NearPup

Okay, the men’s 15km has sold me on having ski cross elements in the cross country course - the near fight between the two Russians who crashed into each other was fun xD

Shows just how much faith they have in Young xD

I know this is just an exhibition, but it was actually a seriously impressive shooting display.

Looks both very old school winter Olympics and distinctively Chinese. I like it.

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Very fun if ill advised run by Cochran-Siegle.

This is very reasonable. The whole “super final” concept was always really confusing. Either the 3000m should be run as a standalone distance or it should be eliminated. Why does that coach have such a hate-on for the 3000m Steeplechase which is, once again, the best race on the track?

I feel really bad for Chinese athletes, this pandemic has really affected them in a hugely negative way.

Kind of funny that Ledecká got her first Alpine world cup win before Gisin, I’m sure we all predicted that at the time.

Has Slovakia not discovered Zoom yet? :P

So it looks like the number of athletes (taking into account the max of 3 per country) that have the qualification time for the men's marathon way exceeds the stated quota. What happens then?

How hard can it be to find a competent Mandarin / English interpreter anyway?

Off topic, but I'd be extremely interested in a "mind sport" Olympics, featuring esports and games like Chess and Go.

Asian game inclusion is huge for the Korean esports scene. Time for some stars to earn military service exemptions!

World Athletics is really going to do everything in their power to avoid having a relay on the road >.>

It’s a shallow talent pool, but honestly it looks better than when women’s ski jumping got it’s first world championships. The big Nordic Combined athletes have started taking the women’s events seriously at the junior level so we can expect the level to get much better very quickly. Today wasn’t a great competition but it was very encouraging.

What this competition showed to me is that women’s Nordic Combined isn’t ready for the Olympics yet but absolutely will be by 2026 given all the young athletes that are coming up. Very happy for Geraghty-Moats. She is a real pioneer of this sport and I am glad she will go down as a world cup winner.

Perez to Red Bull is confirmed. https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/55367539

Can we at least wait for evidence of a a country having systematic state sponsored doping before we start discussing those countries having the same punishment that Russia got? Almost every country has a doping problem. If it turns out that, random example, Sir Andrew was doping and the UK government helped cover it up them we could talk about the UK facing consequences like Russia’s. But even if you assume the worst allegations around Sky / Ineos are true it doesn’t reach that level.

If France and Russia don't qualify it will be a major f-up on their end.

In sports that are dominated by a single country or a very small number of countries I am actually very okay with seeing those questionable nationality change, and honestly if Canadian curling pros start getting poached by other countries it would make international competitions more interesting. The Qatari and Bahraini long distance runners do add to the spectacle, even if their presence feels a little artificial. Ahn, IMO, was pretty justified in changing nationality. His national federation didn’t want him anymore, so in his mind it was clearly a choice between going elsewhere or retiring. Both the men’s and women’s number 1 Canadian table tennis players were born in China, too (Mo Zhang and Eugene Wang).

Russia toyed with that idea but ultimately fast track citizenship didn't come through. Jason Gunnlaugson, ultimately the 2013 Canadian Olympic trials runner-up, came very close to representing Russia at the 2014 Olympics. Actually, my home state, Texas, once won the American women's curling championship with a team made up of Canadian expats.

Mitch McConell, the senate majority leader and arguably the most powerful Republican lawmaker in the country, has (finally) congratulated Joe Biden on being the president elect.

Aerials vs big air is actually kind of funny. On the surface they are very similar but there is literally zero overlap between the athletes, and the judging is also very different (if you did an aerials trick in a big air contest you’d get very low scores, and vice versa). The culture around them is extremely different, too. I actually think of all the Olympic snowboard / freestyle skiing events slopestyle is the most important, because it best replicates the kind of thing a recreational snowboarder or freestyle skier does (but at a bigger scale, obviously).

Alpine snowboarding is a European thing at this point, it has no real support in North America. Vic Wild became Russian because the US didn't invest any money in alpine snowboarding. Snowboardcross is truly an FIS thing now, but for everything freestyle related the FIS is a second rate organizer. Their biggest freestyle world cups, like their events in Laxx, are FIS-sanctioned but aren't really FIS events. The Aspen X-Games are the de facto world championships for the discipline. The only real purpose of freestyle snowboarding world cups is Olympic qualification. You really can't judge the health of freestyle snowboarding by how FIS events are going, the snowboarding community tolerate the FIS because of the Olympics but they don't view them as important or influential. Most snowboarders agree on your assessment of alpine snowboarding though - something that was cool 20 years ago but that basically nobody actually does anymore. It's entirely kept alive by the FIS.