Makedonas

"Stephania Haralabidis" Still hurts whenever I see her playing for USA, she was born in Greece and lived her whole life in Greece until she was 17 and we let her go so easily

@maestro @George_D @Yannakis Great start for our young athletes so far at the European U23 Championships in athletics and at the World U23 Championships in rowing. I am very impressed with some of the performances so far, and the next few days should be quite exciting. Also our men's U15 water polo team is currently in the semifinals of the European Championships. They already beat Serbia and Italy. Hopefully all of this success we had in youth tournaments in recent years will eventually happen in the men's category too. However I am a little cautious after how well our girls did from 2012 to 2015 or so, and so far all we got from them was a silver medal at the 2018 European Championships at the women's level.

Did South Africa withdraw yet?

BRONZE FOR MOUZENIDIS! A good start for Greece already. 19.41 isn’t that impressive (his PB and SB are 19.92) but still nice to be on the podium. This is now his fourth medal in a big competition (U18/U20/U23) but I expect more from him going forward. He needs to improve a lot the next few years if he wants to make it to Paris. I know he had injuries which stalled his progress, but I still expected him to do better the last few years. Perhaps my expectations were too high…

Men: Papakonstantinou I think will win a medal. He is very experienced and has won some medals before, and he also won his heat yesterday. I don't expect much from Faitas and Zografos. They're really young but if they can make the final I think it would be good. They are 18 and 20 so they will have more chances at this event. Palaiopanos and Stergiakas are good and experienced. Palaiopanos has won some medals before, but in the men's pair, and Stergiakas won gold in this event in 2018 but we haven't seen him for the national team since then, so it's nice to see him back. They won their heat today which I guess shows that they should win a medal too. I think our men's four are too inexperienced. We won bronze in that event at the European U23s last year, but only one of them is back now (Boukouvalas). Another one is now too old (Kalandaridis), and one switched to the double sculls (Palaiopanos). The fourth member is Palaiopanos' brother, so I'm not sure why he's not in the team this year. Would've been nice to see Stasinos and Makrygiannis here as they won a medal at the European Junior Championships last year and are now too old for that category, but I guess they're still young. Maybe next year... Women: Anastasiadou won gold last year at the European U23 as an 18 year old, but the entry list here is quite strong so I was concerned. However, she dominated her heat today and some others I expected to do better didn't, so now I'm more confident about her medal chances. I was surprised to see Arabatzi with Fragkou as Arabatzi is a lightweight rower, but they dominated their heat today which was a nice surprise. Both just 18 years old. The Varelopoulou sisters also did really well in their heat, lost first place right at the end but still qualified directly for the final which is nice. I didn't expect them to do so well. I'm disappointed that some of the other good U23 girls like Christodoulidis, Noni, Agioti, Vontzou aren't here. I guess our coaches decided not to send any of the USA-based athletes to Racice. The championships are earlier this year than they usually are. Maybe some of them will appear at the European U23s in early September though. Overall a really nice start for Greece with 4 of our 7 boats winning their heats. I wasn't as confident in our chances before the regatta started but now I think we'll get 3-4 medals. We won 4 medals in 2019 (M1X, M2-, W2-, W2X) and 4 of those 7 rowers made it to Tokyo. The problem is that we always win a bunch of medals at these U23 and junior regattas but then a lot of our athletes disappear. Hopefully that will start to change.

TEAM GREECE Men: BLM1X: Antonios Papakonstantinou BM2-: Pavlos Faitas, Dimitrios Zografos BM2X: Athanasios Palaiopanos, Christos Stergiakas BM4-: Zisis Boukouvalas, Stefanos Kapakoglou, Theodoros Lapikof, Leonidas Tzoumezis Women: BLW1X: Evangelia Anastasiadou BW2X: Angeliki Arabatzi, Evangelia Fragkou BLW2X: Eirini Varelopoulou, Eleni Varelopoulou Obviously since athletes going to Tokyo aren't here, we are without our big stars Christina Bourmpou and Maria Kyridou who won gold in 2019 as 18 year olds in BW2-. Still, this is a decent team for us. Most people are super young.

Greeks doing pretty well so far. We got two girls into the high jump final, two boys into the pole vault final (including Karalis who won silver in 2019 and is going to Tokyo), two boys into the hammer throw final (including Frantzeskakis who is going to Tokyo), a girl in the triple jump final, a boy in the shot put final, and we also have a boy who advanced to the 400m semifinals with a new PB. Tonight I think we have a chance to win our first medal. Mouzenidis in the shot put final has the 4th highest SB of all competitors in the final. He's won three medals before (gold at 2016 European U18, bronze at 2017 European U20 and bronze at 2018 World U20) so clearly he knows how to do it in big finals.

15 for Cyprus https://city.sigmalive.com/article/2021/7/8/oi-15-presbeutes-mas-sten-olumpiada-tou-tokio/ 3-Athletics 1-Cycling (Road) 1-Gymnastics (Artistic) 4-Sailing 4-Shooting 2-Swimming

For Greece we have three Tokyo-bound athletes on this team. None of them have any chance of winning medals in Tokyo anyways and they do here, so I guess it makes sense for them to participate here.

1. Who were the most unexpected Qualifiers(Team/Individual) from your nation? I don't think any of these have chances for medals in Tokyo, but it's nice for them to be there: 1-Artistic swimming (team) We knew the duet would qualify but if you asked me after Rio, I wouldn't have expected this. Though they improved a lot and have a very young team, plus the increased quotas and host quota for Japan (who would've qualified anyways) I guess helped a lot. 2-Evangelia Psarra (archery) She was there at the last five consecutive Olympics but didn't expect it this time around. She won't win a medal but it's a nice story for her at 47 years old to keep making it to the Olympics, now her sixth time. 3-Emilia Tsoulfa (sailing) She is 48 years old and retired after winning gold in Athens 2004. She didn't win the quota but beat the other Greek sailors in the national trials to take their spot. 4-Fani Tzeli (taekwondo) She is only 19 years old and I thought Tokyo would be too early for her, but she beat a Rio 2016 medalist in the qualifying tournament which surprised me. She also won bronze at the 2018 Youth Olympics but I didn't expect her to do this well this early in her career. 2.Which athletes/teams ' not qualifying from your nation hurt you the most? Too many to list... 1-Eleni Chatziliadou (karate) 2018 World Championships gold medalist 2-Apostolos Telikostoglou (taekwondo) 2019 World Championships silver medalist 3-Men's basketball team (though throughout the last few months it became expected as everyone kept getting injured so in the end it wasn't a huge shock, though we did expect to beat the Czechs once we beat Turkey) 4-Women's water polo team (This time we probably didn't expect to qualify unlike 2012 and 2016, but it still hurt a lot especially not knowing if we'd take South Africa's place until two weeks ago) 5-Elina Tzengko (javelin throw) 2018 YOG gold medalist. She's only 18 but last year she threw 63.96 and with the standard being 64m, I thought for sure she'd make it and keep improving and probably make the final in Tokyo too. However this year she has been mediocre and didn't improve like I expected her to. She's 35 in Road to Tokyo so I doubt there will be three withdrawals. 6-Sofia Asoumanaki/Aikaterini Nikolaidou (rowing) They got 4th in Rio in the women's double sculls where they were the youngest team in the event (19 and 23) but unfortunately both have had a lot of injury problems, plus even if Nikolaidou was healthy in time for Tokyo she said she would try to qualify in the lightweight double sculls anyways. 7-Alexandros Tsanikidis (boxing) Chatziliadou's boyfriend. He is our best boxer and was one win away from Tokyo but then the remainder of the Olympic qualifying tournament got postponed and he got injured and was unable to compete when it resumed this year. 8-Rhythmic gymnastics (our first time since 1984 not being represented in the sport. In Rio we had both individual and team, as we usually do, and to get no one this time is sad especially since we even won a medal in Sydney 2000 with our ensemble group) 9-Efthimios Mitas (shooting) He is probably our best skeet shooter but didn't qualify which is disappointing because he had some good World Cup results and a national record in this Olympic cycle but couldn't deliver at the qualifying events.

http://sportsfeed.gr/thetikoi-se-xrisi-meldoniou/ Doping controls in Greece (where the Russians went for training) caught them.

Do you think they will be ranked high enough to get into mixed doubles? Only 16 teams can make it

Lithuanian women's double just replaced one of their rowers, but in 2016 Russia had to forfeit some rowing quotas. I guess we will see what happens.

I've said this like 100 times already, but the Armenian girl used to be a Greek triple jumper. She switched to Armenia a few weeks ago (probably has distant Armenian roots based on her surname and the fact that many Armenians settled in Greece after the Armenian Genocide), then ran her first 100m a week and a half ago. It seems like all she wanted was to get an Olympic chance, hence the switch to Armenia and probably at that point she was willing to do 100m. No way was she going to decide not to go to Tokyo simply because she couldn't get into her preferred event after she already switched to Armenia (presumably only for the Olympic chance). With Greece she never would've had a chance of getting a universality spot.

What did I say back then? And it happened again...

Well maybe no Zika virus but we had this little thing called COVID-19...

We only got 20 in athletics Belibasaki injured, the young girls Tzengko and Karydi failing under pressure, Pappas being MIA, N.Scarvelis and Baniotis not doing it either. I thought they would all qualify or at least 3-4 of them. I was also off by saying we would have 1-2 in diving (we have 0) and 3 in shooting (we have 2).

I'll say 5-6 for Greece, with Petrounias and Tentoglou being the only ones that I would surprised if they did not win medals.

Yeah, Christina Bourmpou/Maria Kyridou will not be able to defend their title from 2019 in the women's pair. They've already been in Japan for a few days now. I guess they'll have to wait until 2022 to return to the World U23s, they'll still be young enough for this category.

Before Tokyo we have the European U23 Championships and the European U20 Championships still. One is this coming weekend and one is the following weekend.

World U23 Rowing Championships will begin on Wednesday

I think for us the problem was that we invested a lot for athletes to be in Athens and still had some of those leftover for Beijing, but by the time London came around so many of them had retired. Plus we had an economic crisis which began between Beijing and London so that obviously didn't help either. However it seemed like for some sports there was no vision after Athens. It was like we focused on Athens so much that we neglected the future after Athens. I'm not sure how much Brazil focused on the future after Rio. China and the UK seemed to do a much better job than Greece in that regard. We also very well could've had 128 instead of 103 in London. We had two shock non-qualifications (men's basketball where we were ranked 4th in the world and women's water polo where we won the 2011 World Championships), so those two sports obviously played a role in our massive drop in team size from Beijing to London (we qualified both of those teams in Beijing). And please don't say that we will have 73 athletes in Paris, I refuse to believe it To be honest though I think in Paris we will go back to 100+. We have a very young team going to Tokyo so I expect many to return, plus we have a lot of good young athletes/teenagers in sports like athletics, swimming, rowing and a few others which gave us hope. Plus having France host might make it easier for us in some team sports, especially our men's and women's basketball team as there will be one more European spot.

Beijing 2008 was the most for Greece (156) not including the two times we hosted, and since then we went down every time (103 in London, 93 in Rio, 83 in Tokyo) so hopefully for Brazil's sake they wont suffer the same fate as us.

Unless anything changes, we have 83 going to Tokyo. Our smallest team since Barcelona 1992... However this is including 9 in artistic swimming and 13 in water polo, so I guess some might say we have 81 and not 83?

That's like Kristina Alvertsian from Armenia who is a triple jumper but will be running in the 100m, which she never ran in her entire life until last week