JoshMartini007

Still on paper a Sweden C team is better than a German A-/B+ team. But that's why you play the game

After the US and Canada, Sweden likely suffered the most due to the lack of NHL players. Typically almost their entire squad comes from the NHL and while they have a good domestic league they still lost a lot of talent. Meanwhile a team like Germany only lost a handful of players.

Germany has the best equipment, Canada has a great driver

So close, but bronze for Canada

United States started strong, and did just enough not to die at the end.

It'll be tight, especially if we completely fail in curling and men's ice hockey.

Canada and China got disqualified so we act as if they don't exist. Netherlands, originally ranked 5th moved up to 3rd.

I feel so, she can clearly do some tricks so obviously she isn't a total beginner. Though to be fair I'm not really angry about all this, she'll be forgotten in a week or so.

I think it comes down to attitude. The athlete is known to act like a spoiled brat. I don't think she bought citizenship (she was eligible to become Hungarian). It would be like if someone made the 100m and decide to casually run it for the publicity. People can tell if someone is trying, even if they aren't good at it. That's the difference.

That's a general issue with the Winter Olympics. If there were quota restraints like in the Summer Olympics these events would be closer to 16-24 entrants than 24-30.

It's been like that since 2010 and I doubt Canada and Russia needed help reaching the quarter-finals . I think it was done so that the players had fewer games to play at the Olympics (6 or 7 vs. 8 in 2006). I imagine the NHL led that charge for the format change.

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.