NearPup

Canada is in real trou le right now.

I keep trying to find an Irish or Italian ancestor but no luck I got my second passport the hard way (naturalization).

I thought I had read that in the Inside the Games story, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore. Looks like I may have been wrong.

Backdated from the 2019 Worlds. The ban doesn't apply to the Olympics though. For 2020 it will have limited effects, but it may wreck havoc with their 2024 qualification.

Iran will be fine for 2020, but it will be really hard for them to qualify people for 2024.

At this point the World Relays should just not be offering direct spots to the Olympics and all remaining spots should be decided by ranking.

I'm going to answer this as a tier list: Mixed events that are must watch for me: Badminton mixed doubles Table tennis mixed doubles Tennis mixed doubles Triathlon mixed relay Mixed events that I am not upset are in the Olympics: Archery mixed team Sailing mixed multihull The three shooting mixed team events Mixed events I don't believe should be in the Olympics: Athletics mixed 4x400m relay Judo mixed team event (the format is simply unfair) Swimming mixed 4x100m medley relay I am against the athletics and swimming mixed relays because they are essentially redundant (wouldn't be opposed to mixed relays that are markedly different from the same-gendered relays). I think the mixed judo team event has a fatally flawed format that has no place in a serious competition like the Olympics (too few weight classes and a very unfair mechanism to resolve 3-3 ties).

In mixed doubles the imbalance is not a bug, it’s a feature. A lot of the strategy revolves around it.

That was expected, California is growing slower than the country as a whole. IMO the biggest shocks are Alabama, Minnesota and Rhode Island not losing a rep.

It would be better with 12 teams. But a lot of summer Olympic events could use more competitors.

Au cas ou sa vous intéresse, j'ai lue une entrevue sympa avec la future Olympienne Yuan Jia Nan qui date de l'an passer. Je l'ai trouvé pas mal sympa. http://www.fftt.com/site/actualites/2020-01-25/a-rencontre-de-yuan-jia-nan

The problem is not the number of individuals competing in the individual event. It's a pure total athlete quota issue. What's the point of not allowing an athlete that is already present and counted in the athlete quota from competing? This isn't table tennis where they only allow two singles competitors to try to limit how many medals China wins (a stupid and short-sighted idea, they should really let every team members enter the singles event). Holding an individual event with 34 competitors isn't all that different logistically from holding an individual event with 48 competitors. What fencing really needs is the IOC to give it 36 extra quotas so they can have 8 teams per event and individual events that have 16 dedicated qualifiers rather than 10. . The team events in fencing aren't some add-on. It's a core part of how fencers compete from the lowest level to the very top level. Even when I did fencing recreationally we did team tournaments almost as often as we did individual ones. The format at the Olympics is more than fine given the quotas Fencing has available. The calibre of competition at the Olympics in the team events is usually pretty strong, even though obviously some medal contenders are missing.

Because mixed weapon team events are a joke, and it’s literally impossible to do a mixed gender fencing event in a way that is fair (same problem the mixed judo team event is running into).

Doping?

wins the mixed doubles quota.

Beijing 2008 just felt like the biggest event out of those. Other than Vancouver (on account of living in Canada at the time) I don’t remember any Olympic being such a big topic of conversation among people who don’t follow sports.

It really just feels like the BTF is doing some palliative care on a dying Olympic sport.

TBH it would almost be more fair to have a group of experts award the slots than having a frankly arbitrary ranking do the work.

Like for these Olympics specifically or just in general?

Miami. Would prefer moving to Montreal though, tbh :P Following the steps of my grandmother who did the stereotypical French-Canadian snowbird retiree thing after my grandfather died.

Huh just in time for when I move to the area. It seems as ill-advised as the Sochi race tbh.

I picked surfing. I was really skeptical of it at first, but I started following the WSL after the sport’s introduction in the Olympics and I was really pleasantly surprised at how different it is from anything else on the program. Very excited for skateboarding (a sport which is way overdue for Olympic inclusion), climbing (despite the terrible format) and softball. I’ll watch a bunch of karate due to the novelty, but frankly I can’t say kumite or kata appeals to me at all. At least kata is radically different from anything else in the Olympics.

Claudia Pechstein will be a candidate for the CDU during the next German federal election.

At this point Edin must be in the conversation for best skip of all times, right?

Three teams with positive tests, four further teams “came in contact”. If all the tests for the remaining teams come back negative the hope is to finish the hope is to finish the event tomorrow over three draws.