phelps

most likely the whole College Footbal season won't happen, so, also the Rose Bowl and all the other traditional Bowls between the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year are going to be cancelled in the next days/weeks/months...

my friends, really... I just can't understand (and never I'll do it) how a bunch of kids having seizures like epileptics can be put into the Olympic program...

https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/tokyo-2020-olympic-marathon-swimming-course-for-2021-to-be-moved-due-to-low-tide-forecast/

by the way, there's no chance Maldives is the main vacation destination for Italy (even as a dream destination...here all the people below 45/50 dream about Ibiza and/or Mykonos......those over 50, instead, normally dream about staying at home without their sons/daughters trolling around and their boss harassing them )... we usually go to Spain, Greece and/or Croatia mainly...most Italians can't even afford to go to Maldives...even in offseason (especially now, after the covid-19 disaster, with many people losing their job or having their salary partially cut)...

well, there are many Albanian mafia boss keeping their hands on human trafficking, drug and (big) weapons dealing... they (I mean, the whole "klan") surely can afford to travel to Qatar whenever they want...

among the candidates, Lucio Caneva is the current Team Manager/Technical Director of the Italian National team (and dad of Aaron -wrestler in the men's FS -86kg- and Dalma -world junior silver medallist a few years ago and silver medallist at the last senior European Champs)... He's also Edith Dosza's husband (she's one of the most appreciated refs in the world of wrestling)... so, despite not being a former wrestler at the highest level, I think he'd be a better choice than Mamiashvili, for instance (despite the Russian/Georgian is a world and Olympic medallist on the mat)...

they should be named the Washington Losing Hypocrites, with a new logo mixing FedEx and Nike's... actually, this is the only imagine they give of themselves...

Marc Warren won the first European Tour tournament after the covid-19 break, the Austrian Open... at the end of 4 competition days, he edged out Marcel Schneider by 1 stroke... third ranked was Wil Besseling, 1 stroke behind Schneider... legendary Miguel Angel Jimenez, after leading midway through the championship, slightly faded away in the last couple of days and ended up in 8th place, 5 strokes behind the eventual winner... next week we're going to have another tournament in Austria, the Euram Bank Open (in a different location, obviously)...

we used to do it until the mid Nineties... then mr. Berlusconi became the Prime Minister and mr. Tremonti his Financial Minister...and they started to open up the betting system in Italy and invented our current main lottery, named Superenalotto, which give away a lot of money and basically killed the good old Totocalcio, which was the only true National betting game before that and used to give our NOC a lot of funding (it was about 35% going to the weekely prize money, 20% to the NOC and the rest to the government as a tax)... the new games instead are about 60% to the prize money and the rest to the government, with no more funding for any other activity... so, our golden age of sports was soon over... now it's up to a pre-determined anmount of money given directly by the government to the NOC and the many small local sponsorships that every federation can find...

GBR at Atlanta 1996 = 1 Gold Medal... so, I'm not so sure they can get the same glorious results they started to record since Beijing 2008 without massive "help"... other Nations...well, some of them are somehow truly "regular" in their performance...so, I guess those Countries will always shine in any case, but some others...

I can tell you for sure Italy hasn't...anymore... we had such kind of program until halfway through the Nineties, when Gianni Petrucci took over as our NOC President (January 1999, but he was operating since mid 1998, after the end of the Olympic cycle with Nagano 1998 as the finish line)... since then, we lost basically more than 80% of our funding system (thank you, mr. Tremonti and mr. Berlusconi for that) and moreover Petrucci is very close to the Vatican City and the old Democratic Christian party, which led him to a different philosophy than his predecessor... in fact, after the high of Lillehammer 1994 (WOG) and Atlanta 1996 (SOG), we started our decline, losing medals Games after Games (especially in those 2/3 traditional disciplines where doping counts more than talent, Cycling -we almost disappeared from the Track scene until the raise of Elia Viviani in the last 8/10 years...and we're not even close to the powerhouse we once were- Flatwater Canoeing and Athletics)... and right now, we're definitely too poor to even think about such kind of program...tbh, in the next 5 or 10 years I expect Italy to almost disappear from the sports map, except maybe for 2 or 3 sports that still have a lot of boys and girls practicing and a national federation that somehow works well (Fencing, Swimming, Judo...maybe Shooting, but in this case we don't have a good number of youngsters, just a good "school" in shotgun shooting)...

as always in the last few weeks, it's almost all about Soccer (mainly English Premier League with a bit of Italian Serie A), Japanese Baseball and Golf...this time with a bit of Rugby (yesterday's Blues @ Crusaders was an obvious choice)...

as if nobody could even imagine that water is wet, grass is green and so on... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-8513525/British-2012-Olympians-guinea-pigs-Special-Forces-wonder-drug.html

great news from the NHL world... let's begin with this season's restart... finally, Edmonton and Toronto have been officially named the 2 hub cities where all the remaining games are going to be played (in particular, Edmonton will host the Conference Finals and the Stanley Cup Finals)... https://www.nhl.com/news/edmonton-toronto-chosen-as-hub-cities-for-return-to-play-plan/c-317371532 play will resume on August, 1st...and this is the schedule of the first stage of the "new" NHL season (the Stanley Cup qualifiers)... https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-round-robin-best-of-5-series-dates-times/c-317365910 p.s. the 2020 NHL Draft will be held on October 9th & 10th... https://www.nhl.com/news/2020-nhl-draft-october-9-10-no-1-pick-drawn-august-10/c-317375432 then, a lot of things have also been decided on longer terms... first, the CBA extension between the NHL and the NHLPA has been ratified, therefore the new CBA will expire not earlier than September 15th, 2026... https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-nhlpa-ratify-cba-extension-through-2025-26-season/c-317377214 this means that we won't have any strike for quite a long period and, above all, it also means that we are going to see the NHL players back to the Olympic Games in 2022 and especially in my hometown, Milan, in 2026!!! https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-players-return-to-olympics-in-2022-2026/c-317375420

this week also the European Tour is restarting after the covid-19 forced break... the Austrian Open is on stage...and midway through the tournament the great oldie Miguel Angel Jimenez is leading the field with a 2-stroke advantage over a group of 5 players ( Joost Luiten, Renato Paratore, Nicolai Von Dellingshausen, Craig Howie and Marc Warren)...

by the way, if there's something true in this article (sorry, it's only in Italian language, but with some help from google translate it should be understandable in any case), we (I mean, people living in Lombardy like me) have been really unlucky... OK, we could have managed this sh*tstorm better, but getting double the threat all together must have been bad luck, too... basically, the article says that in Lombardy 2 different families of covid-19 have co-existed during the worst days in February/March/early April (and still live here, of course)... one originated from the South-East of our Region, the other from the North-East...meeting in the middle area (that could explain why in Milan we had the most cases and victims of the entire Italy)... the only encouraging aspect of all this, it's the fact that the virus looks quite stable and doesn't have many mutations once it's settled in an area, which would mean that when we get a vaccine, it could be really effective, also in the long period... https://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/2020/07/10/news/coronavirus_lombardia_san_matteo_pavia_niguarda_assalto_multiplo_ceppi_diversi-261538170/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I261508546-C12-P9-S2.4-T1

meh! I'm still eating salmon regularly (in all forms, roasted, smoked, raw -in sushi/sashimi) and I've not been infected... and it's almost always the super-tasty Norwegian salmon (sometimes it's the wild red salmon from Alaska/Canadian Pacific though)... I fear you have to search for new suspects (shrimps and crabs are also not a good option, as I'm eating regularly also those kind of sea foods -I love fish and sea food, if someone has not realized it yet )...

we all knew it was coming... now it's official...the 2020 Ryder Cup has been postponed to 2021 and the 2021 Presidents Cup moves forward to 2022...which means also that most likely the 2022 Ryder Cup in Rome will also move to 2023 and so on for the other biennial tournaments... https://www.cbssports.com/golf/news/ryder-cup-at-whistling-straits-postponed-to-2021-presidents-cup-to-2022-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/ https://www.rydercup.com/news-media/ryder-cup-rescheduled

Kyrgios more and more fired up against the covidiots in the ATP world...this time it's Thiem being slammed... https://www.tennis365.com/atp-tour/nick-kyrgios-hits-back-at-dominic-thiem-for-defending-novak-djokovic-and-alexander-zverev-mistakes/ Nick is definitely my idol, if I have a tennis idol!

what a fu**in' damn day!

https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2020/07/08/finn-christian-jagge-dies-norway-alpine-skiing/

well, the bottle is "only" 70cl...and losing bets sometimes require people to do stupid things... however, it took me about 4 hours to finish the job...1 glass at a time in a night like yesterday it's not such big thing (if only it was water and not alchool)... *p.s. here it's on sale the lose Mojito...for those who can't or don't want to waste time to prepare the cocktail in the old manner (actually, almost every famous cocktail is available already mixed up in small bottles)... and if you don't go to a place where the masters of bartenders work, you don't notice the difference between this and a "normal" club classic Mojito...actually, this is quite good...

I just can't watch DeChambeau...apart from all the questions about his physical transformation and his tee shots becoming longer and longer, I just can't watch his style (his mechanics is so ugly), his routine (he's so slow and irritating) and his technique (definitely not the finest touch on the tour)... and his yesterday's win, also cost me to get drunk by throwing down my throat a full bottle of Mojito*... *luckily it was a hot night, so it wasn't even difficult to get my bottle empty through the last few holes and after...

do you think you can eat 75 hot dogs in 10 minutes without "training"? and not only that...because they regularly compete in this kind of contests almost every weekend...it's basically a full time job for the most famous "eaters"... so, yes...they do a lot of damages to themselves...either because they become obese as they actually eat all that sh*t or because they throw it away after every "session"... food disorder is always behind the door for those people...

Japanese NPB Baseball, a lot of Soccer (Italian Serie A, English Premier League and the German Cup final) and some PGA Golf on my list for today...