heywoodu

I am gonna be so ashamed of my country today It's time for Alpe d'Huez, AKA 'The Dutch Mountain'. That's always completely packed with half the Dutch population, especially in 'The Dutch Turn', turn 7. The finish is on the Alpe today, so that's gonna make it even worse Some illustration, this video was made 2-3 days ago in turn 7, where Dutch 'fans' (mostly just drunk people) have been camping for almost a week already.

By the way, since I'm kind of a noob on reading schedules, the main question for me is: what's the average time on which the day of sports starts and ends?

It probably favours the American viewers who are not general sports fans, but only want to see a few medals being decided. If you're a fan of Olympics/general sports, no matter the timezone it just sucks when there's hours and hours without finals, and then a boatload of finals crammed in 2-3 hours so you can't see them all, even though there would have been plenty of time to schedule it in such a way that you could actually see them all. Like in Pyeongchang: almost every day there was a time when for several hours almost nothing happened, and then all of a sudden 4-5 finals happened in the same moment, so even with a lot of available time it was impossible to watch everything live.

A bit of showbizz in between the real stuff:

Yep, Kruijswijk did a good job to try and close a bit of the gap towards Froome for Roglic yesterday at the end.

Where can the (official) results, start lists and stuff like that be found?

Day 1 and already six athletes from Congo and one from Cameroon, Botswana and Togo didn't appear.

Why not keep it as it is, wait for the women's ski jumping to be even half as competitive as the men's, and then add a women's team event? With the current state in women's ski jumping, there's really no need for two individual events.

As a big fan of smaller countries, I'm not sure that's worth the sacrifice of having two events with both of them probably having a somewhat mediocre field because top athletes are saving themselves for either the mixed or the single mixed.

That is if the best athletes even will compete in all events. I can imagine a situation where you've got a mixed relay and a single mixed relay both with around 50% of the best athletes. That's not great.

I meant it's a good thing they didn't add the single mixed relay, because in my opinion that is 100% perfect for show events, but rather mediocre to have in a serious competition.

Netherlands 3, Italy 1, eat that @Gianlu33 and @phelps

Exactly. Events should not be put in the Olympics to make them grow, events should be interesting enough to grow before they're being put in the Olympics.

Because the single mixed relay in biathlon is the absolute perfect event for show events and demonstrations (like Biathlon auf Schalke in Gelsenkirchen).

Ugh, we all know what that's gonna be.

No worries, I enjoyed the ice hockey last Olympics, just wanted to get my Slovak buddy's heart rate to go up

Yep...I'm actually very much hesitating to tell this news to my girlfriend (Brazilian biathlete), since this might severly impact her chances and even her entire motivation for the next 3,5 years..

Just to clarify: my problem is solely with removing competitive events and/or adding senseless events (either mixed team stuff or events that are way too 'young' yet and should be added after having had time to grow up). I'm not against having more women or something

It's not about who wins, it's about having competitive events. Removing competitive men's events or reducing fields there, solely to have more equality, doesn't seem fair at all if they are replaced by events that are not even half as competitive. One example would be bobsleigh: there are quite a large number of men who can win it, while there are realistically speaking maybe 2-3 women's drivers who could do so. Bigger men's field seems fair. On the other hand in skeleton, the women's field is generally more competitive at the moment, so increasing women's quote seems fair there.

The problem is that every mixed event any random person throws at them as suggestion seems to be added, while actual new sports (telemark skiing, natural track luge) don't make it. They are doing rather radical stuff for the Summer Olympics by the way, with 100% judge sports like surfing or skateboarding, or a non-existing climbing event as the only climbing event.

Thanks for 'biting', that's all I wanted

Yes, and not after only a handful of years.

I did not know there was a press conference

I'm more of the "IOC destroys women's sports by adding them to the Olymics while not being competitive yet, so people think they are bad" camp I want to see two women's bobsleigh events, I want to see women's Nordic combined, but they have to be given at least some time to grow up into something that is at least somewhat competitive.

Where do you guys see removed quotas?