JoshMartini007

I'm not sure how that's any different than someone becoming a citizen of a different nation to have an easier time qualifying. The Olympics were never just about having the best, it's also about having a diverse field. I guess they can have a rule where all athletes must score above 50 points in a certain number of competitions or something to prevent people from getting free points.

It worked for Australia in 2002. It was their first ever gold medal too.

We could have quite the log jam with six teams potentially finishing with 5-4 records. Going by tiebreakers the best result for Canada (besides winning their two matches, which they have to do) would be for Sweden to defeat China which would remove two teams that defeated Canada from any potential tie, giving them a better head to head ratio.

Overall Italy had the right plan, stay clean and wait for a penalty. There's no way a Canada/China/South Korea race ends with no penalty.

I'm glad we avoided Sweden and Russia in the quarter-finals, but I'm very nervous against Finland too...

Here's a couple... Pyrros Dimas won gold in weightlifting in 1992, 1996 and 2000, but "only" won bronze at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Viktor Saneyev from the Soviet Union won gold in triple jump in 1968, 1972 and 1976 and then won silver at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow

Speed skating would be a good platform for South American nations to perform well at the Winter Olympics. Nations like Argentina, Chile and Venezuela could also be regulars in this sport.

True, but at the same time the Olympics were less competitive in the early years where Norway won 1/3 of the medals. We'd have to do some complex analysis for a fairer picture.

In terms of total medals, yeah Norway has it. All that's left is to see if it breaks the all-time record (which is likely). In terms of most gold there's a chance for Norway to fail, but they pretty much have to be limited to a couple of golds for the rest of the games which is also unlikely.

Everyone just lost it with that...

So does Red Stripe just have a sled lying around?

Quiet day for Canada, most people performed as expected. It's a shame Vathje had such a poor first run in women's skeleton. She did gain 0.19 seconds on the competition, but that was a great second run and even if she does repeat it she may only finish at around 5th by the end. Women's curling is something else right now... It isn't like she's a no name team that lucked out in the Canadian Trials, she's arguably the best rink in Canada (though I think Jones is better) and the defending World Champion so she's been in stressful situations, including representing Canada when they were hosts in 2014. I'm wondering if there was politics by Curling Canada at play. The replacement of their alternate for Bernard may have appeared that the federation didn't trust that the team could perform well.

Yes. They only predicted one medal for Italy among the events that happened already. Overall they predicted 2 alpine skiing medals (other in women's downhill) and 1 biathlon (plus one each in cross-country, snowboarding and speed skating for a total of six)

Italy won medals in both alpine skiing and biathlon, just not in the event Gracenote predicted.

The website had Italy winning silver in biathlon (women's 15km individual) and bronze in alpine skiing (men's downhill). Funny enough neither of them happened, though Italy did win a medal in both sports. The issue with Gracenote is that it only shows the top three and ignores how close other competitors are. For the bigger nations these eventually even themselves out, but for mid-size nations like Italy it wouldn't take much to turn a 4-5th place prediction into a medal. This is why the Netherlands are doing a lot better, I imagine most of their speed skaters were ranked in at least the top 8 in Gracenote's formula.

Comparing Gracenote's predictions to completed events here are the nations which have over/underperformed so far (by total medals). (+3) (+3) (+3) (+2) (+2) (+2) (+1) (+1) (+1) (+1) (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) (-1) (-1) (-1) (-1) (-2) (-2) (-2) (-2) (-3) (-3)

That was poorly written. Own the Podium being funded by the government is no secret and catching dopers should be the priority of all nations.

Good day for Canada, winning three medals, including a gold in the 10,000m speed skating event. Both ice hockey teams got their win as did men's curling. Women's curling on the other hand had a bad start to the tournament, losing both games. It's not over for them, but they need to use the mixed doubles team as inspiration and try to turn things around. Tomorrow will be another quiet day, but women's skeleton will begin along with men's figure skating and of course curling will be in action.

Medal for the team this time.

Bloemen's father is Canadian so it wasn't like he randomly chose the country.

Shooting isn't very athletic yet no one is trying to remove it from the games. Heck, bridge and chess are recognized sports by the IOC so there's no reason why e-sports wouldn't theoretically be recognized. The main issue is that there is no unifying federation. Different games are rarely played in the same event (with the exception of fighting games and events like EVO).

There was a World Mind Games, though I think the 2016 version was cancelled.

All teams advance, the three winners and best second place go to the quarter-finals the other eight will play a qualification round 5th vs. 12th, 6th vs. 11th, 7th vs. 10th and 8th vs. 9th.

I agree my ranking for medal chances would be men's 10000m > luge relay > pairs figure skating > men's snowboardcross

I always felt that there should have been some kind of qualification events. I'd imagine they would also need to be in the top 300 (the article is vague on whether Europe/Oceania also needs to fulfill that requirement). Abigail Tere-Apisah from Papua New Guinea is currently ranked 333 so she would be the most likely to reach that level.