Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Sports

In the late 1980s, a spectacular three-year-old female racehorse named Winning Colors was being groomed for success under her famous Hollywood trainer D. Wayne Lukas and the billionaire owner of the San Diego Chargers pro-football team Eugene Klein. Meanwhile, three fun-loving gamblers Miami Paul, Dino Mateo, and Big Bernie believed that Winning Colors could be the unlikely female winner of the 1988 Kentucky Derby.

When Lanfranco ‘Frankie’ Dettori arrived on British shores in 1985, aged just 14, he couldn’t speak a word of English. Having left school just a year earlier, he was eager to become a stable boy and apprentice jockey, following in the footsteps of his father. This was his first, but certainly not his last, leap of faith. Despite his slight size, Frankie’s impact upon the British racing scene was immediate and significant.

Aikau's legendary life and legacy, a pipeline into the exhilarating world of surfing, and an important chronicle of the Hawaiian Renaissance and the emergence of modern Hawaii. In the 1970s, a decade before bumper stickers and T-shirts bearing the phrase Eddie Would Go began popping up all over the Hawaiian islands and throughout the surfing world, Eddie Aikau was proving what it meant to be a "waterman."

In this superb and authorised portrait of Räikkönen, Kari Hotakainen gets to reveal the side of the man that few beyond his close family and friends have ever seen. Enigmatic and private, Ferrari’s former world champion driver rarely opens up to outsiders, but he granted Hotakainen exclusive access to his world and to his way of thinking. It ensures that this will be a book that will delight all fans of motorsport who have long revered the Finn.

By age twenty, at the height of the Jazz Age, Trudy Ederle was the most accomplished swimmer in the world. She’d won Olympic gold and set a host of world records. But the greatest challenge remained: the English Channel. Only a few swimmers, none of them women, had ever made the treacherous twenty-one mile crossing. Trudy’s failed first attempt seemed to confirm what many naysayers believed: No woman could possibly accomplish such a thing. In 1926, Ederle proved them wrong.

For years Geraint Thomas appeared blessed with extraordinary talent but jinxed at the greatest bike race in the world: twice an Olympic gold medallist on the track, Commonwealth champion, yet at the Tour de France a victim of crashes, bad luck and his willingness to sacrifice himself for his teammates. In the summer of 2018, that curse was blown away in spectacular fashion - from the cobbles of the north and the iconic mountain climbs of the Alps to the brutal slopes of the Pyrenees and, finally, the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

What’s it take to overcome the odds and change the game? That’s at the heart of the warm and revealing conversations between epic NBA sharpshooters—and father and son—Dell and Stephen Curry in their Audible Original Heat Check. While Dell laid the groundwork, Stephen later delivered a whole new era of jaw-dropping three-pointers from a time previously dominated by flying dunks. In these episodes, we hear how Stephen experienced his life’s journey and how Dell saw it play out.

Fed up with teenage life in the suburbs, Jaimal Yogis ran off to Hawaii with little more than a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and enough cash for a surfboard. His journey is a coming-of-age saga that takes him from communes to monasteries, from the warm Pacific to the icy New York shore. Equal parts spiritual memoir and surfer's tale, this is a chronicle of finding meditative focus in the barrel of a wave and eternal truth in the great, salty blue.

For the Anfield faithful, Jamie Carragher represents everything that is great about Liverpool Football Club, prompting the Kop to sing 'we all dream of a team of Carraghers'. The club's vice-captain, longest-serving player and one of a select band of players to have made more than 500 appearances for the Reds, Carra never gives less than 100 per cent for the cause. He is the embodiment of old-fashioned football values - a rarity in the modern game - honest and uncompromising. The Liverpool defender takes us deep into the heart of Anfield.

Johan Cruyff is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in football history. Throughout his playing career, he was synonymous with Total Football, a style of play in which every player could play in any position on the pitch. Today his philosophy lives on in teams across Europe, from Barcelona to Bayern Munich, and players from Lionel Messi to Cesc Fabrecas.

ECW was one extreme contradiction piled on top of another. It was an incredibly influential company in the world of professional wrestling during the 1990s, yet it was never profitable. It portrayed itself as the ultimate in anti-authority rebellion, but its leadership was, at various points, working covertly with the two wrestling giants, the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling. Most of all, it blurred the line between real life and the fantasy world of professional wrestling like no other company before it.

When we first meet the young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story, he is one of 13 children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school. And he has no serious experience playing organized football.

In this follow-up to Billy's first international best seller, an autobiography set largely in Thailand's infamous prison system, Billy sets out to explore his experience of childhood abuse that would lead to a life of drug addiction and near-constant incarceration. After Billy's sentence in Klong Prem prison was commuted as a result of his extraordinary success as a Muay Thai boxer, he returned to the UK. In this vividly told story, Liverpudlian Billy contrasts his first-hand experience of one of the cruellest prison systems in the world with his experience of UK prisons.

Journey with Olympian Ryan Hall as he reflects on the joys and trials of the running life and, along the way, shows you how his faith has helped him win in his workouts, races, and overall mindset. Ryan Hall is an Olympic athlete and American record holder in the half marathon (59:43). But as a kid, Ryan hated running. He wanted nothing to do with the sport until one day, he felt compelled to run the 15 miles around his neighborhood lake. He was hooked.

On 15 February 2008, Mark Beaumont pedalled through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. 194 days and 17 hours previously, he had begun his attempt to circumnavigate the world in record time. Mark smashed the Guinness World Record by an astonishing 81 days. He had travelled more than 18,000 miles on his own through some of the harshest conditions one man and his bicycle can endure, camping wild at night and suffering from constant ailments.

On Valentine's day 2004, Marco Pantani was found dead in a cheap hotel. It defied belief: Pantani, having won the rare double of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France in 1998, was regarded as the only cyclist capable of challenging Lance Armstrong's dominance. Only later did it emerge that Pantani had been addicted to cocaine since 1999. Drawing on his personal encounters with Pantani, as well as exclusive access to his psychoanalysts, and interviews with his family and friends, Matt Rendell has produced the definitive account of an iconic sporting figure.

Millions of us increasingly seek happiness in fads and self-help books, reaching upward every day toward some enlightened state that we wish to attain. Surfing icon Laird Hamilton is more intent on looking inward and appreciating the brilliant creatures we already are. In Liferider, Laird uses five key pillars - Death & Fear, Heart, Body, Soul, and Everything Is Connected - to illustrate his unique worldview and life practices. This is Laird Hamilton in his own words - raw, honest, and unvarnished - on topics he has rarely explored before.

As the winner of the 2010 Ironman Championship in Kona, Hawaii, Chris "Macca" McCormack may be the world's greatest athlete. In I'm Here to Win, McCormack shares his story along with training tips and practical advice to help listeners develop their own routines, diet, exercise programs and race strategies. Chris McCormack has dedicated his life to training for - and winning - the Ironman World Championships, one of the most grueling tests of mental and physical endurance in the world.

In the decade since his mega-selling memoir I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, he has played at Paris Saint-Germain (2012-2016), Manchester United (2016-2018), LA Galaxy (2018-2019) and Milan (2020-). This outrageous and hilarious follow-up is bursting with personal confessions and revealing anecdotes about the world's best players and managers. Packed with revelations, in Adrenaline, we hear for the first time what Zlatan really thinks about his time in the Premier League and what it was like to score that glorious bicycle kick against England.

Known to bodybuilders young and old as The Golden Eagle, the man Arnold Schwarzenegger personally passed the "bodybuilding torch" to, and commonly acknowledged as the most intense bodybuilder who ever trained - a living legend who forged the best legs to ever adorn a bodybuilding stage -Tom never wanted a "normal" life. The dedication and devotion to his calling started when he was barely 10 years old, and propelled him on a trajectory that led to bodybuilding's stratosphere, and beyond - to the top of the world of the social and business elite.