JoshMartini007

Good to pick up 3 points against Honduras to keep us on top. Big match against the United States on Sunday. Despite playing at home we will have to travel a lot further to get there and then we have to fly back to Central America to play against El Salvador on Wednesday. Who designed this schedule?

Clearly those four quotas "accidentally" ended up in the email spam folder. Good thing they found them.

Not sure, probably Dow Travers

About a year ago I made a prediction on the team sizes, here's the link. Let's see how I did. First the following nations qualified, but I didn't predict. Nations which I thought would qualify, but did not. Overall not too bad, the ones that I missed were not active a year ago and only qualified one athlete. Kenya technically qualified, but the athlete was not selected and I made my prediction before finding out North Korea will isolate itself until COVID passes. Cayman Islands was a bad pick since I thought an already retired athlete would try to qualify. The following nations I underestimated (predicted a smaller team) by at least five athletes. - 59 athletes - 10 athletes - 6 athletes - 5 athletes - 5 athletes Sorry Denmark, but in my defense they were the first reserves in curling and one win away from qualifying in ice hockey. Unfortunately for me, the nation qualified in those four team events, account for 58 athletes. I kind of knew I was underestimating Australia given its restrictive travel regulations so I'm not surprised that I was off by a lot. I also missed the mark on Jamaica considering how small their team is. I originally only had them qualifying in women's monobob, but they were able to barely sneak in the two men's events. The following nations I overestimated (predicted a larger team) by at least five athletes. - 33 athletes - 32 athletes - 12 athletes - 11 athletes - 11 athletes - 10 athletes - 10 athletes - 9 athletes - 6 athletes Originally I had Germany and Norway qualifying ice hockey teams which explains why they are at the top of the list, but even if we ignore that both nations would remain on the list with 10 and 7 athletes respectively. One weakness from my prediction is I didn't take into account whether a nation will decline quotas which is why you see a lot of the big European nation here.

Not surprising, they did the same thing at the Summer Olympics

Most quotas are awarded to the NOC rather than the athlete. You also risk the possibility of sport federations not letting their athletes attend the Olympic qualifier or the NOCs telling their athletes "if you want to go, pay for it yourself"

In the bigger picture, I'm not too afraid of Georgia. Yes we could lose to them, but if we are then we are not beating Japan. The men's singles will be very important for Canada's chances. Worst case scenario we could have and maybe even if they get a host nation boost finish between Japan and Canada. Ice dancing will cover a lot of ground, but they will also need to compensate the distance in the women's singles as at best, our pair would barely finish ahead of Japan's

On paper Japan is the favourite over Canada for the bronze medal in the team event, but given the format where only placing matters a lot can change if one member just barely beats out or misses against a close competitor. Japan is better in the men's and women's singles while Canada is better in the pairs (hopefully) and ice dancing so it'll come down to whoever can get more nations in between the other nation and whether or not the other nations will use their best athletes in both rounds.

Yeah things are tight. 106 quotas went to nations which only used the basic quota while the other 40 basic quotas went to nations who qualified athletes through other criteria which means a few are getting a free ride despite being from a large nation. This only leaves 160 athletes who qualified by merit which averages around 16 athletes per individual event. While athletes do compete in more than one event, that's pretty tight. If I controlled things I would boost it up to 24 unique athletes per event plus 100 for small nations for a total of 340 quotas.

22-26 medals for Canada

Hey I would let you know that we got double digits worth of snow a few weeks ago AND we were below 0 degrees. As for snow in February...

Given the amount of time until the Olympics the quotas will likely be reallocated.

That's one way to get around the ageism issue.

So comparing these numbers with 2018 (according to Wikipedia) we have the following changes Alpine - -1 Biathlon - -2 Bobsleigh - 0 Cross-Country - -2 Curling - 0 Figure skating - -4 Freestyle skiing -+2 Hockey - 0 Luge - -2 Nordic - 0 Short track - 0 Skeleton - -3 Ski jumping - +2 Snowboarding - +2 Speed skating - -3 Slight increases in freestyle skiing, ski jumping and snowboarding while slight decreases in alpine, biathlon, cross-country, figure skating, luge, skeleton and speed skating.

Money is a big issue. Also for some nations funding is tied to performance at the Olympics and it's better to have five top 10 results than five top 10 results + one 30th result.

Again the issue is without using my rule where nations qualified via D.2 or D.3 are not eligible for a D.1 quota the FIS would just make 80 men and 80 female quotas the basic quota and we are back to the same place. The IOC won't allow FIS to decrease the universality quotas so your options are either a low ranked "mid-tier" nation athlete or a top tier nation getting most of the quotas it deserves.

Sounds about right, definitely a Quebec sport

That won't save as many quotas as you think, FIS would just subtract the "exotic" nations quotas from the overall count. A better system would be only award the basic quota to nations which have not qualified a male/female athlete. This gets rid of the +1 quotas for the middle tier nations.

Hoping for a few medals with this team...

Winter sports do need a more diverse set of tripartite quotas. Not all nations perform alpine/cross-country skiing.

Denmark declined its men's quota

Hopefully Hungary's athlete is better than Elizabeth Swaney was in 2018.

If I am reading this correctly, New Zealand's Campbell Wright has 44.94 IBU Qualifying Points which satisfies the NOC's requirement of getting < 140 IBU Qualifying Points Edit: It looks like the federation can override the nomination if they don't feel Wright can establish a top 16 result. His best performance among eligible events was 25th, but if he can argue that he is still competitive he could still be selected

I don't think the Netherlands will be as dominant as they were in the last two Olympics. I'm thinking 5 golds.

Most likely, using speed skating as an example, 192 athletes competed at the 2019 World Championships (the one before COVID) while only 166 are allowed to compete here.