JoshMartini007

Did Nelly Jepkosgei (2008 Olympic silver medalist) switch countries to Bahrain? Or is the diamond league and IAAF incorrect? You'd think there would be more news of such an event

One step closer to the clean sweep...

I think we're good, at least no one that has become ineligible.

Pretty much, I usually consider there to be 10 top teams (the six European teams here, Australia, Canada, China and USA) with Japan possibly closing the gap among the lower ranked teams thanks to the Olympics. At least two of them plus Japan would be in the second group and we'd see 20+ goal victories against South Africa and who knows what against South Korea.

Not the greatest synchro events for Canada, I thought we would pick up two medals and have appearances in all four finals. Sadly two unfortunate events prevented that. Still I feel pretty good we will qualify in women's 10m synchronized platform while we have a good chance in qualifying in the men's synchronzed springboard. The performance in the men's synchronized platform gives me hope we could sneak in a quota. 3/4 synchronized events at the Olympics is a possibility.

England/Ireland is an unfortunate quarterfinal match, but Spain and Russia did well to avoid placing in second. Second and third place is very important as the teams will be huge favourites to win the two quotas at the final qualification tournament

France and England are in good positions to meet in the final. Spain and Ireland should be the favourites to win their quarterfinal match, but I wouldn't put it past Portugal or Germany to give them a hard time respectively. Winning here is important as the loser pretty much needs to defeat Australia or Samoa to qualify to the Olympics, not impossible, but a tough match regardless.

In general, anything that offers direct quotas to the Olympics or is a Pan Am only sport.

They weren't too bad in the preliminary, they had a bad third dive, when adjusted they would have been in contention.

What happened to Canada? Did someone get hurt or did they quit after the bad dive?

Monobob (or any event that is created without a world championships) was a terrible idea, it's not like the Winter Olympics have an athlete problem like the Summer Olympics. Gender parity isn't going to go away and the Olympics and sport federations need to adapt. The main issue however, is that the Olympics haven't kept up with the athlete numbers. In 1988 we had 237 events; 153 men, 72 women and 12 open. In terms of athletes there were 6197 men and 2194 women. That pretty much means for gender parity we need around 12.5k athletes for just over 300 events and that's ignoring the fact that Badminton, Golf, Rugby Sevens, Taekwondo and Triathlon were all added after those games (along with the additional sports for 2020 and 2024). Those additions pushes the number to over 13,000 plus additional quotas for the new sports. While I do acknowledge that was at a time before qualification events, it doesn't reverse the fact that we are probably missing up to 1000 athletes from existing events.

Men's and Women's Entry List

Still even they must know that excluding all, but the top 6 from the hex is foolish.

There's a medal table now Though they order it by total number of medals then alphabetically.

Universiade is always good for unexpected team results, Portugal winning a medal in women's basketball is a surprise for me.

I suspect there will be a lot of friendlies among the Central American teams, Canada and maybe a few Caribbean nations in a bid to claim one of the top 6 spots within the region.

That's good to hear. Will it be after the Olympic or World Championships?

They lost all their games at the World Championships including 8-0 in 5 innings to Italy and 10-0 in 4 innings to Great Britain. They may be one of the best in Africa, but that doesn't translate too well outside.

Still not fair, all teams should have a chance to qualify directly. Have the top 3-5 advance directly to the hex while the other teams fight for the remaining spots.

I'd give Great Britain or the Czech Republic an outside chance, though the odds of them beating both Italy and the Netherlands in one tournament are quite low.

Perhaps, but I don't think beating Australia once, especially since it wasn't their best team will be enough (neither archer competed at the World Championships). No doubt they will use this as an argument for them to be selected, but the official New Zealand Olympic Committee twitter pretty much said that it's not guaranteed yet. Currently we have 10 nations that are eligible to compete in mixed team. Two more are guaranteed as continental representatives. New Zealand is currently in the clear, but once that number approaches 20 they are going to need some individual results to justify their quota.

As much as I like the Pacific nations to win quotas, it doesn't belong to them. New Zealand may not take the quota either, they were 56/58 at the World Championships, well below their standard. This likely comes down to how many nations form a mixed team. In 2016, 24 nations had at least one male and one female archer. In that scenario we could see New Zealand declining a quota considering they will be the weakest team on paper (maybe an African nation might be weaker). Regardless, they will still have one male archer quota to fight over (likely going to Fiji)

Entry List By Nation

Correct, only two athletes per event (the two best times) were counted for each nation.

While true, with mixed team being an event, it will be a lot easier for the archers to argue that they can finish in the top 16.