technique is left untreated in this, the first guide to snowshoeing since snowshoeing has come of age.

Every year, a team of ex-National Hockey League players travels around North America playing hockey and raising money for charity. An intimate look at hockey greats like Dary! Sittler, Tiger Williams, and Bobby Hull. Known as the Legendary Heroes of Hockey, wherever they go, they sell out every game.

Once you begin trying out these games with a creative twist, you'll want to sharpen your skates and your wits! A hockey trivia maestro tests fans' knowledge and competitive instincts in a unique book composed of an entertaining assortment of crosswords, word jumbles, fill-in-the-blanks, and matching column puzzles. Which lucky team has the most famous, most powerful scoring lines? How many players were nicknamed The Rocket? How many fluid ounces does the Stanley Cup hold? Hockey buffs will find and love teasers like these. Each game in the book corresponds to one hockey game, and readers stickhandle their way through a regular-season round of easy to moderate difficulty--then advance to the playoff section!