heywoodu

Yeah, there's certainly things to complain about from an athletes' perspective, but snow should really not be much of an issue indeed. Mostly things like the enormous geographical spread and it's consequences like there not being one big opening ceremony and everything being spread around a bunch of small Olympic 'villages'/accomodations - so not really the Olympic feeling and atmosphere for the athletes since they'll mostly just stay around athletes of their own sport as in any regular competition. We'll be going very near to the Olympic area in a few weeks (Coppa Italia in Falcade), let's see what things look like by then.

Yep, the amount of emergency services I heard at some point was a little extreme (for our little town), so I checked what was going on and saw they were all being called to a specific location. Until then I thought maybe it was part of a parade of trucks and agricultural vehicles that was on it's way from the next town over, decorated with lights and stuff. Since I knew it was on the parade route, I was sure one of those big vehicles had hit people somehow (there were, besides the many vehicles, also two helicopters on the way, meaning it certainly wasn't about a single victim). We picked our bikes and went to take a look, absolutely chaos in the area. Never saw so many services combined together, fire trucks from 20km away, ambulance after ambulance came racing by, people frantically trying to make way for them (the roads weren't really closed yet). While there we heard someone who had been close say that the parade hadn't arrived yet and what seemed to have happened was that a car from the other side came onto the roundabout and simply never turned. "It's a massive drama over there, unbelievable", he said. Quite quickly rumours started spreading of course, the first one turned out to be true: a middle aged (local) woman was behind the wheel and seems to have become unwell. Local security camera showed the car going at high speed right before the roundabout. Plenty of rumours going around in terms of who were involved of course, and people keeping each other up to date to see if they know this or that family and such... Never expected my little town to be big news in the Netherlands, even including some breaking broadcasts, live reporters and everything, damn. By far the biggest thing to happen here in my memory

Not religious, but I do celebrate Christmas because it's the time of excessive and delicious meals I can't really think of any Dutch Christmas songs though, basically we hear Mariah Carey and WHAM! half the day and a collection of others the other half of the day

Hamar isn't exactly fast neither Like I said, that's fine though. It would be great to have Olympics on a relatively slow track, which makes for different kind of races but certainly no less interesting.

Juniors were there recently and the track was awful Although that's not necessarily bad. Tracks don't all need to be fast, a slow track (like the horribly slow one in Poland) simply favors a different style of athletes. Training a lot there doesn't really give much extra advantage though, not like in sliding sports where of course as host country you make sure your athletes know every single meter a year before the Olympics. And to get back on topic: speed skater Elisa Dul broke her tibia and fibula in a training fall yesterday and will obviously be out of the OQT and so the Olympics.

speed skater Patrick Roest is competing, but because of his injury issues of the past years he now hasn't even qualified for the Dutch Olympic qualifiers (I believe he got a wildcard, but the way he's been riding...he is nowhere fit)

Who knows, maybe see you there I know I also have biathlon tickets but I have no idea which ones exactly, need to start putting things together. I know the women's sprint is among them so, if plans work out well, Bruna and I and my family (and her employees) all come and cheer for Baiba Bendika

Please do not bring this idea to Sindo

For a 3rd ticket for Brazil, which would make her/our life a significant amount easier, yes Whether or not she actually needs it will depend a lot on Jaqueline Mourao making or not making the A criterium (under 150.00 FIS distance points on 18/19 January). Last time Brazil was 1 position too low to get a 3rd ticket, but I think this time more countries got the basic quota and so fewer tickets are available for the next steps in the allocation system. Which is an even bigger deal in the men's situation, where I believe it looks like not a single nation will even get to the maximum of 8 spots.

Yes, but what I mean for Serbia is that everything changed there (unfortunately for us ). 2022 was an unbelievable mess, that's not the case anymore now with just one athlete who has really gone for it and made it, so I'm 99% sure they'll accept it this time. Who knows though. Plus there's always 1-2 bigger countries here or there who reject something, but it's not gonna be 16 places I'm afraid

Serbia will absolutely accept their 1 women's spot though, considering the sister of their only athlete basically is the federation (after a massive drama in 2022 where athletes were actually stepping out of a race 100m before the finish to avoid their points counting, that was truly crazy and if I'm not mistaken even religion played a role there). I doubt Liechtenstein will deny Nina Riedener?

Right, so that was a smart way of sounding like making a point while not actually doing so, and people fell for it

Any other countries you think might reject something? I know it's just speculation, but still.

Didn't Svahn say she'd boycott it if Russians/Belarussians were allowed to compete? That should make that choice slightly easier.

As far as I know, yes. I don't think I have seen anyone of those three countries active recently besides Del Rio, Galstyan and Velicer respectively, but Andorra and Taiwan used to have more than one athlete capable of doing so, so who knows. I know Taiwan will have someone compete in the Far East Cup races in Alpensia Thursday and Friday (just like Brazil, which is rather problematic for us and might, with some bad luck, kill 'our' chances for the Olympics, but let's see). I assume that is Velicer, but you never know, they weren't willing to give an actual entry list.