phelps

I don't expect anything different at the moment... I hope sooner or later Marzani, De Marchi and Clerici would become regular medallists, but they still have to earn their experience, which is so important in Epee (more than in the other weapons)... right now, we can only rely on Fiamingo's special feeling for the big events...

I was referring to the Sky vs Eurosport controversy... rai doesn't even exist for me...I'd rather watch Swiss, French, German, British, Czech and Slovak TV (and any other I can find on the Clarke belt)... and I also use the Eurosport Player, if I can't find a TV network showing what I want to watch...

normally is the top 25 only making the 4th run at the Olympics... but also the top 20 is OK to me...it doesn't change that much...

not yet...they are both still open (number 12 probably will have the answer -YES- tomorrow, after the speedskating race (the men's 5000m)...

Women's Individual Epee (Barcelona, ESP) Final Results: Gold: Zhu Mingye (CHN) Silver: Tatyana Andryushina (RUS) Bronze: Kang Young Mi (KOR) & Olena Kryvytska (UKR) Semifinals: Zhu b. Kang 15-11 Andryushina b. Kryvytska 15-5 Gold Medal Match: Zhu b. Andryushina 15-7 Here is the Full Final Ranking (and Results) from Today's competition: http://fie.org/competitions/2018/92/results/rank

the Olympic Games are underway, but that's not the only sport event running in this weekend... Fencing doesn't stop... Men's Individual Foil (Bonn, GER) Final Results: Gold: Alexey Cheremisinov (RUS) Silver: Alexander Massialas (USA) Bronze: Guillaume Bianchi (ITA) & Jeremy Cadot (FRA) Semifinals: Cheremisinov b. Bianchi 15-8 Massialas b. Cadot 15-11 Gold Medal Match: Cheremisinov b. Massialas 15-8 Here is the Full Final Ranking (and Results) from Today's competition: http://fie.org/competitions/2018/138/results/rank

scheduling...scheduling...scheduling... the worst ever...and by far... p.s. here in Italy also the broadcasting question is a real scandal...but I think that this would have some more to be written in the next future...

actually Dominik and Kevin Fischnaller are cousins... apart from that, I guess the Gold has gone (who wrote that Loch is out of shape and above all that he can't handle this track? )... then I think there are still 7 men who could win a medal (even if 3 of them have a good advantage over the others)... and imho, Kindl is today's big loser (no way he can make up half a second in tomorrow's runs)...

day 1... to me, overall it was a pretty average one... as an Italian fan, well...the word "disaster" doesn't even give the idea (if this is the preview, I guess there's a chance to improve all of Sochi 2014 negative records)... what I enjoyed the most: for sure, the Kalla vs Bjorgen duel in Cross Country Skiing... what I didn't like at all: the Ski Jumping competition...boring...and with the wrong winner (at least to my taste)...give us the ski flying!!! and, of course, all the Italian flops here and there around the tracks... also the Luge and Biathlon events left me with a strange feeling (and I'm talking of the general feeling, nothing to share with my biased Italian eyes)...I didn't feel excited enough watching them, it was almost as if they were just another anonymous world cup race... the Short Track competion, instead, technically was just ruined by the judges (you can't advance 9 skaters to the final...c'mon, men!!!) and by an idiot as the ice master...it could have been a great show, but it ended up in a mess... and I don't even write about the TV production, the Italian broadcasting troubles and the awful scheduling of the entire Olympics (for this last item, there's a more appropriate thread)... I hope tomorrow's gonna get better for me and I hope we can watch a few more entertaing competitions...

sure...I can't wait to watch it...

sure, but still... I always have this thing in my mind when I watch a CC race...

women's game is not hockey...they use the same name, but it's just another sport... the only games that's worth watching are the USA vs CAN clashes... p.s. of course I'm still watching this game...but trust me, don't take people like me and @hckosice as an example...we're just addicted to anything looks like a game with sticks and pucks (we don't even need it to be played on ice, though we prefer that)... p.p.s. I'm also a bit surprised by the difficult period the Swedes are going through...I expected a definitely better game from them... but until they take the win home...

maybe I'm a little biased...but what if Belmondo didn't have to fight throughout her entire career against the likes of Egorova, Lazutina, Danilova, Nageijkina, Kuitunen and other people like those ones?

Jansrud, too...he and the Swiss today looked well in front of the rest of the field... and behind them there's a bunch of hungry wolves (Svindal, Paris, the Austrians -maybe except for Franz, who looks a bit slower than his teammates- and also a few other outsiders, like the Frenchmen and even Innerhofer, who was still in full contention until the intermediate #4, when the real effort ended -most athletes just had a touristic attitude in the last 30 seconds of the race)... I think tomorrow it's gonna be quite an open race, with some room for huge upsets (even if at the end the winner will not be the classic one-hit wonder kind of guy)...

I still go with X-Games winner, Markus Kleveland... today he didn't do anything more than he needed, but to have an idea of what he could do, just look at his X-Games performance... quali results from different heats shouldn't be compared (different conditions, different mindset and above all, different jury panel)...

tomorrow I hope to be able to watch all the most relevant events... but my "must" are for sure Cross Country Skiing, Biathlon, Short Track, Speedskating and Luge...

but very, very long... I hope they can fix the problems before the start of tomorrow's competitions, otherwise it's a nightmare follow the Games without the official site's support...

My pick is Wust winning the Gold medal, with Blondin and Takagi fighting up to the last skate for Silver and Bronze... and I pick Pechstein as my "luxus outsider"... for the Italian concerns, I hope Lollobrigida can make at least the 15th place, but I wouldn't be surprised if she just shows up and ends up last (and by miles), since she's only been talking about the Mass Start in the last 2 years or so...

[hide] Event & Date Athletes Gold Silver Bronze Men's Downhill Day 1 February 11th, 2018 Max Franz Vincent Kriechmayr Matthias Mayer X Hannes Reichelt Adrien Theaux Thomas Dressen Peter Fill Dominik Paris Kjetil Jansrud Aksel Lund Svindal X Beat Feuz X Gilles Roulin Any Athlete from North America Any Other Athlete Women's Giant Slalom Day 2 February 12th, 2018 Any Athlete from Austria Tessa Worley X Victoria Rebensburg X Federica Brignone X Sofia Goggia Manuela Moelgg Ragnhild Mowinckel Tina Robnik Estelle Alphand Sara Hector Lara Gut Mikaela Shiffrin Any Other Athlete Men's Super-Combined Day 3 February 13th, 2018 Romed Baumann Marcel Hirscher X Matthias Mayer Victor Muffat-Jeandet Alexis Pinturault X Peter Fill Dominik Paris Kjetil Jansrud Luca Aerni Mauro Caviezel X Pavel Tirkhichev Any Other Athlete Women's Slalom Day 4 February 14th, 2018 Bernadette Schild Any Athlete from Germany Any Athlete from Italy Nina Haver-Loeseth Petra Vlhova Estelle Alphand Frida Hansdotter X Anna Swenn-Larsson Wendy Holdener X Melanie Meillard Mikaela Shiffrin X Any Other Athlete Men's Super-G Day 5 February 15th, 2018 Max Franz Vincent Kriechmayr X Matthias Mayer Hannes Reichelt X Any Athlete from Canada Adrien Theaux Thomas Dressen Josef Ferstl Peter Fill Dominik Paris Aleksander Aamodt Kilde X Kjetil Jansrud Aksel Lund Svindal Beat Feuz Any Other Athlete Women's Super-G Day 6 February 17th, 2018 Nicole Schmidhofer Anna Veith Any Athlete from France Victoria Rebensburg Federica Brignone Sofia Goggia Johanna Schnarff Tina Weirather Ragnhild Mowinckel X Michelle Gissin Lara Gut X Any Other Athlete X Men's Giant Slalom Day 7 February 18th, 2018 Manuel Feller Marcel Hirscher X Alexis Pinturault Luca De Aliprandini Henrik Kristoffersen X Leif Kristian Nestvold-Haugen Zan Kranjec Matts Olsson Justin Murisier Ted Ligety X Any Other Athlete Women's Downhill Day 8 February 21st, 2018 Cornelia Hutter Nicole Schmidhofer Ramona Sieberhofen Any Athlete from France Sofia Goggia X Tina Weirather X Ragnhild Mowinckel Michelle Gisin Lara Gut Mikaela Shiffrin Lindsey Vonn X Jacqueline Wiles Any Other Athlete Men's Slalom Day 9 February 22nd, 2018 Manuel Feller X Marcel Hirscher X Michael Matt Alexis Pinturault Dave Ryding Stefano Gross Sebastian Foss-Solevaag Henrik Kristoffersen X Andre Myhrer Luca Aerni Daniel Yule Any Other Athlete Women's Super-Combined Day 10 February 23rd, 2018 Ricarda Haaser Anne-Sophie Barthet Federica Brignone X Sofia Goggia Marusa Ferk Denise Feierabend Michelle Gisin Wendy Holdener X Mikaela Shiffrin X Any Athlete from North America Any Other Athlete Team Event Day 11 February 24th, 2018 Austria Canada France X Germany Italy Norway Slovakia Sweden X Switzerland X United States Any Other Athlete [/hide]

I guess they're already so experienced that they don't need so many runs to "read" the track perfectly (especially when the training runs are not in the same conditions as the competition's ones)...

they're just settin'it up for another Shaun White's undeserved gold... that's definitely a NBC's plot (I guess thay called Mr.Reddington himself to write the Blacklist of Shaun's rivals and getting them off the Games)... it's a joke, of course...

probably your TV is better than mine (it doesn't take that much...my TV is a old cheap model...I'm just waiting the big offer on the 2018 models later in the year to get a new 4K one ) and adjusts the pictures more effectively...

to me, they only used their competition's sleds in runs 3 (when Loch destroyed the field) and today in the first of the 2 runs (and Loch was still there among the best...trying to hide himself as much as he can, though)... however, I hope that the night competition runs (with colder and dryer track than in the morning/afternoon training runs) won't give them theur usual technological advantage... looking at the Italians, now I'm really afraid that we're going to have some huge disappointment...K-Fisch is starting to feel the pressure and raising his times, D-Fisch is too inconsistent, Rieder just ain't got the talent... I guess it's gonna be Loch vs Kindl vs Repilov for the medals...

I think it's more about personal feeling... the ES Player here works as good as in the rest of Europe (provided you have a good internet connection), but to me a 720p/5000kbps/25fps stream is not good enough...as I wrote before, I'm used to MLB.tv, NHL.tv, NFL GamePass, Amazon and Netflix streams...1080i/p and 60fps for sports streams are a "must" for me (I'm OK with lower fps rate only in movies and tv series, since they were born with that features)... and I guess they also have some encoding problems, because the difference in the viewing experience between ES Player and the other services I mentioned above it's really too big (and not in favor of the ESP)... about being cheap...there's no doubt about it...I got a 12-month offer for only 15€ (and here in Italy they also have our National Basketball Championship and the Euroleague as exclusive rights -actually our BB league also has a 1-game slot on our FTA public channel Raisport+, but that's just a marginal part of the whole tournament)...

I just want to let you know the unbelievable farce going on in Italy... in our Country, as in almost any European Nation, Discovery Media (Eurosport) has bought the main set of TV rights of the Olympic Games... normally, we have 3 ways to follow Eurosport...on the Digital Terrestrial TV as part of the Mediaset Premium Pay-TV offer (less than 2 million subscribers), on satellite TV (main package of Sky Italia Pay-TV, 4.7 million subs) or online (their Eurosport Player, just a few subs, slightly over 100,000)... well, last night, when the Games were to start, we all discovered that sky ITA's sat channels were not to broadcast the Games...and only today in the afternoon came out that there won't be any sat broadcast of the Games because Discovery asked for more money to show the "Olympic package"... so, in the year 2018, in Italy we won't be able to watch the most part of the Olympic Games in high definition (on Mediaset Premium the Eurosport 1 & 2 channels are only in SD...their Player you all know how poor in terms of picture quality is)... now many people are going crazy because of that, especially because nobody expected anything similar (and nobody - not sky ITA nor Eurosport - did announce anything in the past days)... and so, most Italians have to be satisfied with the very limited offer of our public broadcaster (RAI), which, among other things, can't even show a single second of Ice Hockey, Curling, Nordic Combined and Skeleton events because of the agreement with Discovery Group... sometimes I'm really ashamed of being Italian, of living in this fuc*in' place...