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Brazil
Driver in coma after crash in Brazil


Brazilian driver Gustavo Sondermann has been seriously injured in a crash at a truck series race at Interlagos and is in a coma at the hospital.

The 29-year-old Sondermann apparently lost control of his truck in pouring rain at Interlagos on Sunday, spinning across the track at a high-speed corner. His truck was then hit hard at least three times by other drivers.

Doctors at Hospital Sao Luiz in Sao Paolo said in a statement that Sondermann sustained a head injury and went into cardiac arrest on the track before being transported to the hospital unconscious.

Other drivers were hurt in Sunday's crash, but their injuries were not life-threatening.

The race was suspended. Sondermann's former stock car teammate Rafael Sperafico died at the same location in a race in 2007.

Argentina

France Confronts Its Rugby Fears With Argentina

ONDON — In rugby union, as in much else, the French are different. Ask players from most leading rugby nations what the scariest possible opponents look like, and they’ll visualize the black shirts of the world’s perennial No. 1 team, New Zealand.

The French team at a practice session on Wednesday in Marcoussis, outside Paris.

For the French, though, the most frightening adversary wears blue and white horizontal stripes and speaks Spanish. Los Pumas of Argentina have been the recurring note in French nightmares over the past eight years, winning seven meetings out of nine over that time. France confronts its deepest fear again Saturday, when it plays Argentina in Montpellier.

It is a relationship summed up by the former national coach Bernard Laporte, who told L’Equipe newspaper in the past week, “I don’t have good memories of matches against them.”

This is hardly surprising. Laporte, who was coach from 1999 to 2007 before becoming, briefly, France’s sports minister, lost six out of seven to Argentina, including three shattering home defeats.

In 2004, Argentina became the first team to beat France in Marseille, winning 24-14 in a place New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and England had fallen in the previous four years.

Then in 2007, shattering defeats by the Pumas, whose name comes from a South African writer’s misidentification of the jaguarette on their badge, bookended France’s term as host of the World Cup. Argentina outfought and outthought France on a traumatic opening night for the host, winning more completely than the 17-12 scoreline suggested. In the third-place decider, Laporte’s last match in charge, Argentina devastated the French with the brilliantly fluent attacking rugby France regards as its own, winning 34-10.

What is remarkable about this is that France is the perennial superpower of Northern Hemisphere rugby, winner of five Six Nations championships in the past nine seasons. It won a Six Nations Grand Slam — beating all five opponents — earlier this year, then, in its next match, was hammered 41-13 in Buenos Aires.

Argentina is, by contrast, rugby’s great loose end, the strongest nation outside the game’s two great annual competitions — Europe’s Six Nations teams and the Southern Hemisphere’s Tri Nations teams, which it is scheduled to join in 2012. Its domestic rugby maintains the amateur traditions of the game’s past — Argentina was the one nation exempted when the Pugh report on amateurism, which paved the way to open professionalism, lacerated every other significant rugby nation for hypocrisy about payments to players in 1994.

This means Argentine rugby players must go abroad to make a living from their skills. Mostly they go to France, whose leading clubs are appreciative consumers of incoming talent.

Ten out of the 15 Argentine starters Saturday play their rugby in France. They include the center three-quarter Santiago Fernández, the only player on either side who plays for the host club of the Saturday match, Montpellier.

It means that where most teams visiting France find the experience fascinating but sometimes disconcerting, with differences in language and culture, the Argentines feel at home. They are also highly motivated. As Fabien Galthié, the highly intelligent former French national captain, who now coaches the Montpellier club, told L’Equipe this week: “To play France is like playing themselves. France’s players are their teammates and friends. They want their colleagues to regard them as good players, so they play with every fiber of their being.”

There are also similarities in style, according to Laporte, the former French national coach. “They love to battle and to scrap,” Laporte said. “They are very strong in the phases that we like most, for instance, the scrum. They have always had match-winning players and a way of playing that resembles ours.”

French players have been lining up this week to compliment the quality of their opponents.

“I could not have had better teachers,” Thomas Domingo, the prop forward who will play for the first time against the Argentine players Martín Scelzo and Mario Ledesma, his front-row teammates for France’s current club champion, Clermont Auvergne, told the Web site rugbyrama. “Above all they are intelligent players who think a great deal about how to improve their scrummaging. And they’re shrewd as well.”

At the same time, it is possible that Argentina is coming down from the peak of third place it achieved at the 2007 World Cup, with a group of players Laporte correctly called “an exceptional generation.”

Gifted young players like the fullback Martín Rodríguez Gurruchaga have emerged to play alongside veterans like Ledesma, 37, and the team’s captain, Felipe Contepomi, 33, who scored 31 points in Argentina’s 41-13 victory over France in Buenos Aires. But Laporte, previewing Saturday’s match, said he would worry much more if Argentina still had players like Agustín Pichot and Ignacio Corleto, two of the stars of 2007.

Argentina may also be about to lose familiarity with France. Admission to the Tri-Nations in 2012 is Argentina’s great opportunity, but also a huge challenge. Regular top-class international competition should give it a better chance to beat other teams but will also demand that players concentrate their efforts in the Southern Hemisphere. If that shift happens, French fans would miss Argentine stars at their clubs, but maybe not the edge that familiarity gives them in test matches against France.

Dominican Repeblic

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic

Investors from the United States believe they have found an exotic new prospect: Latin American baseball players, some as young as 13 and many from impoverished families.


Recognizing that major league teams are offering multimillion-dollar contracts to some teenage prospects, the investors are either financing upstart Dominican trainers, known as buscones, or building their own academies. In exchange, the investors are guaranteed significant returns — sometimes as much as 50 percent of their players’ bonuses — when they sign with major league teams. Agents in the United States typically receive 5 percent.

The investors include Brian Shapiro, a New York hedge fund manager who, along with Reggie Jackson, tried to buy the Oakland Athletics several years ago; Steve Swindal, the former general partner of the Yankees; Abel Guerra, a former White House official under President George W. Bush; and Hans Hertell, a former United States ambassador to the Dominican Republic.

Other, less prominent investors have had no previous connections to baseball or the Dominican Republic. Those investors include a real estate lawyer from New Jersey, a dentist from California and a computer salesman from upstate New York.

Educators and Major League Baseball officials worry because there is no oversight of the investors’ academies, and they question why the investors want to be part of a system that takes teenagers out of school and has been involved in scandals over steroid use and players lying about their ages.

“If the investment is benefiting the player in some way and improving his circumstances, providing, as I said, educational opportunities, etc., then it can be a good thing,” said Sandy Alderson, who oversaw the revamping of baseball’s operations in the Dominican Republic until he was named the Mets’ general manager last month. “But generally speaking, there is no assurance that is happening.”

At academies run by investors from the United States, the players are typically 13 to 19 years old and forgo formal schooling to train. Several of the players said they would return to school if they were not signed to a professional contract.

The conditions of the academies vary from less than desirable to impeccable — like the one run and financed by Mr. Swindal, Mr. Guerra and Mr. Hertell.

Gary Goodman, a real estate lawyer from Cranford, N.J., opened his academy with a former Dominican minor league player in 2009.

“Are we there to make a profit? Absolutely,” said Mr. Goodman, who, like many investors, wires thousands of dollars a month to feed, clothe, house and train the prospects, many who cannot read and do not attend school.

Mr. Goodman and several other investors said their money helped to improve the lives of prospects and their families. They also take a smaller percentage of the players’ contracts than other trainers typically do, they said.

Some of these investors have gained a foothold in the market by lending money directly to prospects’ families, who agree to repay the loans and give the investors a significant portion of the prospects’ signing bonuses.

These practices are worrisome for critics like David P. Fidler, a professor of international law at Indiana University.

“Buscones in the Dominican Republic are in the business of selling children,” he said. “And it’s very disturbing that American investors would come in to profit from a system that exploits and discriminates against young children.” An hour and a half by car from Santo Domingo, at the end of a dirt road in the town of Don Gregorio, a piece of the Dominican baseball system can be found in a small house surrounded by concrete walls and metal fences topped with shiny barbed wire. The entrances are locked.

Inside is a pensión, a dormitory for about a dozen prospects as young as 14. They are trained by California Sports Management of Sacramento, a firm run by the agent Greg J. Maroni and financed by his father, Greg G. Maroni, a dentist who owns several fast-food franchises.

Along with using the academy to produce teenage Dominican players they can represent, the younger Mr. Maroni represents Neftali Feliz, the Texas Rangers’ closer.

The dormitory, which was built in 2007, contains one large bedroom with bunk beds and a small bathroom with two showers. The barbed wire was installed a few months ago, after a player hopped the fence to look for girls in town, said Carlos Paulino, a Dominican trainer who runs the dormitory for California Sports Management.

Although one coach supervises the dormitory at night, two other prospects had gone over the fence earlier this year, Mr. Paulino said in September. “It’s to make sure they don’t get out,” he said.