dcro

That's right. In other news, the Illuminati Cat was confirmed.

And Olympic qualification. It's feasible that Laukkanen might be a part of the Finnish team sprint relay, so she'll need two more sprints to qualify.

Arabella Caroline Yili Ng has assured her qualification, adding Hong Kong to the list of participants. She will also be their first ever winter athlete competing outside of short track.

It's the TISC dedicated news site, obviously. First article named "To Infinity And Beyond" pretty much explains everything.

Sindo's snowflakes are getting highly contagious.

There is one weekend of racing, just before the deadline (19-21 January). There also some Turkish and Iranian races so I guess they should have enough opportunities. I though there were two Lebanese weekends actually, but turns out the first one only has children categories.

Hopefully they'll all go to Lebanon, as that should be their best chance. It looks like those Lebanese alpine and XC races will be like some Winter Games for the super exotic nations.

Welp, I secretly hoped that we would beat the system this time, as 31st qualifies. Oh well.

Or maybe they don't want random people winning the first round. Two runs give more security to the favorites.

Popović had a giant slalom run of her life, but ended with a DNF...

Yes, WC ranking combines WC and Nations Cup.

By the rules it's the highest placed nations that haven't qualified in any events. are tied on points, but I guess it would be as their luger has the highest individual placement.

Hard to say with this ridiculous point system that FIL got (after some position every competitor gets exactly one point). Such a shame that Portugal got DSQ in the first stage, as getting 1 in every stage would have been enough... http://www.fil-luge.org/cdn/uploads/cup2wcmen.pdf Looks like Rosen just broke that 67% requirement with his 2 points score. Finished 39th out of 59. Don't know if any of Staudinger's 1 point scores were within that 67% (probably not I'd say).

Seems like it. Are they going to accept those quotas though I wonder? I know that Slovenia won't be accepting their quotas, so there are already some guaranteed reallocations.

8th place at the end is a very fine result. This helps our team qualification a lot.

Zubo

Now Hirscher is winning even the parallel events. He used to get beaten here by Belgian skiers... I hope he retires at the end of the season.

154 pts for today. Slow and steady wins the race, but they may run out of time.

Yeah, I concluded that by looking at her results. She's stealing the Montenegrins' trademark. Well, she'll get her frequent flyer miles, that's for sure.

Cool! Lebanon seems to be a popular cross-country destination these days. Suddenly there is a whole bunch of Lebanese skiers competing all over Europe and they will host their first ever XC event. Hopefully Lebanon will be rewarded for this by qualifying for the Olympics themselves. She has enough time to fit all this?

Situation is looking pretty good for our bobsled team. Seven best results will count for the IBSF qualification rankings. All racing has been done for 2017, and in New Year there are just two weeks of racing (2xWC, 3xEC and 2xNAC races) before the period is over. So this means that top 4 current best results are guaranteed to count, as none of the teams will be able to compete in more than 3 of the remaining races. Top 4 results for our team are 5th, 5th, 7th and 7th. They also have useful 8th and 9th places "on the bench". 18th place is currently their 7th best result, but hopefully they'll improve it after New Years. Some of our direct qualification rivals already have to count some 17th/18th places in Continental Cup though.

Could be... But there is less than a month of qualification period left. Hopefully he'll go to Turkey, as that might be the best chance in Europe.

Next Austrian race will be Villach on the 28th (and that's classic technique which I doubt he prefers). Pretty questionable decision to be in Central Europe, I expected Project Bogota to relocate to North America. 415 is enough for him, but I'm sure he won't achieve that in Central Europe...

Good race with 346 pts for Rai today. Wise decision to race in Slovakia. I guess her next stop will be Turkey, @ahjfcshfghb?

Looks like his new goal is collecting 29th places. Congrats. If this continues we won't even qualify for alpine skiing team event. Like, seriously.