phelps

The Open, #147 after yesterday's weather did some damages, today it was back to (relatively) easy conditions, which helped some very low daily scores... still, we have a very tight field, with many players definitely not out of contention... the leaders after day #3 are Jordan Spieth, Kevin Kisner and Xander Schauffele...all from and all with a total of -9... another player, Kevin Chappell is 4th with -7 and Francesco "Chicco" Molinari is 5th (and 1st European) with -6, followed by a bunch of guys at -5 (among them the great Tiger Woods, who's going to play the 3rd last flight tomorrow, together with super-Chicco)... full leaderboard is here: https://www.theopen.com/Leaderboard#!/traditional

European Championships 2018 men's quarterfinals Brouwer/Meeuwsen 1 - 2 Smedins/Samoilovs Stoyanovskiy/Velichko 0 - 2 Semenov/Leshukov Mol/Sorum 2 - 1 Varenhorst/Bouter Herrera/Gavira 2 - 0 Beeler/Krattiger men's semifinals Smedins/Samoilovs vs Semenov/Leshukov Herrera/Gavira vs Mol/Sorum

European Championships 2018 women's quarterfinals Lobato/Amaranta 0 - 2 Keizer/Meppelink Ukolova/Birlova 0 - 2 Hermannova/Slukova Betschart/Hüberli 2 - 1 Bieneck/Schneider Liliana/Elsa 2 - 1 Laboureur/Sude women's semifinals Hermannova/Slukova 1 - 2 Keizer/Meppelink Betschart/Hüberli 2 - 1 Liliana/Elsa women's Bronze Medal match Hermannova/Slukova win by Walk-over women's Gold Medal match Betschart/Hüberli 0 - 2 (16-21, 24-26) Keizer/Meppelink

Silver medal for Raffaello Ivaldi in the U-23 men's C1... Gold went to Vaclav Chaloupka (CZE), Bronze to Cedric Joly (FRA)...

Tonight at 19.30 CET (men) and 21 CET (women) the Finals of the Briançon World Cup stage (Lead)... Live free here:

Quarterfinals results: ITA b. AND 6-2 FRA b. GER 5-2 ESP b. SUI 10-2 POR b. ENG 14-2 Tonight it's Semifinals time... h.20 CET, ESP vs FRA h.22 CET, POR vs ITA (remake of the 2016 Gold Medal match...2 years ago the Portuguese won the title at home...let's see if this time we can make them cry)...

almost...but not quite... exciting pitching duel between ITA and NED, with "oldie" Alessandro Maestri showing all of his class on the Italian side (7 innings, 3 hits, 1 run, 9 K's)... Italy did even take the lead in the 2nd inning thanks to a pair of mistakes of the Dutch pitcher and defence, but unfortunately our reliever Alex Bassani didn't match Maestri's effort and in the 9th gave up the winning run to the Dutch players (both NED runs entered on De Caster's hits, the 1st in the 7th, the game winner in the 9th)... in the other games, Cuba avoided the shame of ending up last thanks to an easy win against Germany (who beat them in the round robin head-to-head) meanwhile Japan earned a spot in the Gold Medal match thanks to a blowout success over Chinese Taipei...

29th Haarlem Baseball Week Yesterday's Results CUB b. GER 7-1 (GER end up the tournament in 6th place, CUB advance to the 4th-5th place match) JPN b. TPE 8-1 (JPN advance to the Gold Medal match on Sunday afternoon, TPE play the Semifinal/Bronze Medal match against the NED) NED b. ITA 2-1 (NED advance to the Semifinal/Bronze Medal match against TPE, ITA play the 4th-5th place match against CUB) Today's schedule ITA vs CUB (h.14.00, 4th-5th place match) TPE vs NED (h.19.00, Losers get the Bronze Medal, Winners advance to the Gold Medal match on Sunday afternoon against JPN)

3 failures at 1.94 (not sure if the good result was 1.90 or 1.91)... here you can watch all the Russian championships live and/or on-demand (women's HJ is in day #1, вечерняя сессия...Chicherova's attempts at 1.94 are at about 3h30mins of that video): http://eng.rusathletics.com/sor/calendar.4337.htm

European Championships 2018 Men's tournament is still at the 1st direct elimination round, but women's is already at the quarterfinal stage... and those are the pairings: Lobato/Amaranta vs Keizer/Meppelink Ukolova/Birlovavs Hermannova/Slukova Betschart/Hüberli vs Bieneck/Schneider Liliana/Elsa vs Laboureur/Sude

to be honest, I don't care about forums that much during the Olympics...I prefer to focus on the competitions (and generally in those days I have both PC and TV running pictures from the Games venues rather than writing on some forum)... there's so much time to discuss after the Games are over...just in case...

very good (and closer than expected) game between POR and FRA, with the red & green machine only able to snatch a 1-goal victory (5-4, the final score)... with this last result, we have the full quarterfinals schedule (games will be played later Today): ITA vs AND (h.17.30 CET); ESP vs SUI (h.20 CET); POR vs ENG (h.22 CET); GER vs FRA (h.12.30 CET) in the semifinals, instead, we have the following pairings: Winner GER/FRA vs Winner ESP/SUI and Winner ITA/AND vs Winner POR/ENG

29th Haarlem Baseball Week Yesterday's Results TPE b. CUB 12-2 ITA b. GER 3-1 Round Robin Final Standings JPN, 5W - 0L TPE, 4W - 1L NED, 3W - 2L ITA, 2W - 3L GER, 1W - 4L CUB, 0W - 5L Today's schedule (Playoffs Rd #1) GER vs CUB (h.11.00) TPE vs JPN (h.15.00) ITA vs NED (h.19.00)

personally, my best Olympic time window is the US East Coast time (Rio too was almost perfect)... I like taking afternoon, evening and night to watch the Games, then going to sleep around 5/6 a.m. until 10 a.m. and still having the late morning hours to manage my own affairs... meanwhile I've never liked the Far East Olympics...those times are very uncomfortable to me...

I understand your point of view...and I'd love to have them at 8 p.m. here (in Central Europe), too... the main problem is that 8 p.m. in the USA, here is something from 2 to 5 a.m. (depending on where you live, East Coast, Central US or West Coast)... so, I guess they won't be able to make both of us happy...and I don't know why? I think there are lots more chances that you'll get the best start time...

game over... Spain win 2-0 and end up in 1st place in group B...Italy are 2nd, Germany 3rd and England 4th...Netherlands (5th) and Belgium (6th) are out of the quarterfinals... in group A, waiting for the POR vs FRA clash, which is going to determine the group winners and runner-up, Andorra are 3rd and Switzerland 4th, meanwhile Austria are 5th and out of the quarters... we also know the first 2 quarterfinals pairings: ESP vs SUI and ITA vs AND...later tonight the remaining 2 quarters will also be determined by the final score of the POR vs FRA match-up...

very interesting broadcast on cerh.tv...the play-by-play is in Italian language, the color commentator is a woman speaking Spanish...I've watched a lot of sport on tv/streaming in my life, but this is the first time I hear a 2-language broadcast... by the way, Spain are leading 1-0 with 14 mins still to be played...

Kevin Kisner leading the field with -5 after day #1 at The Open... Tony Finau and the duo Erik Van Rooyen & Zander Lombard follow with -4... good 32 golfers are under the par at the end of today's action (and 20 more are Even with par)... when the weather conditions are not so difficult (better, extreme), links courses are too easy... I want to see some golf from Carnasty, not Carnoustie...

earlier today, Golf, The Open...right now (all at the same time...it's really like at the Olympics ), Football Sub-19 Europeans (men's division), ITA vs POR + Rink Hockey men's Europeans, ITA vs ESP + Waterpolo women's Europeans, RUS vs HUN

Natalia Ducò provisionally suspended for a positive test (GH)... http://www.politicalhispanic.com/en/they-confirm-the-provisional-suspension-of-the-chilean-natalia-duco-for-doping/

well, I'm not that old (I'm gonna turn 44 in 9 days) to remember foil and epee before wiring (my first really clear memories are about the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and those weapons were already wired)... meanwhile sabre became like the others only after the Seoul 1988 Olympic Games...and I remember that before that, all assaults lasted more than a foil match because there were always a lot of complaints and so many fencers arguing with the refs at every hit... and actually many times the fencers also had a lot of discussions even between themselves during the assault, reciprocally complaining about opponent's unfair attemps to manipulate the ref... what I liked, it was the rule that after 3 calls of "simultanèe" priority was assigned to one of the 2 athletes (the 1st was by draw, then it was 1 left and 1 right according to the natural sequence), so in case of a 4th call "simultanèe" the hit was going to someone in any case...I'd rather apply that rule also to today's sabre, because I can't stand those coward refs who always call that even 10 or more times in a row every time they do not have a really evident "winner" of the hit... I couldn't find anything about the epic mess of the team bronze medal match in Seoul 1988 (guess who were involved? yes, you're right...the Italians were there ), but here is part of the Los Angeles 1984 Team Gold Medal match between ITA and FRA...that's a good expample of how sabre was at the time... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQjDT6ORMyk

unfortunately Ten's death is confirmed... https://bnews.kz/en/news/25_year_old_denis_ten_has_died R.I.P.

sure... I started following Fencing with the 1982 Worlds in Rome, when I was a little child (those champs became -in-famous also outside the fencing world because of the fatal accident that killed the reigning Olympic and World champion in men's foil, the Soviet Vladimir Smirnov)... let's say it wasn't the easiest approach to the sport...but, despite that tragic day, I've always been liking fencing (by the way, my favourite weapon is men's sabre...man, I remember what used to happen in the late Eighties, when there wasn't the electric signal for the hits yet...every assault was crazy...those refs got really mad all the times) ...

beside the already known Olympic Qualification Regatta (Varese, April 27th through April 29th), in 2020 Italy will host also 2 (out of 3) World Cup stages (Sabaudia, April 10th through April 12th and Varese, May 1st through May 3rd)...

always on the Tokyo Olympics... according to the latest rumors reported by the Italian press, FINA has stated that they do not have anything against the Swimming (semis and) Finals being held in the morning, like it happened in Beijing in 2008... the official announcement won't be made until September (at least), but it's basically sure that, with the green lights given by the Aquatics World Federation, the Japanese organizers will make the greedy and powerful NBC happy and we're going to relive the (awful) Beijing experience...