NearPup

Official report shows 46, which is still... a lot. Poland only had 19 shots. Belarus can still probably qualify with two regulation wins (assuming Murray isn't randomly on the form of his life and Poland just takes this tournament) but it's definitively a terrible start for them.

Anyone knows if the games in Norway will be streamed anywhere?

She really never got back to the level she was at in 2014, and frankly everyone just kept improving leaps and bounds.

They are all former Minsk players who were offered fast tracked citizenship. Having a Belarusian passport as a non-Russian player is super advantageous when you play in the KHL since it allows you to live and work in Russia without a visa.

Wow there are a lot of Canadian-born Belarusians on the Belarusian team, I didn't realize Canadian emigration to Belarus was such a common thing

Oh they finally came to their senses and realized that having some other group of people pay swimmers a salary was good both for FINA and for the national federations?

I don’t think the A team is super interested because they have worlds two months before. If worlds weren’t delayed a year you’d very likely see the A team go.

This women's high jump jump-off is making me grateful that Tamberi and Barshim agreed to tie. Both athletes missed six times in a row before there was finally a clearance...

It's a really great biodome, at least. And it isn't a white elephant, unlike it's next door neighbour.

Ya, some sports are in rough shape. Canada's Nordic skiing team is in the worst spot it's been since at least the 90s (Alex Harvey sure did a lot to hide the steep decline Canada's cross country team was in), our "best" (best, not good) medal chance in Nordic skiing is probably Boyd-Clowes in men's ski jumping. Short track is in a rebuilding phase after losing our best men's and women's athlete to retirement post-Pyeongchang (and IIRC there was a bunch of drama around the coaching, too). At least Sarault is looking good to make the team (one of my high school friend's dad is deeply involved in NB and Canadian short track so I'm really excited for that whole setup). Luge peaked in 2018, no consistency in women's Skeleton (and lets not bring up the men), we lost our best Bobsleigh pilot to the US. Curling has been rough this quad. Figure skating is in a deep, deep rebuild after Canada had it's best decade ever in the sport. The Alpine Skiing team is in the wilderness. Biathlon seems to have stalled after doing a lot of good progress over the past decade. I'm cautiously optimistic about speed skating potentially being really good for us in 2022, and freestyle skiing and the slopestyle / big air events in snowboarding remain the best teams for Canada. I think if we want to have any chance of repeating a top three finish the freestyle skiers and snowboarders are going to need to do a lot of the work (if they have really good Olympics they could realistically win half a dozen gold medals). But outside of those three sports Canada has been having a terrible quad.

Ya, the effect has been extremely noticeable.

Canada has made some truly incredible progress in track cycling. There is definitely some work to be done when it comes to the omnium / Madison but Canada had credible men’s and women’s team pursuit squads and good sprinters on both the men’s and (obviously) women’s side. The advantage of investing in medal rich sports like athletics, swimming, track cycling or judo is that by having a deep team you are buying a lot of lottery tickets. You aren’t depending on one or two star athletes that you are packing a ton of pressure onto. I also think that’s why it’s worth it to not give up on wrestling or boxing. There are a lot of medals on offer in those sports, we just need to figure out what is going wrong in those pipelines.

The New York Rangers have announced they will retire his number (30).

I think Slovakia is more likely to win the qualification tournament than O'Toole is to be the next PM...

Boxing only had one problem (corruption), weightlifting has a major corruption problem *and* a major doping problem.

Normally I don't think they send a B team in swimming, but given there are worlds in 2022 they probably will.

Why are they playing “beach water polo” in a pool?

The point of Trump's peace treaty with the Taliban was to hand the country over to them. Everyone knew this would happen, the only surprise is that it happened so quickly.

The people who now lead Afghanistan got released from custody because of the deal Trump signed with the Talibans... The way the withdrawal has gone is obviously a disaster, but if what you wanted was for the US to maintain a presence in Afghanistan what you should have wanted was for Trump to lose the 2020 Republican primary to someone like Rubio or Sasse. Just a month ago Trump was complaining that Biden wasn't withdrawing fast enough.

Do NHL players ever play in those qualifying tournaments?

I sort of figured this was the entire point of the Kunlun Red Star existing xD

Je pense que dans le moment ce que le coach a dit est correcte. Quand un athlète a une épouvantable première expérience Olympique c’est important de les convaincre que c’était une expérience utile et positive.

It’s actually the podcast where McKayla Maroney announced her retirement, which is how I first heard about it. They don’t take themselves super seriously during competitions (which makes for fun listening) but they have been covering the various abuse scandals in gymnastics (especially everything related to USAG) relentlessly. And they have very strong opinions about E scores :P

The rotation system sucked when it was happening with fencing (thank God fencing has all three team events now) and it sucks with shooting, too.

I want to see women have to do rings and pommel horse just because it would make Gymcastic's host comically angry (she's a noted hater of rings as an apparatus).