phelps

Didier Bionaz will kick our mixed relay off instead of the supposed Dominik Windisch tomorrow...

sure, so to have the skier starting with bib #1 winning gold, the no.2 winning silver, the no.3 winning bronze, the no.4 ending up in 4th place and so on...at least if you hold the world champs on the Alps (or in Are, just like it happened in 2019)... thanks to the climate change, there's no room for regular races in March in Europe anymore (except maybe for Kvittfjell, that's the only place in Europe where you can still find cold enough weather at that time of the year)... on the other hand, I agree about getting rid of some races like AC and Team Event (meanwhile Parallel Slalom could be an entertaining discipline, it's only a question of using the right slope and the right course setting so to have fair races on both courses)...

Leon Spinks, Montreal 1976 Boxing Olympic Champion in the Light Heavyweight class and former Pro Heavyweight undisputed world champion, dies at 67 because of a cancer... https://www.cbssports.com/boxing/news/former-heavyweight-champion-leon-spinks-dies-at-67-after-lengthy-cancer-battle/ R.I.P.

Larissa Iapichino (18) today recorded 6.70m and 6.75m in the women's Long Jump in her first official outing of the indoor season in Ancona... after the lone star of a 6.80m jump (outdoor, of course) last Summer, she looks more stable and reliable on this kind of measures right now... so far, 6.75m is the second best jump of the indoor world campaign after Mihambo's 6.77m last night in Berlin...

Italy are also mathematically qualified after today's success over Romania (81-66 the final score)...

Italy Men Giovanni Borsotti (GS, ?) Emanuele Buzzi (DH, SG) Luca De Aliprandini (GS, ?) Filippo Della Vite (GS, ?) Giovanni Franzoni (GS, ?) Stefano Gross (SL) Christof Innerhofer (DH, SG, AC?) Matteo Marsaglia (DH?, SG) Manfred Moelgg (SL) Dominik Paris (DH, SG, AC?) Giuliano Razzoli (SL) Florian Schieder (DH?, SG?, ?) Riccardo Tonetti (AC, GS?, ?) Alex Vinatzer (SL, PAR) Women Marta Bassino (DH, SG, AC, GS, PAR, SL?) Federica Brignone (DH, SG, AC, GS, PAR, SL?) Elena Curtoni (DH, SG, AC?, GS?) Irene Curtoni (SL, PAR) Nadia Delago (DH?, SG?) Lara Della Mea (GS?, SL, PAR?) Francesca Marsaglia (DH?, SG?, AC?) Martina Peterlini (SL, PAR?) Laura Pirovano (DH?, SG?, GS?)

Wintersports (Luge, Snowboard, Alpine & Cross-Country Skiing) in the morning and early afternoon Ice Hockey right now (SHL, Linköping vs Färjestad) and tonight (NHL, Montreal @ Ottawa & Arizona @ St.Louis) a bit of Soccer and Basketball in between the Hockey games

it's not a pre-requisite, but it's clear that ISU doesn't want Speedskating to be held outdoor and they make all kind of pressure on the organizers to build an indoor hall... it's the same issue Swimming has with fina and IOC...they push for indoor pools, but if L.A. 2028 says it's gonna be an outdoor baseball stadium turned into a swiming pool they're going to take it... surely, in Italy they have definitely more chances to get want they want at the end of the day (nobody knows the art of compromise and how to pump up the cost of every building like our politicians )......

it's not likely here, as we have different laws (much more conservative) about monuments like that (it's the same for the Colosseo in Rome...there's no chance to use it for anything, it's there just to be watched as it is by the tourists)... as I wrote, Baselga as it is right now (outdoor venue, of course with temporary stands for the big event) or a soulless pavillion in the Expo area of Milan are the only realistic chances for the Speedskating track (the Turin solution is the last chance option, nobody -except the Turin's politicians, who aim at sharing the IOC and government's funding more then anything- really wants it)... meanwhile the only logical option (building a true permanent indoor oval beside the Forum Milanofiori, where the Olympic Fugure Skating and Short Track Speedskating are going to be held and where there's so much space you can build a new town rather than a single sport arena) has never been taken into consideration and probably it will never be...

it's impossible...it's an historical monument that can't be touched in almost all the outside features...the shape, the marble stands (they can't even think to install temporary individual seats), the façade, the socalled "imperial box" (basically, the V.I.P. main stand)... not even a temporary roof is allowed in the park where the stadium is located... it's all protected and disciplined by local and national laws that can't be easily bypassed, as I wrote before...

Ski Mountaineering too... not only because we're good at that, but mainly because of turistical purpose...ski mountaineering on the Dolomites...probably the it would lead to some of the most amazing and iconic pictures ever in the history of the Games...

yeah, except for the fact that's an outdoor stadium (which ISU doesn't like at all), it would be a wonderful place for those events... there's only one problem...that stadium is a public monument, protected by local and national laws... it would be extremely difficult to match all the required features of an Olympic venue (especially in terms of renovating the locker rooms and building the press boxes/places with all the modern technology the OG need)... even the attendance's entrance would be quite complicated in terms of security standards for such kind of event (except for the main stand, there are only "little holes" to get in in the other areas of the stadium, which could be a real problem if you need to get 10,000 people out of the stadium quickly...the Hillsborough effect is not so remote in that kind of venue...that's why it's never used for Football matches...it only hosts some athletics, where no more than 1,000/2,000 people well spread around the building normally come to watch the events)... however, it's only speculation right now...at the moment, the official venue is still the Ice Rink in Baselga di Pinè as described in the bidding book (once again, it's an outdoor arena and ISU doesn't want Olympic speedskating to be contested outside...and the original project to get it covered looks already out of chance because of the excessive costs and logistical issues)... I fear that at the end of an endless discussion, they would eventually end up with a temporary pavillion in the 2015 World Expo area, if not the good old Lingotto pavillion in Turin that already hosted the 2006 Speedskating events (which would be unacceptable to me...Turin must be kept far from these Games as pestis)...

the half-beard look is only for the main events of the season... normal meets don't count so much...

it's extremely odd (actually, it's crazy, a shame if you like)... they could and should have scheduled the Bronze Medal match the day before (if they don't really want it at 9 a.m. local time in the same day), considered that the semifinals are set 2 days earlier...

if the USA don't make the Gold Medal match, there's no problem with their TV as they would never show on TV the national shame of playing for a minor placing...

so, one of the signature sports of the Olympics, full of epic moments and tradition, is going to change its hundreds-of-years-old racing distance and sell its soul for what? a venue a few miles closer to the city center? c'mon! let's go on with this crazy farce that the Olympics have become...

yeah, I used the BBC website (with a vpn) a lot in 2012 (together with the excellent sky Italia tv coverage)... in Rio I used mainly the BBC TV channels on satellite (and the Czech and Slovak TV channels as well) since in Italy we got back to our unwatchable public tv, rai (some events I necessarily had to follow on their streaming platform for the event were just like a Middle Age torture...hope not to repeat the experience anymore in my life)... now I have to rely on Eurosport Player...if they stay like they are now when they show the Italian Basketball League, I'm fine...but I secretly hope for some 4K stuff as well... that would be a very, very good gift by them...

no mistakes here...it's known since a very long time ago... it's an explicit request by the NBC (just like the Swimming Finals and the Skateboarding/BMX Freestyle events in the Japanese morning or the Figure Skating and Snowboard/Freestyle events in the Korean morning in Pyeongchang 3 years ago)...

eurosport tv rights started in 2018, in 2016 it was up to the single national tv to put a streaming platform in place... nothing to say about the coverage, they had all the feeds of every single race, normally with multiple commentaries (all the events that were shown on the linear tv channels in the various countries had their commentary put on the streams, too)... what I didn't like at all, it was the fact that the tv pictures were awful*, since they only had 25 frame per second, which makes any sport almost unwatchble to me... the English commentary was also a disaster for 95% of the events (it was the IBC's one, not the usual Eurosport commentators)... and the worst thing of them all, the app for apple tv 4/4K was highly unstable, I had to uninstall and reinstall that app at least twice a day... so, the idea was amazing, the actual result was to say the least reviewable... I hope the picture quality improves a lot by the next Olympics (right now, it's better than 2 years ago, but still a bit under par if compared to the best OTT services in the world in these terms -NHL.tv and MLB.tv), but what I think does really need to change upsidedown are the apps for connected device...some of them (amazon fire tv stick, for instance) are just impossible to be used because they just can't manage the framerate correctly and the app design is a pure mess... *it wasn't just because of my internet broadband connection, at that time I had a 200mbps FTTC connection, which worked at max speed with all the streaming services I tried (now I'm on a gigabit FTTH true fiber connection)... p.s. don't get scared more than necessary...I'm well known to be a very, very diffcult man to be satisfied under this technical point of view...

in Italy there are so many tv channels showing movies, that's impossible not to find some of them on the schedule at least every few months (on some channels they just show the same 5/6 movies all year long, so the replay rate is so high that you can't even keep the pace with it)... by the way, the nicest tradition we have, it's about Eddy Murphy's Trading Places which is shown every year during the Christmas period (Dec 24th and/or Dec 31st are the 2 favourite days by the TV network that's always showing this movie)... another movie that's shown at least 10 times a year by the FTA channels is Little Lord Fauntleroy... but the absolute winner in this particular race is surely Pretty Woman (which is normally a classic on our main public channel, rai 1)...

the official explaination was to avoid teams making calculations (and maybe losing a game on purpose) to have a better position in the knockout stage table draw... with this system, losing a game on purpose is senseless because there will be a full draw for the quarterfinals and semifinals (with seedings based on the overall results between the groups where teams won't even play each other in many cases)...

knowing our German friends of Luge, it's almost sure they did it...

I think almost all the big western countries are discussing that in this period... also in Italy today's newspapers are out with an interview to our NOC's president Giovanni Malagò talking of that ("professional athletes can't stay quarantined at home, they must fly arounfd the world to save the good name of Italy and earn as many Olympic spots as possible"...

starting 1-2-3 and finishing 1-2-3... typical race on the German tracks... Nagler&Malleier's result is basically a miracle, considered their starting number...

and here we go... German clean sweep in the women's sprint race... no comment on Andrea Voetter, once again among the best at the start and first intermediate (2nd, in today's case) and then miserably at the bottom of the rankings...