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Is it actually? Juries should be professional and not give points for any other reason than good music. Italy and France in 1st and 2nd should be an example for Germany, UK and Spain trying to skate through with what was mostly shit performances for years. They can also look at the qualification system, perhaps they would get more love from Eurofans if they were not afraid of trying their luck out in the semi-finals. If they felt what it's like to fight for qualification, maybe they would try harder for their finals.

It's not like you tend to get more than 20 points if you're a country that won last year anyways. It's a pretty solid tune though .

Yesterday in Birštonas, Andrius Gudžius took the WL with a 68.62 in the discus. Same competition, Indrė Jakubaitytė improved on her W45 Javelin World Record that she achieved a week ago, it's now 54.56.

Danas Rapšys is unhappy with his performance here, but is very glad that he could use the European Championships as a rehearsal and that gives the opportunity for him and his coach to analyse what went wrong and fix these details so that he would be ready for OG.

Time to throw some shade and some praise: - Easily the best performance of the night, superb songwriting and atmosphere, stage presence is brilliant as well, you can feel their years of stage experience through the screen. - One of the small amount of performances where it seemed that nothing went wrong, not the biggest fan of the song, but the staging is really well done, vocals on point and they didn't give me a reason to doubt them. - One of the best songwriting in this year's competition, but there's still a lot of work to be done before the final, vocals slightly off, whistle notes were a huge gamble and they didn't pay-off yesterday. Hitting them is cool, but if the notes slip away from you, then it's pointless. - The staging feels thought out, but some of the camera angles could be a little bit better planned, not many places where you can slip up vocally, because it's not a very technical song. I don't think it's a winner, because when the drop hits, it just doesn't have the magic of 2020 both musically and choreographically. Also, agreed with @dcro, it's not aging well, I've been exposed to this song far too much. - Low ceiling, high floor type of performance. Nothing went wrong, the singing is on point, but the whole thing just has filler vibes, but in this very weak edition of Eurovision, this is still one of the better things out there. - Really good vocals, but a really annoying song. I'm done with "men are stupid idiots" type of lyrics and the fact that it is celebrated in today's culture. No, you're not too good to be true, Destiny, you're just a person. Also, it seems like she avoided some of notes she was trying to hit for the jury show. Perhaps she's saving it for the final or she thought it was too high of a risk. - I don't think that I like this song, but the energy and charisma of Manizha really lifts this up. - Can't really separate these three. The three tits and asses out performances of the night. Cyprus with the best staging, Azerbaijan with the best vocals, Croatia with the best songwriting, all three with lyrics that aren't in any way meaningful or captivating. - One of the best songs from semifinal 1, but the performer couldn't handle moving around on the stage and there were a lot of issues leading up to the performance for her, so she went in with zero confidence and you could feel it. - Ireland tried to go for a cool stage aesthetic, but I don't know if it worked for me. I guess she tried to make the performance cute. If she did a better job with vocals, could have been a qualifier for me. - Very bland song, the performer is pretty pitchy throughout, this only qualified because it's Sweden. - Doomed by not being there, vocals really on point, but the song really gets lost amongst the others, because it lacks the special factor to make it stand out. Also, I always thought she was trying to make me strip, but the lyrics are actually 'time to take off your cloaks' and not clothes. - Disney could use this for their Tarzan remake, when they eventually decide to make one. - Sadly one of those songs where you have to look at the list of participants to remember that she was even there. Also, my producer said that you can sing Adele's "Hello" on top of it, so there's that. But in Slovenia's defence, you can sing a lot of pop songs on the Cyprus entry, ranging from Lady Gaga to Rita Ora.

Ryan O'Shaughnessy and Molly Sterling are easily the two best performers that Ireland have sent in the last decade.

Lithuania has been really struggling with qualifications for Olympic Games recently. With canoe sprint and rowing bombing out, there is finally good news with Andrius Šidlauskas swimming a qualifying time in the 200m Breaststroke. Now he's in two disciplines and he's probably the starter of our relay as well.

Don't ask me this question, I would delete half of the Olympics to accommodate more boats

NICE, then we will be able to not qualify double the amount of times, YES Honestly, the amount of boats they cut in this OG and destroying the sprint disciplines really effin doomed us.

I'm late to the discussion, but I think that 3 swimmers from the same nation should be able to qualify to the semi-final and the final. If a country can do a clean sweep, it's a huge achievement and it is also a very rare achievement, but I'd like to have every country have the chance to compete for every medal in the discipline. It is also a huge advantage to the competitors from other countries when for example and Italian, Hungarian, Russian etc. swimmer has to give it their all in the morning session to qualify, while other athletes get to chill. I'd also be up for singles and doubles to get 2 boats in rowing and canoeing and limit it to 1 only for quadruples and eights, but my dreams are never going to be coming true.

Andrius Šidlauskas really overperformed here with that 6th place. Happy for him and hoping for the best in the 200m Breaststroke. Also, I wonder if Teterevkova is strong enough to get into Olympics as well. She got a PB by 0.01s in the swim-off this morning. Though if I remember correctly, she's more of a morning swimmer.

Nice, Šidlauskas snuck into the final Perhaps this good form will help him snag a 200m Breaststroke OQT

Oh jeez, Danas Rapšys is really looking wasted, I thought he would be an easy contender for a medal in the Olympics, now I'm not so sure anymore...

LITHUANIAN NATIONAL RECORD ALERT Anyways, I decided to be a little bit fancy today with this extra presentation, but today Agnė Lukoševičiūtė broke her own hammer throw record by more than 5 metres. The new Lithuanian women's hammer throw record is now 66.09m and this was the first competition for Agnė after a long covid hiatus. It also got her a huge sum of Olympic qualification points and she is actually now on the radar of athletes that could have a chance at an Olympic quota and nobody really expected that it could happen this year, but if she keeps throwing around the 66 metre mark in a few other important competitions, she really has a good shot. Edit: also, forgot to mention that this was historically the weakest discipline for Lithuanian athletics of all time and could only have been compared to our pole vaulting. If we go back two-three years, the women's hammer throw record was below 50 metres.

Second time in history that Lithuania qualifies to the European Championships. The first time it was 1998, finishing 9th.

Everybody's acting like we won the entire championship, yet there are still mathematical equations of how every group has to play out for Lithuania to have a chance at passing as the 3rd best team in that same article

Yeah, the media is all crazy about it even today

So did they really just yeet Sanfilippo out of the team? First Oberhofer, then Runggaldier, then Gontier and now her.

Lithuania's athletics summer season is starting to get into gear. Today and tomorrow there's a long throw Lithuanian championships that is usually held in the middle of spring as the first event for discus, javelin and hammer throwers. Edis Matusevičius and Liveta Jasiūnaitė skipped the event, so there won't be anything promising tomorrow, but everybody took part in the discus and hammer. Women's Discus was really sub-par, because no one threw over 60 metres, but Andrius Gudžius season opener in the discus was 66.06. So that's a pretty decent start.

This poll is unfair, I love rowing and swimming equally

Lithuania just held a championship for swimmers born in 2007-2009 Žygimantas Tautvydas broke the U13 national records in 50m, 100m, 200m Freestyle, Augustė Jakštaitė in 100m and 200m backstroke as well. So many age group records have fallen over the past couple of years and it's mostly credited to Meilutytė's Olympic run. The facilities improved a lot, the state started running a programme teaching children to swim and a fair few of them continue to do it professionally, so nearly every U13, U15 and U17 record has been bettered in the past decade. Really interesting how all of these swimmers will translate the results into senior competition.

Honestly, I couldn't care less about all of the team sports in and out of the Olympics and I'm usually not the biggest fan of relays in sports as well. Perhaps this feeling comes from the fact that I'm from a small country where you mostly get 1-2 good athletes per sport, so you never really produce that many competitive teams in anything. We never qualify anywhere apart from basketball, but even if we did, I much more prefer supporting individual athletes than I do teams, so I would definitely delete a sport or two to give additional Olympic quotas in some sports or add a few disciplines to sports that are already there.

In case anyone is interested in translating for themselves, this is from the POV of Brigita Virbalytė-Dimšienė. Fun fact, Drahotova after the European Championships started training together with Brigita. She added a lot of thoughts that everybody behind the scenes were talking about Drahotova's former coach and how untrustworthy he seemed as well as adding that everyone knew it was strange that an 18/19yo race-walker was posting these amazing results. She also talked about how she got the news from her coach that her training partner is suspended and that she is now the likely recipient of the bronze medal.

Didn't want to get ahead of myself, but now that the information is official: Anežka Drahotova, Czech 20km walking star is probably going to be suspended as she was tested positive for doping 12 days before the European Championships in 2018. Which would mean that Brigita Virbalytė-Dimšienė would be bumped up to bronze and Živilė Vaiciukevičiūtė (already retired) would be up to 4th place in the championships. Test A was positive and test B is going to be examined at a further date, but seems like the results are almost set in stone.

Oh wow. The feeling of wonder got kinda smashed for me, when I just heard that Husavik was really modelled around "Never Enough" from The Greatest Showman. I had to listen to a cover of "Never Enough" by one of our possible clients in songwriting and I was like wait, this is not Husavik?