Jinzha

And in a video on TeamNL's youtube channel I heard that they were already on the plane back home the same night or maybe the morning after, with the Argentinian team on the same plane.

I agree, the international nature of the forum is what appeals to me. I love reading about what Irish, Greek, Polish, Brazilian, Italian, etc, etc. athletes achieve!

I already have savings put apart to go to Paris 2024! I'm honestly just as worried about getting a place to stay as getting tickets. Surely every apartment/airbnb and even hotel will be sold out in 2023 already.

So I made in my prediction a range from pessimistic to optimistic. Turns out I wasn't optimistic enough after all! Update of my prediction from earlier this year: Archery: 0-1 -> 1 Athletics: 0-3 -> 8 Cycling road: 2-3 -> 4 Cycling track: 3-5 -> 6 BMX: 1-2 -> 2 Mountainbike: 1 -> 0 Field hockey: 1-2 -> 1 Artistic gymnastics: 0 -> 0 Handball: 0 -> 0 Judo: 1-2 -> 1 Rowing: 3-5 -> 5 Sailing: 3-4 -> 3 Swimming: 0-3 -> 3 Suprise medal: 1-3 -> 2 Total: 16-34 -> 36 Only one medal below the pessimistic range, because I foolishly put Van der Poel as a guaranteed medal and not Bol or Hassan. From the optimistic ranges only men's hockey team, a judo medal and one more sailing medal (De Geus in RS:X women) missed out. The surprise medals happened mostly within the already mentioned sports, but the two missing from the list were Fontijn (boxing) and Van der Vleuten (horse jumping). The 8 athletics medals are the huge outlier that I did not predict and in road and track cycling I had not considered medals for Dumoulin and Braspenninx.

Super happy for Bonevacia winning silver! Absolutely amazing athletics tournament for us

Looks like I misspelled Harrie Lavreysens name. Other than that I got 8/9 right!

Will Europe have 4 quotas because France gets a guaranteed slot? Or will there be only 2 other quotas available? That's going to be a very fierce battle to even reach the Olympics.

Results: 2 gold, 1 silver, 2 bronze and a fourth place. Not bad I guess!

Wait, Hassan is human after all? This was not according to plan!

You know, I really agree with you here. I love that we're getting huge amounts of medals, but in the end medal factories like rowing, sailing and track cycling don't have anywhere near the societal impact and involvement as big team sports like football and field hockey (at least for the Dutch). I hope we keep funding team sports and hopefully our 2008 women's water polo will get a successor soon with another team gold by someone other than the women hockey team.

I wonder how much France will improve in swimming. They recently signed Dutch coach Jacco Verhaeren. He had various roles as a coach and technical director in Dutch swimming from roughly 2000 to 2014 (Van den Hoogenband, De Bruijn, Kromowidjojo, etc.) and then joined the Australian swimming team which was super succesful these games. I believe he's one of the best Dutch coaches/managers in sports in general!

Tomorrow is a huge day for the Netherlands actually! Field hockey women final Track cycling men sprint final Track cycling women madison Athletics 1500m final (Hassan) Boxing semi final (Fontijn) Other than that, it's mostly track cycling yeah Edit: individual sprint of course, not team sprint.

I actually believe this incredible athletics tournament by the Dutch is not a fluke at all. It's a concentrated effort by NOC*NSF and the Atletiekunie (national athletics federation) to lift our Athletics to a higher level. They attracted succesful Suisse coach Meuwly for 'Project 400' to improve our elite performances in 400m running. They followed the example of our swimming team (4x100m freestyle women) by creating a relay group that drives each other to greater heights. The project then struck gold by assigning talented young coach Peters as Meuwly's assistent and with the introduction of talents like Bol, Klaver, Angela and others the entire 400m group has found an incredible flow. Peters was actually Bol's youth coach (age 15-16 I believe) and he wanted to grow with her, so he was studying for the elite coaching papers when this 400m project started. Then there's the succes in heptathlon, which has traditionally been the focus event for our athletics federation (Schippers, Visser, Broersen, Vetter and now Oosterwegel). The stars aligned with incredible performances and a barrage of PB's in Tokyo. But Vetter has proven before that she has what it takes to medal internationally before and Oosterwegel has improved steadily since youth tournaments and her international debut in Doha 2019. The federation has put a solid structure into place for talented athletes to develop in a highly professional environment in our national sports centre in Papendal. We still consistently send heptathletes and decathletes to European youth tournaments and it's only a matter of time that a small percentage of them manage to reach the elite level. That Hassan came to the Netherlands after leaving Ethiopia is a coincidence or 'fluke', I'll give you that. But from there her talent was recognised early and she integrated into a highly professional distance running environment. The management bureau of former Dutch marathon runner Jos Hermens is the biggest in the world of distance running, although they don't necessarily focus on developing Dutch distance running. Even if coincidence played a role, Hassan's development as a runner is the result of her incredible talent and drive, good management and conscious decisions. A fluke to me would be if Bol medalled only because Muhammad hit a hurdle or if Vetter only medalled because of KJT's unfortunate exit, neither of those are the case. This success is the result of the hard work, good decisions and dedication of the athletes and all staff involved.

What a day this was! I never expected medals for Braspenninx and Oosterwegel! A beautiful gold, silver and bronze! Before the Games the only serious medal chances I saw for this day were the hockey men team and Van Schip in omnium. Little did I know!

These are two of the best and most unexpected medals of the whole Games. I couldn't sit down during this 800m race, what a beautiful day!!