phelps

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...

by the way, they could come down the toboga in swimsuit...currently it's +6°C in Koenigssee...

Loch only 4th! no Germans on the podium (and no italians, but that was expected on this track), triumph of the Gleirscher family... now let's see what happens in the doubles' race...

yeah, that's better...so, the SWR timetable was definitely wrong (senseless)... all the action that counts is between 8 and 10 p.m. CET...

that's wonderful... but I have a different timetable for today's meet... on the German SWR TV, they start their live stream (also via Youtube) already at 6.35 p.m. CET (and they say it's a 3-hour stream)... so, on the BBC Red Button it's only a partial live broadcast (I guess it's like for the DL meets, with the international feed not including some of the early events -the 60m heats, for instance)...

they didn't change their mind... it's the government that approved a new "law" that follows the IOC's recommendation before resigning this morning... it's a bit different...

as usual, at the last second... what a shitty politicians we have...

25 Russia, 10 Italy, 5 Belarus...and you get 40 (which is very much a realistic preview)... if you add 2/3 more for each Country (more optimistic preview) you go even beyond 50... Russia in Rio was excluded from many events where they could win medals (and the entire delegation was a bit shaky because of the whole mess regarding their status)...this time they have the chance to win a lot more gold medals than 4 years ago...

Yes... also Ivano Brugnetti won the 20km race walk in Athens and Alex Schwazer the 50km race walk in Beijing...going back, Gelindo Bordin won the Seoul 1988 Marathon in white... as I wrote, the white one is the regular outfit for distance runners and race walkers...

yes, it's a technical point that could be fixed in 10 minutes... but... tomorrow morning our Prime Minister is going to the Presidential House to resign, so the current government can't take any further action and therefore we are in the middle of nowhere... moreover, behind that there's a political plot by those who tried to make this "reform" just to put all the money reserved for the NOC and its "armchairs" under their control... this is why no agreement has been reached in these months...most political parties here don't care about sport at all, they just want more money and power under their control and that's it... I'm pretty sure we're going to fix this question sooner or later (maybe even before the Tokyo olympics), but we will have to get the humiliation of being sanctioned like the last of dictatorships before we do anything...typical of this class of politicians we have right now...

it's the Italian outfit in athletics, we have both a white or a blue shirt with a small national flag close to the heart... normally the white shirt is used by the long distance runners and race walkers, but there's no strict rule about it...also the other athletes can use it... however, this is the Moscow 1980 final over 200m and Mennea is wearing our usual blue shirt (as you might notice, in that particular case there's no Flag on it)... on the other hand, Sara Simeoni has the Flag on her blue shirt... as I wrote, basically our authorities supported those boycotting the Games, but they didn't actually stop our sports institutions to take part into the Olympics (except for the Military system, which was in practice forced to do it as part of the NATO)...

32-19 with 12 mins still to be played... CRO are basically out...

no, in 1980 Italy competed under our own Flag, but all the athletes enrolled in the Military corpse didn't participate at all... it was one of our usual compromises, the State as an insitution (and therefore all the Military athletes) boycotted the Games, the private citizens (so, all the other athletes) were given the chance to choose... our NOC, as a private institution, could use our Flag and Anthem... this would be the first time ever we don't have our National symbols...and it would be because of a sanction, not on a voluntary basis, which is quite different in terms of public perception...

not only Fencing...adding together Russia, Belarus and Italy, there's a high risk that between 40 and 50 gold medals would be awarded under the IOC Flag and Anthem instead of the proper ones... most likely we're going to have 2 Nations in the top 10 (1 in the top 5) of the medal table that couldn't even be named...

it's on all kind of media, except those that only consider as sports football and formula 1/Valentino Rossi... so, no rai (servant of this and all the fuckin' governments in our history), of course... even on Gazzetta 3000 (once known as the most respectable newspaper in Italy, now a parody of a gossip magazine*) and on the enemy par excellence of any true sport Corsera, they have an article about that (still, a farce of an article and well down on the bottom of their website, but they have it)... *may the poor souls of Candido Cannavò and Angelo Rizzoli find peace one day...

yeah, that wasn't exactly a smart move, to say the least...especially in a sport where every single second of the race is watched and watched again by a full panel of judges assisted by top tier technology...