Monzanator

The problem with the old combined was it was skewed heavily into slalom speciallists for a while and the speed guys just threw in the towel. The whole alping skiing has turned into event speciallism except for guys at the very top (and the current #1 Odermatt doesn't do slaloms which makes him vastly different to Pinturault & Hirscher who came from tech to add speed events). Likewise Svindal didn't bother with combined since he didn't do slaloms. The days of KAA and Kjus were over and done with some time ago and FIS realized something had to be done. The parallel team events are not good enough, everyone knows one course is very likely to be better and the event can be manipulated by choice so having two athletes doing their preferred event in Team Combined makes most sense on paper IMO. I'm willing to give it a try going forward.

Ekaterina Alexandrova keeps rolling and takes out #1 seed Aryna Sabalenka in Doha R2 (in a third set TB of all things where she's historically very bad - 5 wins & 19 losses).

Venla Lehtonen is out with some heart issues. Apparently Sophie Chauveau was added to the team after winning the IBU Cup race in Rindaun.

And it's over. Eagles won 40-22 and blew up the Chiefs three-peat bid in spectacular fashion. Outside of Kansas & Missouri it's a very acceptable result

Half-time and Eagles lead 24-0

Time for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans

Meanwhile Anastasia Potapova has won the Transylvania Open in Cluj for her third WTA title. 4-6 6-1 6-2 over Lucia Bronzetti in the final. Guess that divorce boosted her form this season (she won zero titles when married to Shevchenko).

That should do it. Ledecka could have won it if not that last section but she should still take a medal.

The first women's event in Lake Placid had to be rescheduled due to some strong winds after 14 jumpers and Nika Prevc won ahead of Kvandal & Loutitt. Pola Bełtowska had record 131 meters in the anulled round which only shows how much support the wind had

Looks like Gascon has self-sabotaged anyway after someone dug out the old tweets about George Floyd, Islam and whatever else. Yeah, a film about Mexico made by Europeans. What could possibly go wrong? I read Selena Gomez had to le-learn Spanish to even make it passable on-screen? I'd never suspect she forgot how to speak Spanish fluently

Sadly that won't have Liliana Lewińska reinstated for the Olympics (she was the one robbed at the expense of the Russian representing ). Nothing to see here anyway. Gymnastics is one of the last sports where you have judges openly manipulating the results and nobody really cares. Trikomiti should be banned for life but yeah, let's move on.

I'm OK with this podium. Macuga & Lie getting medals is a good story

Alexandrova has won the Linz title over Dayana Yastremska 6-2 3-6 7-5. She led 3-0 in the second set before losing NINE games in a row but still came back from 0-3 in the decider. Peak WTA action

Three in Top 20 and first career Top 10 for Kevin Bickner! Tschofenig picks up another win.

Ekaterina Alexandrova makes her third Linz final of her career and let's see if she can finally win it (lost to Camila Giorgi in 2018 and Jelena Ostapenko in 2024).

Terrible performance from Poland. Meanwhile Timi Zajc was DQ in the first round for illegal suit yet the very same suit was deemed legal in round two. Classic case of the measurement being reliant on how the athlete actually stands during the process.

A real slaughterhouse in Run 2. I lost track how many big names made mistakes. Zrinka Ljutic wins by 1.26 seconds though. Swenn Larsson blew a podium away and Holdener went out after like 10 seconds. Shiffrin with a messy run and down to 10th. Marta Rossetti likely blew a strong podium bid from 20th after Run 1. She was 0.85 up on Aronsson before going out with 15 seconds of the course left. Aronsson finished 0.86 behind Sara Hector in 2nd place.

Shiffrin returns in Courchevel SL tonight. Bib #6. Nina Ortlieb is out with another serious injury suffered in Ga-Pa, this time a broken leg. Idk how long she keeps going? This will be her 23rd surgery already.

Reported list of skaters & coaches on board the plane: Andrew Torgashev, Katie McBeth, Daniil Parkman, Christina Carreira, Anthony Ponomarenko, Alexey Shchepetov, Artem Markelov, Anton Spiridonov, Danila Savelyev, Evgenia Shishkova, Vadim Naumov, Inna Volyanskaya, Spencer Lane, Gina Khan, Franco Aparicio, Everly Livingston, Alydia Livingston, Sean Kay & Angela Yang.

Evgenia Shishkova & Vadim Naumov (1994 World Champions in pairs) very likely were killed in the American Airlines collision with US Army helicopter in Washington last night.

I know Norway is heavily cutting finances in ski jumping so presumably there is some economical shift in sports over there but it would be insane to have the likes of JTB or Riiber compete for Qatar or any other petroleum country now

It's simple. In shooting it's possible to have the same athletes compete in multiple events (air rifle + 3 pos being the obvious one) but rapid fire pistol is for "one event speciallists" so by cutting down this event you actually remove more quotas by design. Promoting "multi event" athletes in multi event sports lowers the quota by default. It's no different when gymnastics promoted OG qualifying through all-around which hosed single apparatus speciallists who could only make it as reigning world champions (and why Leszek Blanik didn't compete in Athens 2004 and only qualified for Beijing 2008 because he won WCh gold in 2007).

This is just sailing deja vu. IOC will do anything to cut down the athletes quota on the less popular sports. Sailing & shooting have a long history but they're just not trendy enough these days to survive the purge in some capacity. Yeah, it sucks...

No surprises in conference championship games so we have another Chiefs vs Eagles Super Bowl (happened two years ago too). The main difference is Eagles have Saquon Barkley this time...

We're circling the drain both on & off the field now