Giacomo Perini, who originally won bronze in men’s PR1 single sculls, were found to be using communication equipment during the final and has been excluded from the event (ranked dead last)
Oksana Zubkovska just won her 5th consecutive gold in women's long jump at the age of 41. She's just fenomenal woman, who tried to convince doctors that she is healthy at her junior age.
It might have some advantages, I get that, but it doesn't take away the fact that you simply can't make a remotely fair league standing when teams don't all play each other. There's no way you can compare team A and B on number of points gained when they didn't play the same teams (and/or each other)...
I'm as traditional and anti-Super League as anyone you can get, but i'm optimistic about the new format.
For one it's still totally opposite of what the Super League wants to be. We don't have a closed league with 30+ matches in a season and you also depend on the domestic leagues to qualify.
Also, as good as the old group stage format was, the last few years it became very double sided in my view. In the 2000s and early 2010s it was much more interesting, when the teams were more equal in strength and surprises happened. But in the past few years, with all the money involved the gap is widening between the elite 10 teams and the rest.
And we usually got 2-3 really strong groups, where some teams got screwed and then we had 5 rather easy groups, with the big teams there had a cruise to the knockout stage, where after 3 matches it was virtually known what the final standing will be.
Now in the new format, where the knockout bracket is fixed by the positions in the league, there will be intrigue till the end i reckon. Plus with only 1 match between teams, there is a higher chance for a smaller team to upset a bigger one. If you have Man City - Sparta in 2 matches, you definitely know City are winning at minimum 1 of them. But in only 1 round, if they miss to beat Sparta, then lose to team 2 and have another draw with a smaller team, then their position in the table is affected much more serious.
I also really like, that after the league phase, we don't get teams dropping to the lower competitions. I have enough of teams like Barcelona or Man Utd phoning and moaning, when they drop to the Europa League. If you don't make the knockouts you are out, done..
The one thing i definitely don't like about the switch is that they gave 2 of the extra spots again to the top Nations with this bogus "best country coef. in a year" spot. They should have given them to the Q nations. The top 5 leagues have enough teams already.
Lill was well on her way to silver, had a small but 'annoying' fall and just seemed to be kind of broken from then on, with first Terpstra catching her and at the end Berta doing the same
Yeah, Friday I was just trying to stay on my feet, quite a fever, feeling super cold and bloody hot at the same time, dizzy and so on, watched Aline's heat before stepping back into bed and didn't really care about watching anything else that day
Luckily it's a lot better now, so I can enjoy the day more or less as normal.