France

Australian Rugby Union (ARU) officials are predicting a world record crowd of 109,000 for Saturday's Tri-nations rugby clash between Australia and New Zealand at Sydney's Olympic Stadium.

The French rugby union championship will be progressively reduced over the next two seasons to create a 16-team top flight - the sort of elite that national team coach Bernard Laporte has been calling for.

Sports.com has launched a new motor sport site ? Rally Arena ? and has enlisted the support of FIA World Rally Championship pace-setters Ford Racing as founding sponsor.

Euro 2000 organisers have freed up well over 50,000 tickets for this summer's championships and plan to sell them from Thursday.

Most players in this year's Euro 2000 tournament will have to pay 18 percent of their earnings in tax, tournament officials have announced.

The IOC has confirmed that ten cities have submitted preliminary bids for the 2008 Summer Games.

Rugby World Cup chiefs are unlikely to answer calls to shut the retractable roof on Cardiff's new Millennium Stadium for Saturday's World Cup final and stage the first indoor test unless the players' safety is threatened.

Glasgow Rangers and Celtic plan to lobby the Scottish Football Association and UEFA in order to create a second string European league that would effectively end the UEFA Cup.

The French Transport Ministry has urged air, rail and road haulage unions not to tarnish the image of France by carrying out their threat to strike during the forthcoming World Cup.

The Belarus Soccer Federation has unanimously rejected the resignation of its president, Yevgeny Shuntov, and he said he had agreed to stay on.

With the WorldCup kick off just a day away, a strike by pilots at flag carrier Air France dragged into its ninth day on Tuesday with little hope of a near-term settlement.

England will not be barred from the World Cup finals despite the behaviour of its hooligan fans, FIFA said on Monday.

Soccer's World Cup continues to pull major TV audiences, even in countries whose national teams are not involved in a particular match.

US network ABC scored a 6.9 rating in 40 major markets for its coverage of the World Cup final.

Riders in the Tour de France, which has been hit by the biggest doping scandal in cycling history, have denounced police raids on their hotels as "unacceptable".

Great Britain will stage the next rugby league World Cup in 2000, it was announced in Sydney. The newly-formed Rugby League International Federation (RLIF) has put in place a calendar of events covering the next three years.