De_Gambassi

If we win tonight in RT, we will be defintly be promoted which - I'm almost sure - will be the first time an Usomething french team will be paying in an elite division

So much tension between the French and Russian team, you could feel it through the TV

It's an american football ball...

It basically never happens. Somme balls can be realy hard though (but there are many different kind of balls depending of the type of game). The ones playing with their bare hands with a very hard ball are the ones who suffer a lot. Still my favorute racquet sport and the most fun to play a friendly game IMHO. Can't wait to see the Slovaks make their debuts on world stage

Maybe, that's just a (failed) scam Anyway, with you, that make 2 slovakains who would know what the sport is. I smell growth in the air.

Wait... what ? Basque Pelota in Slovakia ?

Meh... it's hardly a flawless map (see slovakia for a start) If you only count the "bums on seats" aspect of it , rugby is a more popular sport than soccer in SA. It might also be the case in Madagascar (yes, really).

Rugby League.

Freaking unbelievable. We won, leading the game for a grand total of 0.1 second.

0.1 second on a biathlon race

Sounds perfect to my ears

The french NT kit is supplid by the official local Captain Tsubasa's material retailer

No one cares, basically.

Wiggins seems to suffer a rare disease that seems to waken up just before GTs start.

Here, we have a fancy paper signed by some one, so nothing to see there. Nothing "troubling" with so many top athletes living around with rare diseases and competing or training with legal doping products http://www.uci.ch/clean-sport/therapeutic-use-exemptions/ TUE's granted by UCI have declined from 239 in 2009 to 13 in 2015. Which can only means two things. - Up to 2009, we had a population of near-zombie ridding in pro cycling. - TUE's were used do cover up doping cases. I'd favor the second hypothesis. And what UCI has done, others might still doing it. TUEs are a disgrace. At the very least, sport people shouldn' be able to compete using them, and there sloud not be no retroactive case in any circonstance. At best, they should be eradicated. -

I was not either...

That sentance... PS: 3x3 basketball is decade(s) away to be a competitive enough sport on its own. We are talking 1996 rugby seven at this point. PS2: sorry to disrepute...

I'll encourage them to create the Silly Hat International Basketball Federation (SHIBA).

Germany (TischTennis + Gesamnt ): 570 655 France (Tennis de Table + Nbre de Lincences): 197 797 Here, by these two countries alone, there are close to 800K registered players (there are not your average garage players btw, but people that are registered through their clubs, that train and play official competitions week in and week out). This number alone would easely smash the overall particpation level of many olympic sport (have you met any syncro swimmer lately ?), It not like people in other countries don't try, but it's not like they're facing competition from Aruba neither, We are talking about a 1.5 billion people country ffs.

Why do you need Cricket, when Baseball is such an incredible popular sport all over Italy ? @orangeman

National federations don't necessarily mean that much. For instance, in both Italy and France, we have a cricket federation, yet the game basically doesn't exist in these two countries bar a few immigrants circles. Anyway, the IOC allready did most of the job https://stillmed.olympic.org/media/Document Library/OlympicOrg/IOC/Who-We-Are/Commissions/Olympic-Programme-Commission/EN-RIO-2016-International-Federations-Report.pdf

Nice review, hope to read more PS: You could look like at a 40 person tournament for instance with the ranking round serving also as an elimination round like in shooting. it would mean 32 extra quotas for achery, sounds bearable.

Food for thought, back in 2002, the Olympic Program Commission recommended the exclusion of baseball/softball, canoeing slalom, eventing, pentathlon, race walking events and one of the wrestling discipline (and that was before women wrestling was included). http://www.ffcanoe.asso.fr/actualites/evenements/cio_pekin_an.pdf

Fine, point taken. Doesn't change my argument though.

hem... please stop ? - The only one who stated on theses boards "lol, no, nobody cares about baseball except americans and japanese" was actually an american, not an european. The lack of professional involvement is not simply a concern, for many but a reason enough not to include it (and most of them actually think men soccer should be dropped for the same reason). There is no need to overestimate the popularity of the sport neither, the game barely exists south of Venezuela and north or Korea, and is marginal at best in Australia. - (Really, still moaning about TT ?). First, by itself, the over-domination of one country shouldn't be a reason enough to drop a sport., if it was the case, basketball should be out also and no one should think about baseball then (which would be over dominated by a MLB stars led US team). Secondly - and most importantly -, TT is a competitive sport played by millions, including thousands of professionnals (Pro TT leagues actually exists in Europe for a reason). By any stretch, TT is actually a bigger sport than squash, and probably badminton too (more countries play it, more professionnals play it, bigger crowds for top events, etc.). Domination by one country is not a good reason enough to remplace one sport by a smaller one, or then call for netball to remplace women's basketball.