Vektor

I don't understand the Loreen hype, Euphoria was a far better executed popsong. I guess the songs this year are so weak that this is enough to rank #1 at the bookies... I really hope the BBC nails their song selection this year as they are the hosts and win the contest this time for real.

I think we gained one more Russian wrestler since the invasion started: Orsus Sztalvira. At the very least she has a Hungarian grandfather (Orsus/Orsós), so she has some connection to Hungary.

The 10k course of the marathon of the 2023 World Championships. They will have 4 laps on this course.

For a brief moment I considered sending Carson Coma again, but that would have been a step too far even for me. So instead I am going with another alternative rock band. I was planning to send a different song from them, but that would have likely been too lowkey for the contest. I want to give them at least a slight chance of success, so I have decided to send their most mainstream song from their latest album. Maybe you have heard of this band before, they are one of the very few Hungarian artists who write songs in English. But their latest album is in Hungarian, so we aren't breaking any long standing traditions, you will have to wait longer to see an English language submission from Hungary. Please welcome Platon Karataev and their single.... Hungary Platon Karataev - Vízből van Lyrics (The song was released on October 15, 2021, but the album its featured on was released in the current eligibility period (January 21, 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC8Pl11YwbA

Women's sabre has become an insane mess ever since the Russian ban. This is why I feel like we can win even the gold in Paris, like how the girls somehow ended up with the gold at the WCh, but we can also fail to qualify.

God fucking damn it. It looks like the rumors might be true about that Western European (German?) antifascists beat up somebody in Budapest yesterday. I hope this will turn out to be a hoax, but the Hungarian police are on it and they already caught multiple foreign individuals who were part of this madness. Do these people not realize how much this hurts the reputation of the left-wing and Western Europe in Hungary? We are already getting more and more conservative and anti-West as time progresses, and shit like this will only make things worse. This is not the image you want Hungarians to see about Western liberals, even if their intention is to beat up neonazis. And even if it turns out this wasn't antifa, the fact that foreigners come into our country to pull shit like this is infuriating.

Here's how much Orbán's system changed Hungarian sport, the amount of money the sports are getting from the state are significantly higher, but our results at the main international events aren't getting better... Team sports: 7.4 billion HUF between 2000 and 2010, 552 billion HUF between 2011 and 2020 Important individual sports: 38.5 billion HUF between 2000 and 2010, 678 billion between 2011 and 2020 Yes, you read that right, that's all state money, and it's a 7500% increase for team sports and 1900% increase for individual sports in Orbán's system. In case you didn't get my frustration with handball, research shows this... state money between 2000 and 2010: 2.45 billion HUF state money between 2011 and 2020: 223.77 billion HUF And change in the rate of success between the two periods: -79% Out of all the Hungarian sports it performed the worst, a complete failure compared to the 2000-2010 period. And at the same time Hungarian handball got an insane amount of money from the state. Despite all the money poured into all of the major Olympic sports, Hungarian weightlifting and boxing are close to being complete dead. Hungarian wresting has a shrinking talent pool as well and it might join weightlifting and boxing soon. The only Olympic sports where everything is going well are swimming, fencing and water polo. Hungarian sports in general are in a downward trend, at the time of insane luxury where seemingly training sport coaches are more important for the state than medical professionals or teachers.

Night Train >>> FlixBus I have done both when I traveled between Budapest and Warsaw. Nothing against FlixBus, but traveling in a bus for many hours or during the night isn't "my thing". It was impossible for me to sleep. I did the night train with the cheapest sitting tickets and it was much better for me than the bus. But obviously the couchette is preferable if you don't want to sit during the night.

Yeah, I am currently in Northwest Hungary. But only the Northeast part of country is getting proper snow, the weather is too warm in the West even at 21:00: https://www.idokep.hu/hoterkep

Yeah, that's true. But China was/is in a difficult spot with COVID, so at least they aren't at fault there.

Considering that we haven't even seen Russian athletes in most sport events for a year now and their country is quite segregated because of the war, I am not sure how they be trusted. I mean, even before the war the Russian anti-doping system was the most untrustworthy in the entire world, now it might as well not exist anymore. The only Russian athletes who should be considered as potential neutral participants are the ones who train outside of Russia, preferably in a country where a proper anti-doping system is in place.

Meanwhile here winter literally doesn't exist anymore. The mildest winter weather ever, barely any sign of snow, almost never under 0 Celsius during the day. I feel bad for all the children living here, they will never experience the kind of Hungarian winter that we still had a couple of decades ago.

It's always frustrating when an artists makes an album that's technically eligible for the Annual contest, but the lyrics that they adapting into their album aren't original, which makes them ineligible for Annual. I would be too afraid to send her anyway because this isn't something that ever gets a lot of points in a song contest, so she works as an example as something that I find too "out there" as a submission. But she (Deva) is on my radar just in case she makes something more mainstream in the future, she's already getting a lot of acclaim in the Hungarian music industry.

I mean, I don't want to oversell it, I just went with more well-known artists or popular artists recently since I flopped in Open 2020. The artists of the song that I am thinking of submitting are a bit less known than Carson Coma, but they are still kinda mainstream. I am not bold enough to go with something that goes completely against song contest conventions. (I will provide an example in the music thread)

I think I have found the Hungarian submission, but it might be my strangest submission since Open 2020. The Open 2020 Hungarian song got by far the fewest points since I joined this contest, so... I will have to figure out if I want to risk competing for the last place again.

For some reason the acoustic version of the Swedish song isn't blocked in the US and Canada, but the main music video is.

is in. I just have no idea what to send.

Well, I have never been to an athletics stadium of this size to watch athletics, so I just went with a higher seat to see everything. I imagine that for the morning sessions it won't matter anyway as the stadium won't be full, so you should be able to go to wherever you want, depending on what kind of event is happening. Maybe other users are more experienced with this stuff. Athletics is unique because the action is happening all over the place in the entire stadium and it's a quite large space. Maybe @Adriano knows more about this.

Well, I usually had homemade Hungarian food because it's cheaper that way. For tourists the most obvious answer is the Central Market Hall: It's very close to the stadium, only 15 minutes from there with Tram 2 . Google Maps

For now I am only planning to attend on Aug 20 as I don't live in Budapest currently, so I only bought tickets to those two sessions. I might change my mind later, but I didn't want to buy tickets to other sessions in advance. I am guessing that there will be tickets available anyway even during the summer if I change my mind. Well, @rafalgorka, the truth is that I am not that much of a drinks and foods person, in a sense that I never searched for the best places when I lived in Budapest as a uni student. But I did visit all the movie theaters there because that's where my priorities lie. Anyway, you should visit Kopaszi gát, it's literally next to the athletics stadium on the other side of the Danube: Google Maps It's a really nice place to take a walk. You should also be able to take picture of the stadium and the Danube there.

It has to start now because of the qualification tournaments. Any kind of debate over the ban in 2024 would make no sense because by that point most Russian athletes would have missed out on a bunch of qualification events and would have no chance winning quotas, unless they get some kind of wildcard, which would be even more insulting for Ukrainians than the ban lift.

You can't separate politics and sport at the time of such a major military conflict. If you think that this is comparable to the Korean War or the Vietnam War, or any other war since WW2 you are fooling yourself. It's the largest attempted landgrab in Europe since Hitler was defeated, the historical significance of such an event is massive and can't be brushed aside as just yet another war. Making a "safe space" out of the Olympics would be foolish. And yes, every Russian athlete, every Russian citizen is culpable. I say this as a Hungarian who knows that the fact that I am living in Hungary supports Orbán's system, regardless of how much I hate him. Russia is exactly like Hungary, just on steroids. They are all guilty, just like I will be guilty of being part of Orbán's regime if he does something truly awful, no matter how many times I vote against him. Putin isn't doing this alone. If Russia is like Hungary, the country is rotten to its core. People need to take responsibility for the actions of their nation if they live there and they are part of its society. Putin would have never started this war if the Russian society wouldn't accept such an action.

My view hasn't changed on this. Once you cross a bridge, you won't back down until things have settled. The debate on Russia and Belarus should have ended the moment IOC announced the ban. If they make exceptions now it would make it seem that the West is weak and the Russians are winning. The fact of the matter is that you can't separate the Russian athletes from their state, it's impossible. Just like you can't separate Hungarian athletes from the Orbán system. Russian athletes are all collectively part of the nationalistic state and get money from it. If they despise the state, seek refugee status in the West or anywhere in the world where you can hide from Putin. The antiwar sentiment of any Russian athlete means absolutely nothing if they are still sponsored by the Russian state.

The Olympics is ultimately a competition of nations, proving which of them are the best in certain Olympic sports. The ATP/WTA Tour are the literal opposite of the Games, it's a professional individual sport, it's about the achievement of individual players, not about nations. Which is why it's so strange to see professional tennis players at the Games because that's the only time when they truly compete for their nation outside of the Davis and BJK Cup. The more professional a sport becomes, it's seen more and more as just an entertainment industry thing that's separated from the nationalistic side of view of sports.

With each match the Hungarian team proves that they shouldn't be in Paris. Iceland will probably get another chance to prove that they are a better team than us.