Golf and health club operator Crown Sports announced four major acquisitions. The group has acquired Axis, a health and fitness club owner, for £8.94m, which brought four clubs and 9,800 additional members into the group. The board also revealed the £3.4m acquisition of Fitness Express, bringing in a further 14 clubs with over 15,000 members. Two other deals created a new Products division within Crown. 'The Winning Line', 70% of which Crown bought for £2.03m, provides horse racing information to subscribers and the syndication and management of racehorse ownership for customers. Only last week Crown announced the £8m acquisition of sports and leisure publishing business 'Information Australia' and revealed that Olympic gold medallist Sally Gunnell will promote a range of healthy living publications with the group. At 30 June 2000, the group was known as Golf Club Holdings and was listed on Aim. Six months later, the company had changed its name to Crown Sports and moved to the full list in February. It only bought Dragons Health Clubs on 29 December and so the full year figures are meaningless and almost entirely reflect the old Golf Club Holdings structure. Pro forma figures showed a pre-tax profit of £1.8m on sales of £19.7m.