Sardinia sports news - yacht sailing, road rallying - and Premiership Football!

The Italian Mediterranean island of Sicily has featured prominently in the sports pages of the world’s press in a month when Wimbledon and the World Cup in South Africa dominated all the back (and often the front) pages in the UK.

From May 22 to June 6 the sparkling inshore waters around this most scenic of islands in the heart of the Mediterranean hosted sailing’s Louis Vuitton Trophy La Maddalena. The most famous participants were the BMW OR ACLE Racing team who had taken the America’s Cup trophy to San Francisco, competing against teams from Italy, Sweden, Russia, France, New Zealand and Britain. Emirates Team New Zealand won the cup, beating the Russian team into second place. The Kiwis had won the previous LVT sailing contest, the Louis Vuitton Trophy Auckland, in February.

This little island with just over 1.5 million inhabitants is a favourite destination for sports and leisure sailors. It has more than its fair share of super yachts passing through its marinas, including many luxury charter yachts featured by UK sailing specialists such as Dream Marine. The yachting elite are drawn to Corsica by the superb beaches, including Spiaggia del Principe, said to be a favourite of the Aga Khan. He built the marina village of Porto Cervo as a retreat for the international jet-set in the 1960s and it is still home to one of the most exclusive assemblies of mega yachts in the world, rivalling Monaco and Cap D’Antibes.

Apart from the sailing, Corsica in June has also been in the sports news for two road racing events. The third event in the motorcycle Raids World Championships was won by Marc Coma on his KTM EXC 530, undaunted by the muddy tracks created by unseasonal heavy rain. In the fifth round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge, Juho Hänninen and Mikko Markkula in the Škoda emerged victorious, but after a high-speed crash, British driver Guy Wilks was airlifted to hospital with two broken vertebrae.

Finally, Premiership football stories twice hit the headlines in Sardinia this month. The  first came at the beginning of June when the former Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez, on holiday in Sardinia, revealed he was departing from the club. More transfer news came to light a couple of days ago as Chelsea star Michael Ballack, also holidaying in Sardinia with his family (after injury had cruelly deprived him of the captaincy of the German world Cup squad) announced he would be leaving Stamford Bridge, and retruning to his former club, Bayer Leverkusen.