phelps

Pan Yufei reached the Top in the Lead quali of the men's Climbing...

very close race for second place (the last good for the final) in the first semifinal of the women's inline speedskating (with the French girl beating the girl from Ecuador by just 14 thousends of a second)...

well, in a few minutes there's the B-Boys Breakdance quarterfinal between Axel and Bad Matty... always if you consider that a sport, of course...

fencing Gold Medal finals... women's Foil vs men's Sabre vs

naaaa...they had no chance here...they're pure sprinters... and this format favors clearly the lead & boulder specialists... on the other hand, here we have a lot of the youth & junior lead & boulder world medallists from last august...the Slovenians, the Austrians, the French girl Nolwenn Arc (and not to mention Laura Rogora, who won the youth world championship in Boulder and was into the final of the senior world champs in Lead...but still failed to make the final here )... I'd say that we have 5 of the 6 favorites in the final (just replace the German girl with Rogora and basically it would be the "perfect" top 6, according to the pre-competition preview)...

sure...

I'm not so keen on compromise...better nothing than a farce competition...

yeah, but not with this stupid combined format...I want the sprint, points, elimination, madison relay and marathon standalone races...

fencing semis... women's Foil vs & vs men's Sabre vs & vs to be noticed...in the women's foil Martina Favaretto (ITA) and Yuka Ueno (JPN) already battled each other in the cadets world championship final and in the junior world championship semifinal earlier this year...and the Japanese won both matches...

this is a CET schedule, but it's in Italian language... https://www.oasport.it/2018/09/olimpiadi-giovanili-2018-il-calendario-e-le-date-programma-orari-e-tv-giorno-per-giorno-a-buenos-aires/

well, he's basically a former player... I mean, he's still competing on the major tour, but all of his good results are from 8 or more years ago... in Golf you can never exclude a "one-hit wonder", but it's reasonably fair to say that his chances to win an important tournament (and/or an Olympic medal) are nowadays very, very slim... p.s. and in any case he's not elegible to take part in the Ryder Cup, since he's not registered as a European Tour "regular" nor he did begin his pro career first in the European Tour (and only then going in the US)... and you need to fulfill at least one of those 2 requirements to become elegible for the Ryder Cup...

US West Coast time... just add 9 hours and you get CET times...

are they crazy? they gave 930 points to the winner of a continental championship and have those who won a K1PL stage at the 20th place or even worse... to me, there's something strange (and in any case out of this world) in those rankings... I still think that at the end they should look more close to the actual full world ranking and right now they don't mean anything... we'll see when all continents will have their continental scores and when more global events will be completed...

it's still not really updated...we already had Berlin's K1PL and Santiago's K1SA and they didn't add those results yet... therefore, those rankings are not reliable at all...

I was just thinking about that... with boxing out of the Games, we're gonna have around 300 quotas to be spread all around... and imho the sports that need most of them are Karate (enlarging the field in any category to 16 and adding the 2 Kumite classes "killed" so far), Sport Climbing (give up that silly combined event in favor of Lead and Speed as proper Olympic disciplines, with at least 30 starters each one and for each gender), Rowing (enlarging the starting field of the longer boats to at least 12 men and 10 women's Eights and maybe also a pair of Fours/Quadruple Sculls more than today), Baseball & Softball (increasing the number of teams of those tournaments at least to 8)... and I'd like also to add a 5th weight class in Taekwondo... then a few more quotas here and there in the sports (and/or events) where we have a very small field, too (I'm thinking for instance about the Synchronized Diving, where they could go from 8 to 10/12 pairs...but not only, of course)... and if IOC gets rid of Weightlifting too, maybe there's a small margin for adding 1 (Squash) or 2 (Squash + Inline Speedskating) more sports with selected events... but I guess that now I'm just going too far & beyond...

I hope our girls wouldn't eventually end up like our men...so strong too early, just boiled when it did really matter...

hopefully... but I don't trust them until I see a official statement (and even after that, I'd always fear they make up their minds, sooner or later)... by the way, some sad news from the world of non-Olympic boxing... former Pro World Champion Graciano Rocchigiani died yesterday in Sicily after being hit by a car... https://fightnews.com/graciano-rocchigiani-killed-in-car-accident/31291 R.I.P.

if I know North American people well enough, I can fairly say that most of them (at least 80/90%) would eventually accept a lot easier to lose a single decisive tie-breaking game at the end of the RS (when all the fans, the payers and the media are well aware of the importance of that game) rather than not making the post-season because of a few spare games played maybe at the beginning of April with most players not fully fit yet and/or in bad weather conditions in a mid-week matinèe... that would be considered really unfair... I think the different mentality between Europe and North America can't actually help us to understand why the main Pro Sports in the US/CAN are run the way they are... for most of the European people is just to difficult to accept the odd schedule and the fact that the game times are mainly decided by the TV stations...let's imagine all the other peculiarities... by the way, I'm quite outside the European fan type and I appreciate the US Sports exactly as they are... and I'm happy to miss a few sleeping hours to watch MLB and NHL games every year... they are always a great show and I enjoy them just because of that, meanwhile I don't like the "win or die" kind of attitude we often see on the stands (and in the TV broadcasts/shows) in most team sports here in Europe...

no, that's a great rule...this is the best way to create hype to the post-season... and it's always better to have a real game than using some unfair criteria (considered the fact that all the teams don't play the same number of games against each other during the RS)... as it is for the wild card games...they are highly unfair (a single elimination match after 162/163 RS games), but they are at the same time the most exciting moment of the playoffs (apart from possible games 5/7 in the division/league/world series)... by the way, October to me is one of the most beautiful months of the year...MLB playoffs + NHL start of the season...I just couldn't ask for more (only for what concerns my sports obsession, of course)...

Radim Vrbata and Scott Hartnell retired just before the start of the new season... https://www.nhl.com/news/nhl-all-star-radim-vrbata-retires-from-hockey-after-16-seasons/c-300536462 https://www.nhl.com/news/scott-hartnell-retires-from-nhl-after-17-seasons/c-300523458 meanwhile, great show last night in Bern (SUI), where the New Jersey Devils led by the Swiss star Nico Hischier played an exhibition game against the local team, SC Bern, as part of the NHL Global Series 2018... The Devils won the game by a score of 3-2 (after OT), but that's the least important part of the night... Tomorrow it's the Edmonton Oilers' time to entertain some European fans, since they play in Cologne (GER) against the local team, Kölner Haie (puck drop @ 4 p.m. CET)...

IFSC World Cup, Stage #12 (Kranj, SLO) Women's Lead 1st, Kim Ja In (KOR) 2nd, Janja Garnbret (SLO) 3rd, Hannah Schubert (AUT) Men's Lead 1st, Stefano Ghisolfi (ITA) 2nd, Jakob Schubert (AUT) 3rd, Masahiro Higuchi (JPN)

and after the World Championships in the past weeks, now we're back to our usual World Cup business... this week it's time for the last European stage (Lead only) in Kranj (SLO), before the last 2 events of the season (Lead and Speed) scheduled in China in the last couple of weeks of October... and this is the starting list for the women and men's Finals in Kranj... Women's Lead, Climbers qualified for the Final Katharina Posch Mina Markovic Katherine Choong Natsumi Hirano Hannah Schubert Janja Garnbret Jessica Pilz Kim Ja In Men's Lead, Climbers qualified to the Final Marcello Bombardi Kokoro Fujii Yuki Hada Masahiro Higuchi Francesco Vettorata Sean McColl Stefano Ghisolfi Jakob Schubert no real surprise in the women's results so far (yeah, maybe Choong wasn't expected to be in the top 8, but still...), meanwhile the men's event is having basically only unexpected results (Schubert and Ghisolfi's domination in the semifinals excluded, of course)...

oops... I trusted my memory, so I didn't check and obviously I was wrong...nothing new...

congrats to Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes...just another triumph to be added to his palmarès...