De_Gambassi

The nightmare is back.

What... 20 quotas and up to two by nation, that's crazy, stupid, the death of olympism, yada, yada. Anyway, the overall ranking won't be too much of use. By default, I don't really like extra qualification tournament when you allready have a ranking that could do the job.

I fail to see the connection PS: XC still has more events than any other FIS/IBU discipline. EDIT/PS2: We could simply call moguls & aerials "freestyle skiing"

So the sports that allready suffers from a lack of quotas, should also suffer from the absence of some of its best athletes when other sports can rack as many athletes as they want and exclude no one ? Non bis in idem Besides, in most cases (excluding the longer boats), we are talking about events with 20-25 athletes. Other sports (BMX, surfing, diving...) manages to qualifie more than one athlete per nation with a similar number of overall quotas.

Exactly

Yeah, why not "giving" the medals to the best athletes ? The shock, the horror !

Do you guys believe we will see snowboarding and/or freestyle skiing with more than 10 events each at Beijing or later ? Remember, they introduced Big Air this time, but they dropped parallel slalom in the process. Maybe, 10 is the upper limit for these sports (and FIS might do not want to have any of these two fellows with more events than alpine skiing anyway)

Of course not, it's the winter olympics !

Why not a skeleton relay just like in luge ? And is women's doubles luge anything more than vaporware ?

Something that recquires a new venue to be built (ie natural luge) is probably dead in the water.

I would chose... none of them . The only one I'd personnaly like to see is the snowboard cross team event, but only if it was limited to only one - mixed - event. I guess that alpine parralel slalom is a given at this point (and alpine combined on his way out also). Big air skiing is so redundant with both aerials and snowboarding big air. But the IOC really want to reach these millenials I don't see any other events making the cut (except perhaps women NC)

Please, let it be true. Please, let it be true

Fencing + equestrian and you only need horses that go straight: problem solved

Well, no, not really . There are similar games in other european regions (Wallonia, northen France, Valencia region...). There is even a world championship and an international game that mixes the differents disciplines. All of them and more (basque pelota, tambourin/tamburello... and, well, tennis) are sharing the same roots. None of them looks anything like this new baseball game though

We really should make a contest out of it: - predict every nations that will qualify in each team sport - rank according to the percentage of success - a ridiculous tiebreaker ------------- Bragging rights Edit: once, we have the definitve qualification systems.

I assume our comeback in the World Cup after 27 years will be a very short-lived one

No it didn't. Please stop. Swimming was neither needed nor seen valuable and certainly didn't come naturaly. And again, it has nothing to do with the topic...

Disagree with what ? It has nothing to do with the lack of popularity* of the sport outside of the olympics. *popularity as in spectators popularity which was @JoshMartini007point I believe. Besides, that's a very debatable point. There have been billions of people who never learnt how to swimm through historty. I'm not even sure that the majority of people today knows how to swimm.

La chaîne L'Equipe qui réalise ce qu'on espérait plus du "service public"

Six, next year !

The 'popularity' of swimming is only worth of the million+ of medals they are giving away during each olympics. If it was not for that, it would just be just one olympic sports among others. T&F is a different beast.

Regarding Sochi (Why are we talking about that here btw ) and its pricetag, the $50b meme should really be revisted one day, possibly cut in half: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/did-the-winter-olympics-in-sochi-really-cost-50-billion-a-closer-look-at-that-figure/2014/02/10/a29e37b4-9260-11e3-b46a-5a3d0d2130da_story.html?utm_term=.76063b896db5 But, it won't serve the anti-russian Sochi 2014 narrative. So... And yes, other cities didn't wait for Sochi to happen to drop their bids left and right.

Not even close. The Olympics survived Montreal 76, they'll survive Sochi 2014

The thing is that the Davis Cup was really the X factor of the tennis world. The X factor that was badly needed. Congrats, tennis you're the new golf. Nicklas Kulti and Arnaud Boetsch played the best match of tennis ever in 1996. Period.