heywoodu

Quick question: could you do that in a spoiler next time? It'd be nice to keep the TOISC thread available also for those who want to watch a bit later

Whoah

Still 12 nations within douze points, lovely so far

This confused me as well

No idea if information is still really being published about it here, it's mostly become just 'part of life', kind of. The recent thing is that there's another round of booster vaccines going on, apparently, but mostly for older people.

Probably going to wait with sleeping until Bruna's flight to the Netherlands takes off, which is around 25 minutes before the Dutch voting time...so might as well wait for that as well then

That is unclear yet Step one is getting back home, which is hopefully tomorrow (her flight of today was cancelled). Then she'll need to get back to work: both work as in training, since in the burning heat in Brazil she simply had to put that down for a bit to not destroy her body, and actual work as in her job in the bike shop For now we're thinking of trying to find some races in Austria or Germany in January, possibly including the open Dutch championships (which are no FIS races) and maybe followed by the Austrian championships in Saalfelden. It depends a little on logistics, for example the wife of the bike shop owner is more and more planning to take their van and drive to Austria for a bit to go to some races together, which would help immensely compared to having to find your way with public transport Long story short: probably not in the World Cup this season due to mainly logistical reasons and focusing on other kinds of races for now

What the fuck, Ryyty and Shalygina, bibs 2 and 3, break their pole in the very first push of the race

Which is why I'd be fine with having this as a sort of 'every now and then', like the mass start, as long as a very large majority remains the regular Gundersen format

After all the earlier troubles specifically regarding formatting, I'm positively surprised there's flashy-looking scoreboards after all

I love this one Got to know it thanks to Sex Education

Good idea, I'll do that in a bit too! If I do it now, I think Eurosport will freak out

Wow, that new 'compact' format is....fucked up Basically a huge middle finger to every athlete in Nordic combined who's strength is more in jumping than skiing.

Kinda looks like Bilbo Baggins in his arrest.

Who could have guessed, Mario Balotelli has been involved in a big car accident (got off unhurt) and was most likely rather drunk. https://www.voxnews.al/english/sport/i-dehur-ne-timon-aksidentohet-mario-baloteli-video-i53158 I guess it had been quiet around him for too long, so he needed some new bit of drama to make sure everyone remembers he is still....well, that

And Germany redefines the meaning of collectively coming up just short

Well, she's already been on the snow for quite a few weeks now, I think barely a month after giving birth she already was I expected/knew she'd be back in competition soon, but I thought the plan was IBU Cup instead of already World Cup, that'd be cool

Brazil - Croatia, didn't think they'd ever team up after last year's World Cup

OMG OMG OMG confession of the century, biggest doping revelation in ages!!

Didn't know that, but of course he did, surprise (this was sarcasm, just to be clear ) Oh well, actually going to Indonesia and demanding an apology is never going to happen anyway. Just like his usual plans of making the Quran and mosques illegal are things I didn't even write down when trying to eliminate parties for me to vote on. I am very much against those plans, obviously, but there is absolutely no way he would get them through parliament anyway. His bullshit about things like "climate madness" (their words of course) were more important reasons for me not to vote PVV, because in that area he can definitely gain some support and get unfortunate things done. By the way, now that most results are counted: it has even gone from 35 seats in the exit polls to a likely 37 seats, damn. I'm curious what's going to happen, at least he has plenty of good plans for things like healthcare (he is pretty far right because of his stance on EU, migration and climate, but in things like economy and healthcare he is way, way more left).

Right, when Europe's Putin congratulates you, you might want to think again...

But those are for art purposes.

That is really not as much of a one-way street as the far-right wants people to believe

Polls closed at 21.00 and so the first exit polls can now be published, and they're quite a shocker. Absolutely massively good picture for PVV of Geert Wilders: a staggering 35 seats, 9 more than leftist PvdA/GL and 12 more than ruling centre-right VVD. Damn. Of course it's only exit polls, but it's usually not like the actual result is different by 5+ seats.

Still something needs to be done about the whole equipment saga. Whether that's neutral wax, very strongly limiting the number of skis, whatever. It is absolutely batshit crazy that most of the big-country athletes have 40 or even 50 pairs of skis with them. Limit it to a maximum of say 4-5 pairs of skis per athlete per World Cup round, that is really, without a doubt more than enough. Add something like a neutral wax provider to that, with a limit number of waxes one can use. It takes out at least some of the insane advantage the big teams have with their research budgets, while still including the actual skills of the waxers in applying them correctly and choosing correctly (from the limited number of options that are available to everyone).