I went through this looking for my daughter's camera a couple of years ago, ended up with a canon A520 4MP. OK its obsolete now, but the buying parameters look similar, and if anything the market looks like it has less options.
I reckon sports/action needs a real optical viewfinder, and that's getting hard to find, most have only rear screens or fake electronic viewfinders. The electronic screens (both rear and viewfinder type) can have noticeable delay, not good if trying to track anything, and they can blank out while shooting for quite some time, some don't give an option on switching off the last shot display too, so trying to run a series of shots of action could become seriously troublesome.
I have only seen Canons in shops recently (looking in the sub 150 bracket) with a combination of proper optical viewfinders, decent quality and availability of manual, aperture and shutter priority controls. Have a look at the Canon Powershot range.
Most other point & shoots appear to be concentrating on taking the user control away and making sure they're small, trendy and available in pretty colours.
The canon has been very good for action shots, if a bit limited on maximum zoom, but additional lens adapters can be obtained for many of the powershots giving extended zoom range. I quite like the little A520, this was done with it (albeit cropped hard to get a decent size), one of a sequence of the Norton rotary at Mallory Festival of 1000 bikes:
if it can track nortons at 100mph, then I think its got the performance you're interested in.
