OlympicsFan

Alpine skiing - No combined - Different format for the team event: Only two athletes per nation and both race once on the blue and once on the red course. Biathlon - Drop the pursuit - Make the races "more different". At least one event should clearly favor good shooters and one should clearly favor good skiers. Bobsleigh - Monobob and two-man for both men and women Cross-country skiing Relay: Don't change anything Team sprint: One leg freestyle, the other leg classic style 7.5/10 km classic style interval/mass start (maybe alternate between interval start and mass start every olympics) 7.5/10 km freestyle interval/mass start Classic style sprint Freestyle sprint Alternative: Completely get rid of classic style and only have freestyle events. Curling Absurd to say that this is the sport with the most depth ... Don't really have any thoughts about this sport, but 3 events seems like enough. Figure skating Get rid of the team event and the ice dance Freestyle skiing Get rid of mixed aerials and include mixed ski cross (or get rid of mixed snowboardcross, makes zero sense to have mixed snowboardcross but not mixed ski cross) Hockey No thoughts Luge Drop the relay and maybe add women's doubles (or drop men's doubles and add mixed doubles at some point after 2026) Nordic Combined Either only have a normal hill competition (same in ski jumping -> Less costs building only one hill) or make the two individual competitions more distinct so that one clearly favors good jumpers and the other clearly favors good skiers. Also maybe add a women's event and a mixed event (overall this sport shouldn't have more than 4 events). Short track speed skating Too many events, completely absurd that this sport and speed skating combine for a billion events. If the alpine skiing combined event is dropped, then this sport and alpine skiing have the same number of events!!! I would drop the 1000 m race and maybe also the relays or the mixed relay. Skeleton Not sure how a relay would work in this sport, probably would be best to keep everything the same. Ski Jumping Maybe add a women's team event and drop the men's large hill competition. No point in building two hill just for the olympics. Snowboarding Program seems fine. Only thing i would do is find a common scoring system for the ski freestyle/snowboard events. Sometimes adding the top 2 scores and sometimes only taking the best score is pretty confusing (especially for the casual viewer). Speed Skating I would only have the following events: 500 m m/w 1500 m m/w 5000 m m/w Team pursuit m/w Maybe mixed relay/pursuit

Hoping for a Repinc vs. Grotian battle on the women's side. A bit surprised that those two won't compete at junior level. The italians also look good as usual and the norwegians are unpredictable since none of them have any recent results. On the men's side things look less predictable, although Betemps should be the favorite. Engelmann from Germany and Trojer from Slovenia look like interesting talents as well. Also a guy named "Sivert Björndalen" will be competing as well ...

Biathlon junior worlds and cross-country skiing junior/U23 worlds will start soon. I'll try to watch some of that. Will try to figure out who might be the stars of 2026.

Only natural that the interest in the olympic has decreased. IOC did their best to achieve that. I would be surprised if there wouldn't be a turnaround for 2024. The competition times will be much better for european times + the host is not controversial + fans will probably be back.

1) I think your trend in speed skating at the olympics is negative (2014 -> 2018 -> 2022). The Netherlands should remain dominant, but not sure by how much. 2) A medal in a 4th sport (snowboard) wasn't impossible and your prospects there look good. Not sure about skeleton though. So again winning medals in at least 3 different sports in 2026 looks definitely realistic.

I think their first spot is safe. I don't see any chance for the US, but maybe Russia can do it. Russia has a lot of potential to improve on their gold medal count in speed skating, biathlon and women's cross-country skiing. The norwegian dominance in women's cross-country skiing might end, but i think they have a very bright future in speed skating (especially on the men's side), nordic combined, alpine skiing (especially on the men's side) and of course biathlon. No other nation than Germany has won more than 11 golds at the last 3 olympics and i think Germany doesn't have the potential to win many more golds, while Norway will probably win 12+ golds even if they completely flop. I think climate change will lead to their dominance in sports like biathlon, cross-country skiing or alpine skiing becoming even bigger. The exciting part is that noone can really make any solid predictions about what will happen in 4 years. 4 years ago absolutely noone would have predicted Schouten and Roeiseland to become this dominant.

Something that really bothers me about Roeiseland: She never finished higher than 12th in the overall world cup before turning 28 and then she suddenly became superhuman. Also: What are the odds of Boe becoming the winter olympian with the most golds in 2026?

Pretty much confirms most of what i already thought. Only surprised to see that Austria and Russia apparently "underperformed". Italy, Finland, Slovenia and Sweden had close to perfect olympics and Canada won tons of surprising medals. The fact that Canada won so few golds might have something do with them not having many gold medal favorites. It also has to be said that some of those results used as a reference are from 3 years back, so not sure how relevant they still are. For example german biathlon was in a very different spot back then (when Laura Dahlmeier, Simon Schempp and Arnd Peiffer were still active). Edit: About the italian medal tally: I actually think that Italy has a lot of room for improvement in biathlon and alpine skiing. Even without the new sports/events they might go for 20+ medals.

Overall a better than expected result for Germany, although some sports (mainly snowboard and ski jumping) still underperformed. Cross-country skiing and skeleton were probably the biggest overperformers. I think this is pretty much the ceiling for Germany for now and it is almost incredible for Germany to be doing this good while being pretty much nonexistant in the sports with the most medals (alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, biathlon, short track, speed skating, freestyle skiing, snowboard)*. There is some hope in some of those sports (as always), but i don't expect the german medal tally in those sports to be much better in 4 years so the german success probably will again mainly depend on the material in sliding events. Some medal statistics: Number of different sports countries medalled in: Russia: 10 Canada/Norway/Germany: 9 Italy/USA: 8 Japan: 7 France/Austria/Sweden/China: 6 Number of different sports countries won a gold medal in: Norway/Germany/Sweden: 6 USA/China: 5 Canada: 4 Austria/France/Japan: 3 Russia/Netherlands/Switzerland/Italy/Finland/New Zealand: 2 Athletes with the most golds: J. Boe 4 Bolshunov/Roeiseland/Schouten/Johaug 3 (17 athletes had 2 golds) Athletes with the most medals: J. Boe/Bolshunov/Roeiseland/Fillon Maillet 5 Schouten/T. Boe/Klaebo/Schulting/Takagi 4 Johaug/Latypov/Dahlqvist/Shaogang Liu/Weidemann/Sundling/I. Niskanen/Nepryaeva/Eckhoff/Dubois/E. Öberg/Fontana/Minjeong Choi/Strolz/Gu/Grabaak Interesting that: a) Two dutch athletes won 4 medals while no german/american/swiss athlete won more than 2 medals b) An athlete from Hungary won more medals than the most successful german/american athlete Edit*: I just looked at the distribution of german (gold) medals: Number of medal events in alpine skiing + biathlon + cross-country skiing + freestyle skiing + short track + snowboard + speed skating: 81 Number of german (gold) medals in those events: 6 (2) Number of medals events in all other sports: 27 Number of german (gold) medals in those events: 21 (10)

1) Not sure why this sport needs saving. Would be way more sensible to get rid of it (or only give olympics to countries with existing tracks). 2) We saw in 2014 that it isn't impossible for FES (german institute that develops the bobs) to produce a shitty bob and if that happens again german athletes will have a very hard time to even win a medal.

You were talking about "the germans", so how was anyone supposed to read this as "not Friedrich"? If you were talking about Hafer: He had a different bob. People who watched the race must have realized that he constantly lost time in the last part of the race even without hitting any walls and even in comparison to Kripps.

Nice of Germany to not sweep another podium and gift Canada a medal. Kripps should probably hand his medal over to the german officials who decided to give Hafer an older bob. Too bad that Germany had clearly inferior material in 2014, otherwise Friedrich might have gone for 8 golds.

Crazy how delusional you are ... Friedrich always has been considered a generational talent, he could probably beat a grandpa like Kripps racing in a salad bowl. It was the same after womens monobob when canadian fans thought that Humphries could seriously win gold in womens 2-man.

Also part of the gold belongs to New Zealand (one of the scottish players was born there).

I think you can have 4 DNF and still win.

A bit of a mess up by IOC to first tell everyone that only athletes who actually raced will get medals, just to go back on that shortly before the race (according to german TV). Germany didn't want to take any chances, so they used their replacement (Rauchfuss) instead of Strasser in the final.

Happy that Dürr and Straßer won a medal after all, but sad that Aicher will also get a medal. A bit tragic that Dürr again missed gold by 0.19 seconds as she already did in the slalom. Perfect end to the olympics for Austria, they simply couldn't do no wrong here. One of their best ever olympics with such a mediocre team (especially on the women's side) shows how incredibly lucky they were here. They easily won 6 or 7 more medals than they deserved.

Yes, this is why FIS should change the rules. Only have one man and one woman per nation and have all athletes race on both courses. Would also help nations like Slovenia or Sweden who don't quite have the depth.

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I am happy that Germany made the semifinal, but if Switzerland would have competed with their best team they probably would have won. On paper it should be gold for Austria, silver for USA and bronze for Germany. Too bad that Dürr will race against Shiffrin, would have been better for her to face Moltzan.

Hopefully. I think Russia will set a record for their most medals ever. Clearly they have no intention to stop their doping program. The best would be to just exclude all athletes who are stationed in Russia.

Pretty interesting to look at the number of different sports nations won medals in. The following nations won medals in 3 different sports: Australia Slovenia Netherlands ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Switzerland (and without Scherrer's bronze in men's snowboard halfpipe, they only would have won medals in 2 different sports) Also here is the list of nations that have won medals in more different sports than Italy: Norway, Russia, Canada

I asked myself that question yesterday (kind of*). I think even if it would be possible to do on purpose, noone in gold medal position would risk "only" winning silver by messing up. * I asked myself if theoretically it would still be possible for Germany to win the medal table by winning multiple golds in the same event and then i asked myself in which sports/events it would be the easiest to tie for gold on purpose.

Women's team pursuit: No, at least Japan was a bigger favorite. Kingsbury: 1 billion percent he wasn't the biggest favorite. Maybe/probably the favorite, but he didn't even win the last world cup before the olympics. Snowboard slopestyle: I think there were many gold medal contenders (McMorris, Parrot, Toutant, Su Yiming, Gerard, Kleveland), but overall a canadian gold probably seemed most likely. Canadian men were probably/possibly favorite in snowboard slopestyle and moguls, but certainly not overwhelming favorites. Canada might have been expected to win 1 or 2 more golds, but i am not sure if it was reasonable to expect more medals overall. Canada won tons of surprising medals.

Yes, but the logical conclusion should be to shorten the games. I think a more compact TV schedule would be appreciated by most (casual) TV viewers. There are clearly less winter sports and clearly less people who practice winter sports. It would be only logical for the duration of the games to reflect that. Obviously IOC would claim that less airtime would mean less money (which it probably would), but since the athletes get pretty much jack shit anyways, it would only hurt people who don't do anything to help the sport anyways.