BBC SPORT | Other Sports | US Sport | My kind of town: Denver



By Alex Trickett BBC Sport Online

The teams:

Baseball: Colorado Rockies
American Football: Broncos
Basketball: Nuggets
Ice Hockey: Colorado Avalanche

Denver's sport - like its Rocky Mountain weather - blows hot and cold.

Ray Bourque and the Avalanche celebrate their Stanley Cup win in Denver
Bourque and friends celebrate in Denver

From the dizzying heights of a Broncos Super Bowl or an Avalanche Stanley Cup has tended to follow a disastrous drop in local fortunes.

This fast-growing city's franchises are relatively young, with MLB's Rockies and the Avalanche only coming to town in the 1990s.

Sadly, basketball's Nuggets have already built up a reputation for being consistently poor, crashing to a woeful 87%-loss rate in 1997/98.

Venue:

Home to the Avalanche and the Nuggets, the Pepsi Center has seen good times and bad.

Camby is the Denver Nuggets new signing
Denver will be hoping Camby is a nugget

When 20,000 fans watched their ice hockey team win the Stanley Cup in 2001, there was barely a dry eye in the house.

Colorado sealed a comeback win over New Jersey in the deciding game, to finally land NHL legend Ray Bourque his first championship.

And Joe Sakic and goaltender Patrick Roy earned their plaudits as well, turning in truly dazzling displays at opposite ends of the ice.

Times have been leaner for fans of the NBA.

Feature: Bourque meets Stanley

Expectations are modest - as they have been for years - and Denver chiefs continue their desperate search for a "golden" nugget on whom to build the franchise.

Legend:

John Elway's right arm earned him a minor league contract with the New York Yankees, but baseball was not in this legend's sporting future.

John Elway in action for the Denver Broncos
Elway is Denver's number one sporting son

Instead, Elway turned his arm to American Football and became one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.

He spent 16 glorious years with the Denver Broncos, building a reputation as the NFL's fourth-quarter comeback king, and passed for 50,000 yards and 300 touchdowns.

But Elway's crowning glory came late in his career.

Just when it looked as though he - like his peer Dan Marino - was set to finish with no Super Bowl ring, two came along at once in the 1998 and 1999 season finales.

Elway's new direction

The coveted jewellery was just reward for a brilliant, hard-working talent.

Men about town:

The thin air in Mile High Stadium lends itself to impressive batting and Larry Walker and Todd Helton have taken full advantage.

Larry Walker has formed a formidable hitting partnership with Todd Helton
Walker: Big hitting star

The dynamic duo have averaged around the .330 mark for several years and they have driven the Rockies into contention in front of 80,000-plus crowds.

But, after finishing the 2002 regular season well off the pace, there is still much to be done.

These two will need the back-up of better pitching if the franchise is going to reach for the Rocky Mountain skies.


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