LDOG

It's not so much of an "invitation" but more like any member federation of FIH can participate in world league as long as they pay the entry fee I think. Next stop is in (only for ladies) with the home team and . 3 spots to take, I'd say it should be very close between them but with Switzerland as outsiders (first time they participate in women's IIRC).

Happy for Wawrinka, deserved title. I like Djokovic but winning a GS with 3 walkovers would have been a bit too much.

^He has some trace of his slavic accent in the spanish part and he mixed a few words with italian I think (the demonyms, he said "cino" and "serbo" instead of "chino" and "serbio"), but other than that, is good.

2-2 haha Well, there were too many missing players in attack to expect a good performance from our team. Hopefully they will stop getting injured when they have to play for NT...

^also Bulgaria against familiar rivals France and Sweden once again.

Yes, I was using that as part of my point, since Indonesia is a fast-growing economy. He only got there because of the $$$ and as soon as it stopped he's out. I don't even mean countries in utter poverty. Obviously no one is going to take car racing in Central African R. I'm talking about Argentina/Uruguay or the smaller european countries. With all respect Argentina has a much bigger car racing culture than Mexico, Venezuela or Colombia, yet...

I'll believe this the day I see a F1 driver from a broke country It's all about money. The indonesian driver was replaced by a french because his government stopped financing him lol. Argentina had a lot of drivers in history and we have had 0 since 2001 (our big economic crack) what a coincidence.

Never said Lopez was good, I didn't even mention him in my post. But anyway, he could have been the best driver in the universe and still wouldn't get into F1 because no private money whatsoever is put into sports in this country. F1 is more about the "show" than any other motorsport class.

F1 is a load of shit, 95% car 5% driver and you can only get in if you are from a rich country and have a sponsor willing to pour millions into these old men's bank accounts.

The Prague rounds of world league are over and the qualifier teams decided... In men's the home team is surprisingly eliminated at the expense of lower ranked Ukraine and Italy (the latter with a bunch of argentine players in the squad). In women's no real surprises as Czechia, Ukraine and Poland advance, though the "surprise" in this case would be Poland (the highest ranked team of all round 1) having trouble to beat the likes of Lithuania and even losing to Ukraine. Next up is.... - Glasgow tournament (only for men), where the home team should win. Second quota looks open between and . Completes the field for which just participation will be the achievement. - Accra tournaments for african teams (men and women)... where men and women should take the only place in round 2. - Antalya tournament (only men) in which should destroy the competition, second place and round 2 quota will be fought between and curious debutant which I suspect will maybe have some pakistani/indian/malaysian reinforcements.

Del Potro already climbed from 147 to 63, one more win and he is top 40.

I'm sorry guys, but you'll have to wait until Wanderer has a bit of free time. I postponed a lot of stuff to be able to enjoy the olympics and now I have to catch up (remember is not summer here, so I can't have any vacation for the moment). It is what it is.

Finally reaches top of the table. Hopefully to never let it go until the end. Now there are three relatively easy fixtures coming: vs (away), (away) and (home). We need 9/9 or 7/9 and Russia will be almost there.

The road to India/England 2018 has started a while ago (before the olympics actually) with the early rounds of FIH world league. Currently the first european stages are underway. Lots of debutants in both gentlemen and ladies, especially from Asia. The most "exotic" additions seem to be on the men's side: Some of them never before I had even seen playing this sport.

It's the same as those fake north korea news during the world cup...

Well, some countries have been qualifying teams for CL since forever and their leagues haven't got much better in level (Greece, Turkey, Russia, Switzerland, Netherlands). The only country that increased the level of their league over the last 20 years is Portugal I would say... and Ukraine, but in a lower scale. I think other factors are more important than CL money.... economy of the country, level of investment in football, etc

I like this new format, right now there are too many punching bags in CL.

No, 248.

Ok, @konig what do you think about my predictions? I think I guessed most correctly I know argentine mentality too well The only thing I missed badly was the tennis. I knew Del Potro has the tennis to beat anyone but I think he was helped a lot by the crowd during games. It was like his body was telling him, whenever he was about to lose a set or a game: "you can't give up, you have to win for them". If this tournament had been played anywhere else he would have lost in first round. Other than that, I had many 100% guesses (athletics, fencing, wrestling, Judo, Golf, Rowing, Cycling Road, Rugby, Basketball, Volleyball, Gymnastics, Triathlon). Then other sports in which I had accurate guesses but not 100%: - I knew Grabich would do bad, but I didn't expect everyone else to also be terrible. - in Sailing I predicted one medal and 4 medal races and that was exactly the case, but I didn't expect 49er FX and 470 to be the ones to do SO BAD whilst Finn and Laser did well. - Football was a 50/50 gamble and it went to the disaster side. - In shooting I got the Gil performance the opposite way. Once again Federico does bad in multi-sport games while his sister does well. Still, this sport is (when you reach a certain level) all luck. - Handball: our women's team did just as I expected, but our men's team played surprisingly well without Simonet and even won a match. Good for them. - Boxing: just as I predicted Melian and Peralta lost in QF. However I wasn't expecting all the others to be SO weak. - Equestrian: the good performance was in individual and not in team as I expected. Then there is the special case of Hockey.... I knew our guys could win a medal (I have known that for a long time) since we have the best coach and the best corner in the world, but I wasn't expecting a gold, of course (mostly because I never expected Australia to do that bad). Now the women's team.... what can I say? I had a bad feeling the weeks before the olympics because of the many injuries and the bad preparation schedule (play 7 friendlies one week before the start and fly to Rio just 2 days before the ceremony). Also I saw that the girls did not seem to be very focused in the competition... too many social media stuff, attending the ceremony while they had to play the following day, too many young girls in the squad and lacking a captain with strong personality like Aymar, etc. I thought however that even all that was going to be enough for a bronze in the worst case, but seems not. Also, I don't like the coach (to me he is like the Julio Lamas of hockey, respected coach but very overrated in my opinion). I'm pretty sure we are going to win the women's Junior WC later this year (or at least play the final), so we should have a very strong team for 2020. But I hope the management of the team is handled better in the future (and hopefully without any "Aníbal Fernández" inside the federation). Now... Buenos Aires 2018. I hope we have a good performance and I wonder in which sport(s) will we see an exciting young promise.

The logo for the Luge section in the front page is wrong.

Yes, I told him that day to put points in the bets, then he edited but apparently had this excess. Obviously I was busy with opening all the other contests that day and didn't have time to count the points of all the participants.

I counted your points anyway and your total is 229. At least you didn't miss a medal because of this.

Excess of points: 32x10 = 320 120 - 32 = 88 320 + 88 = 408 I'm sorry, but I didn't realize this before so I could tell you to edit

Well, we didn't conceive this game for people to only bet 10s and 1s. I mean, it worked for you anyway, but you could have placed that extra point in any of the ones you left with 1 to make it a 2 (imagine if you had lost by 1 point ).

Final Standing available here. Dunadan OlympicsFan De_Gambassi Our Olympic Betting Champion is none other than OlympicsFan, who with a bold betting strategy of only placing 10s and 1s managed to top the tables while winning 75 bets in the process. Silver is for enigmatic Dunadan, who seems to have pretty good knowledge of sports from what I have seen, despite he doesn't post much. Dunadan also was the user that guessed the most bets (78) and could have won the contest if only one more american nation had been able to win a medal in Rio (the count stopped at 14...). Bronze for De_Gambassi, who was 2nd in number of bets won (77). Honorable mentions to heywoodu, a betting fanatic who got 4th place and collaborated a lot to make this contest possible.