Makedonas

Her ITF profile still says Russia though? Two teenage tennis players, Yaroslava Bartashevich (WTA no. 846) switched to France and Elena Korokozidi (WTA no. 859) switched to Greece. Korokozidi clearly has a Greek surname so I'm not surprised. Also, it looks like she now lives in Greece for the last year or so and has a Greek coach.

TEAM GREECE Men: 60m: Ioannis Nyfantopoulos (GS Eleftherios Venizelos) 800m: Christos Kotitsas (Alexandros Makedonias) 60m Hurdles: Konstantinos Douvalidis (GS Eleftherios Venizelos) High Jump: Antonios Merlos (PAOK) Pole Vault: Emmanouil Karalis (Olympiacos) Long Jump: Miltiadis Tentoglou (GS Kifisias) Triple Jump: Nikolaos Andrikopoulos (Ameinias Mesogeion), Andreas Pantazis (AO Megaron), Dimitrios Tsiamis (Olympiacos) Women: 60m: Polyniki Emmanouilidou (Alexandros Makedonias), Rafailia Spanoudaki (GS Ilioupolis) 400m: Andrianna Ferra (Pannaxiakos), Irini Vasiliou (Ameinias Mesogeion) 3000m: Anastasia Marinakou (Panathinaikos) 60m Hurdles: Anais Karagianni (AEK), Elisavet Pesiridou (GS Ilioupolis) Pole Vault: Nikoleta Kyriakopoulou (AGES Kameiros 2009), Ekaterini Stefanidi (AO Filotheis) Triple Jump: Spyridoula Karydi (AO Kallistos) Tatiana Gusin also qualified in the high jump but withdrew due to injury. Surprised to see Ferra here as she has not yet competed in 2023. Tentoglou is a big favourite for gold. Karalis and Stefanidi also should have chances for medals. It's crazy to see Tsiamis still competing at a high level at age 41. I have high hopes for our teenager Emmanouilidou, who improved her PB this season three times, from 7.49 to 7.39, then to 7.37, and then 7.30.

Greece used to always do that too, I'm glad we seem to have stopped doing that in recent years.

Also I want to add that when Petrounias wins his gymnastics WC gold medals, a lot of people will like/comment/share his posts but I bet you 95% of them have never watched his routines and just celebrate the gold medals, pretending to be such big fans. I am not sure if it is like this in other countries too or just Greeks. Even with tennis, to watch most matches of Tsitsipas you have to pay more money for the channels that show tennis regularly, or go to a cafe/bar that has the channels. It's the same for many other sports in Greece as well so it's really hard for "new" sports to become popular. Roland Garros is the only tournament shown on public TV every year, so you can imagine how big it was in 2021 to have one player in the final and one in the semifinals. Everyone was watching, but since then a lot of these people don't want to pay more money to be able to watch tennis. Also the biggest Greek sports website has an article about Ginnis' medal and there are 0 comments on it. For contrast, Femke Bol's WR article got 9 comments so far, and Medvedev winning Rotterdam ATP 500 got 1 comment, so I'm not really exaggerating when I say no one is talking about him.

Unfortunately no one is really talking about it. I mean I didn't even know these WC were happening until after I read the news that he won the medal. It will be really hard for this sport to get more exposure although this is definitely a step in the right direction. He said in an interview recently that he is a big fan of Tsitsipas and wants to do in alpine skiing what Tsitsipas did for tennis in Greece, although he is already 28 so it will be hard to achieve something like that. Honestly when I heard the news today, I expected more of a reaction on social media but it's basically been forgotten just a few hours later and overshadowed by the AEK vs PAOK derby in football and Cup final in basketball...not to mention we had the National Indoor Championships in athletics where everyone was looking to see what Tentoglou would do today. Sakkari posted about Ginnis on her Instagram but other than that I have not yet seen any famous person mention this. When Korakaki for example wins shooting WC medals, again there is very little interest generally, so I guess we shouldn't be too surprised... That is correct. At the Winter Olympics our best result ever was 13th place. I hope Ginnis can break this record. He missed Beijing 2022 due to injury unfortunately. The people on the ice hockey roster are actually Greeks from Greece, not from the Greek diaspora, so that basically confirms the level must have been extremely low those years if we were able to win medals

Another NR, this time it's in a much more important event, Emmanouil Karalis 5.86 in the men's pole vault! His PB was 5.83 from a few weeks ago and the NR was 5.85 from 2017 (Konstantinos Filippidis). The outdoor NR is 5.91 from 2015 (also Filippidis), so now he is trying to pass that too. So far he missed his first attempt at 5.92.

GREECE Amanda Tenfjord, Evangelia - AMAN

Less than one week later, another NR for her, this time in the 3000m indoor race walk at the National Championships. With 12:18.26, she broke her own NR from 2021 (12:21.43) and is also WL in this event.

The draw sizes in Linz and Lyon for example were 32 for singles and 16 for doubles, but they played both finals on the same day.

Thanks for explaining, but why would they play the doubles final the same day as the singles semifinals? It should be played the same day as the singles final in my opinion. Also what if the singles final is a quick match, then these fans bought tickets just to watch less than an hour of tennis? Should have both finals on the same day. That's how it normally is at WTA events anyways.

Well to begin with it seems difficult because she plays an early match in SF even though she finished after midnight local time. Meanwhile Kudermetova vs Swiatek is later even though one played the first match of QF and the other didn't even play... Reminds me of Guadalajara where Maria had to play SF and F in one day, while her opponent in the final (ironically also Pegula) did not have to.

Today in Doha, Azarenka wasted a 6-1 4-1 lead against Bencic (lost 6-1 6-7 4-6) and Ostapenko wasted a 5-2 lead in the third set against Pegula (lost 5-7)

He had a lot to say about this: And then a few hours later after writing "I don't care about an 8.40 jump...I can jump it whenever the fuck I want," he jumps 8.41 Also a lot of big names in the sport commented agreeing with him.

She won in the end although Zheng hit the shot of the year in the second set. The article just says that she added Tillstrom to her team in addition to Tom Hill, and that Hill will still be the main coach. I understand why she wants to keep him, he made her top 3 from a top 50 player and even though her results lately are more up and down, her highs are still very high and her level is generally much higher than it was in 2018 when they started working together for example.

Very special for Greece that the Chiefs won, as one of their players (George Karlaftis) was born and raised in Athens! He moved to the United States when he was in high school and started playing American football. Before that, he was a water polo player on our junior national teams! It's crazy to see Greeks doing well lately in "popular global" sports which were not big in our country like tennis (Tsitsipas and Sakkari), alpine skiing (Ginnis), American football (Karlaftis), NBA (Antetokounmpo, okay we were always good at basketball but didn't have an NBA star, only Euroleague stars or NBA bench players). What is next? F1? Golf? Figure skating?

After an amazing end to their campaign, winning 3 games in a row, Poland still failed to qualify @Monzanator @rafalgorka @Adriano @rybak

Your girls beat Slovenia!

For many years she didn't schedule properly, she would almost never play 250s when she was ranked in the 20s and 30s, she scheduled like a top 10 player for years before she was one. Then once she suddenly became top 10 she had only one title to her name, and it became somewhat of a mental thing. Had she played more 250s in 2019, 2020, 2021 etc., I wonder if she would've won more of them.

Athletics (1) Antigoni Drisbioti (women's 20km walk)

Antigoni Drisbioti qualifies for Paris 2024! New NR in the women's 20km walk of 1:28:12! The previous NR of 1:28:58 was from 2004! Drisbioti's previous PB was 1:29:03 from 2022, and the Olympic standard was 1:29:20. Really incredible for her to be doing this at her age, she will be 39 next month! And she'll be 40 in Paris!

Not that it matters, but these were the National Championships, not "One Day Race Walking Match"

Also I don't know if this is the right place to say it, but the Greek media is really shameful. Some Greek media outlets barely acknowledge the matches she wins, but then love to publicize the matches she loses and exaggerate them in some way. She has 8 wins and 3 losses this year, but most people in Greece who are brainwashed by the media will think she has lost most of the matches she's played this year...it's really shameful! Of course it is not a coincidence that they treat her this way when she is dating the Prime Minister's son.

In the end some of these WCs were wrong (I saw on Wikipedia so forgive me), however, they are still making Pliskova play qualifying. So ridiculous. I saw the match, I don't think she played poorly, Martic was really good and served brilliantly. Maria gets a lot of criticism for her SF record although last year she won 4 semifinals and lost 3, so I think she has overcome that now. Now she needs to fix the problem of finals, where she has 1 win and 6 losses. The only bad loss she had in a final was against Sherif in Parma. The St. Petersburg loss stung because she was up 5-2 (one break) in the third set but Kontaveit played well indoors at that time and was winning every tournament on the surface. When she won in Rabat 2019, which people always make jokes about, she was not even expected to win and actually had a really tough draw (defending champion and top seed Mertens in QF, and then Konta in F, who went on to make the Rome F and Roland Garros SF that year). I think if she keeps putting herself into these positions she will win more titles, but WTA has stupid rules that limits top 10 players from playing many 250s in a season, whereas on the ATP for example guys like Ruud and Sinner are able to play endless 250s and inflate their trophy cabinets...

I just hope that they can keep this up once the ranking points start counting for OG qualification. Georgiadou has a real shot at a medal in Paris, which is crazy because she was a nobody until the last 1.5 years or so, now she is a top fencer in her 30s! Of course the other alternative is to qualify in the team event, which will be difficult but we keep improving so you never know.