heywoodu

'Funniest' thing so far is Toto Wolff basically telling Vasseur he shouldn't be complaining and overreacting so much. You know, Vasseur, whose Ferrari team now has a severely damaged car due to organizational oversight Wolff just wants to make sure he never says anything that is actually decent, right? Edit: new 'funniest' thing already appeared That is half an hour before FP2 is finally going to start.

1 is a matter of preference I think and I agree with 2, this isn't at all great for the residents. I don't think it's more dangerous than Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Monaco, Miami, Baku for example, and whether the race will be boring or not we really can't say yet....that was said about more new tracks which turned out to not be the case, with classic tracks then ending up boring sometimes. This is definitely not going great, but it's also far from the first time a race track - street or not - has had manhole cover issues. I still have hope that's solved and we can get things going for real. The track and surroundings definitely have a lot more interesting overall feel than soulless stuff like Bahrain or Qatar. How are Sepang and especially Shanghai classics, by the way, didn't they debut less than 25 years ago and stayed for not even 15-20 years? As long as at least Monaco, Spa, Monza and Silverstone stay on the calendar forever...

Fantastic start for the Vegas GP weekend this morning. First practice was stopped and then cancelled after a grand total of 9 minutes, due to a loose manhole cover which severely damaged the floor of Carlos Sainz' Ferrari (and luckily didn't injury anyone). Seems unlikely FP2 will happen in a bit over an hour.

Never used the Google applications, the only ones besides Teams were Zoom and Webex and those were because some external party insisted on using them for one or two meetings with them. Sucked balls compared to the super duper easy Teams with chats and agendas and shifts and everything integrated and a grand total of I believe one 1-hour problem in the past three years

Once again, Apple and it's devices causing problems I can't count the amount of times that one colleague delayed a work meeting for half an hour because his MacBook had yet another issue with Microsoft Teams (which worked perfectly for everyone else) Anyhow, it must be frustrating for @Olympian1010 that it's not working well, but we're gonna make a TISC party of it nonetheless tomorrow, no worries about that

That is so odd. Surely it's not like it was all entirely different than all the times it did work? Maybe the forum software changed or something

And even the Gods of Formatting themselves, @OlympicIRL and @Sindo, are at a loss?

I have exactly two reasons in my life to use Mozilla FireFox: to use the website of the Dutch train service NS which for whatever reason doesn't work on my laptop on Edge (it refuses to scroll down, no idea what the issue is with that specific site).....and for formatting stuff on Totallympics, 99% of which is indeed around the song contest

This weekend it's Beijing time and in terms of entry lists we went back to normal: they were already there on Wednesday, as used to be the case but wasn't for Obihiro. Now the draws are there as well for tomorrow, with the main thing being Olympic 500m champion Gao Tingyu being back in competition for the first time since he took gold in the Olympics almost two years ago. https://live.isuresults.eu/events/2024_CHN_0001/schedule

These guys are definitely worth listening to. One Israeli man, whose young daughter was killed in one of many suicide bombings, and one Palestinian man, whose young daughter was one of many innocent victims of the Israeli army. They're both prominent members of a group of people consisting of both Israeli and Palestinian people who lost children during the decades of violence and together try to raise a voice in somehow, maybe trying to improve the situation somewhat (with especially this Israeli and this Palestinian guy often travelling around the world together to spread their message, but they're working with a lot more Palestinian and Israeli parents who want the same thing: a stop to all the back-and-forth violence). With their main message basically saying: "everyone who lives in the area has full right to live in this area, but we all have to make a choice: either we share the land, or we share the cemetary under the land. Any other option isn't going to happen, because both of us aren't going to go away, so we should all stop the 'your people don't belong here' rethoric and start talking." These guys aren't people who just appeared now by the way, they've been doing this for many years now.

Damn, the football part of that video is chilling, in the most positive possible meaning (as in, giving chills) That atmosphere is magical, it kind of reminds me of the athletics youth (junior?) world championships in Nairobi a few years ago where the entire stadium was shaking on it's foundations almost every day I believe the Tour of Burkina Faso has similar kinds of enthousiasm levels as you see in the video (probably spread from Rwanda which is the most insanely awesome country in the world for cycling atmosphere) I hope they can play their home matches at home again soon.

Good luck doing that while at the same time Israel is bombing their homes and cities off the map.

Isn't that at least somewhat what the likes of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were doing (obviously not solving the whole thing, but slowly making small steps forward)? You know, until the likes of living trash Netanyahu incited people into murdering Rabin and basically bombing the shit out of the entire peace process for another few decades.

They can close the stadium all they want, I'm going to assume they have no power over the streets around them Now you got me curious for pictures from the city Thursday

Yeah, I mean on online forums and such here, a large part of people is not exactly thrilled by their/our own leader's speeches. Yes, there are unfortunately people here who post trash like, and I am quoting them, "just turn the Gaza Strip into a big parking lot" or "now the Palestinians are getting what they wanted". Which luckily a very large majority of people do see as definite trash, but I sadly can't deny it exists. If I'd just try to sort of summarize the overall mood I'm reading online and hearing around (my country specifically, I can't say how it is in other countries), I'd say a majority of people is disgusted by basically everything that has been going on since the morning of 7 October. There are the extremists in one side who yell the 'From the river to the sea' thing and so call for the non-existence of one country (with sadly at least one Dutch political party supporting this), and there are the extremists on the other side who yell the aforementioned disgusting stuff about turning Gaza into a parking lot (with some politicians not literally quoting that, but....yeah, at the very least slightly leaning that way), but overall a majority isn't on either extreme and wants to see - small as the chance may be - that the whole situation gets better. Since it obviously won't be all solved within a day, that will have to start somewhere, and there's a lot of people here who at least want a ceasefire (unlike apparently our politicians) and decent opportunity for all kinds of aid to enter Gaza to somehow try and make some sort of a start. I'm momentarily lost on how the multiquote thing works or how to break a quote, but about what you said about "You speak about the whole thing like Palestinians were living in a Paradise" --> I worded that wrong, because I definitely didn't mean to say Palestinians were living anything better than an already very poor life in inhumane conditions, so my apologies for that. The exact sentiment you describe there about nothing justifying killing innocent people, babies etc, but this very much not coming out of nowhere, is exactly the sentiment I saw a lot online here as well. People being obviously disgusted by the attack at first, but pretty quickly getting angry towards Israel's (and the west's overall) reaction as if they - as a country - were getting attacked by wasps without ever getting anywhere near a nest.....when they basically are the ones who created it and then kept pushing it to a breaking point decade after decade. And on a sidenote: I do hope dialogue between different people from different cultures remains possible about these things. I don't mean between Israel and Palestine directly, but about people like here on a forum. I'll be the first to admit a lot of people in the west, definitely myself included, have no clue about the full extent of the situation, but quite a lot of people are at the very least trying to understand something, even if it's only a tiny bit, and dialogue is a lot better to try and learn something about it than only the one-sided viewpoints in the media of whichever 'side' of the world.

Yes, basically everyone agrees those are beyond horrible things. And lots and lots of people agree that Israel is committing war crimes on a large scale. Thinking that everyone in 'the west' is somehow in favour of these things is equally wrong as saying Hamas (which puts their command centers in hospitals, puts large munition storages in apartment buildings and so on) is speaking and acting for all Palestinians, because of course a terrorist group doesn't speak for a whole population of regular people who just want to live their life. I highly doubt a large part of regular Palestinians want Hamas, because Hamas is causing them to die (it's not without reason they were protesting in the streets yelling 'Fuck off Hamas' before 7 October), and so is Israel. Nobody wants the Hamas terrorists on the face of the earth and nobody wants the war crimes Hamas (by setting up centers and munition storages in hospitals and residential buildings and hoarding all the fuel so hospitals can't use it) and Israel (by refusing aid to go there and cutting off water and electricity) are committing. At least not most.

Right, most of the assumptions you make here (starting from literally the first few words to literally the last few words) are not true, so somewhat of a discussion is clearly not going to be possible given the (understandable) sensibility of the situation. That's fine though, so never mind

At the danger of receiving a rant because it's a sensitive subject: does one need to be fully pro-Palestine and fully anti-Israel to be considered to 'have something of humanity' in this context? I do hope not (and to be clear, I am far from anti-Palestine, just to be very clear). Meanwhile I'll continue this so far excellent bit by John Oliver, starting with talking both about how awful Hamas is and then how the often-heard 'Palestinians elected Hamas, so they want this war!' is obvious bullshit, and then going on a similar route about Netanyahu (and how just like Hamas not speaking for all Palestinians, Netanyahu definitely doesn't speak for all Israelis).

Apparently they also have unlimited space for headlines now (just ignore the unnecessary . at the end of the headline, where one generally doesn't end with a dot) https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1142467/skiing-levi-shiffrin

More sports should follow this example of not having OQT finals in events with more than one available spot (so where every finalist would be qualified anyway).

Saturday was the second race of the South American championships, distance classic. As usual 5k for the women, where Totallympian Bruna was once again the fastest, although Duda Ribera surprised by being only 3,5 seconds behind - she is normally much more of a sprinter. Mika Picin, who is usually stronger in longer distances, came up short and finished in third place. https://www.fis-ski.com/DB/general/results.html?sectorcode=CC&raceid=43876 The men's 11km race went to Norwegian Chilean Sebastian Endrestad, who was 12 seconds faster than Brazilian junior Claudio Gustavo Oliveira - currently probably the strongest of the Brazilians who live and train in Brazil. Victor Santos, the one the federation usually wants to put on the forefront, was 52 seconds behind in third. https://www.fis-ski.com/DB/general/results.html?sectorcode=CC&raceid=43875 After a rest day on Sunday, yesterday the next series of races started. These are not South American championships anymore, but only part of the regular Brazilian rollerski circuit. It started off with a freestyle mass start, where Duda was simply a bit too strong. Bruna was in the lead in the last part, but didn't have the power to hold off a strong final sprint by Duda. Once again, Mika was the third wheel on the bike and finished third. https://www.fis-ski.com/DB/general/results.html?sectorcode=CC&raceid=43866 The men's race saw a tight final sprint as well, but with a slightly bigger group. It was Endrestad who again took the win by overpowering the rest in the final few hundred meters, Victor finished in second and Martin Flores in third. Fourth place for Yona Fernandez, which makes it three Chileans in the top-4. https://www.fis-ski.com/DB/general/results.html?sectorcode=CC&raceid=43865 Also, I am frankly somewhat angry at the races even happening. Cross-country races are not even allowed to go on when it's -20 degrees Celsius or colder (measured at the coldest part of the track), but for high temperatures, FIS rules only state that it's up to the technical delegate (which in races like in South America or the Balkan is usually someone with close ties to the organization). It was already awfully hot in the South American championships races, but yesterday it was even worse: the women started at 08.30 for example, and whereas the official results sheet that was sent to FIS listed 23 degrees as starting temperature, in reality it was already well over 30 degrees, by the time they finished (not even 20 minutes later) it had already gone up to 36 degrees. And that was not even the last racing of the day, the para-athletes still race after all that. Doing a cooldown after the race was barely even possible, because how are you going to do a cooldown when the temperature is literally higher than a healthy human body temperature? The women's race yesterday already saw a DNF purely because of the heat, 16-year old Julia Reis (who will be Brazil's representative at the Youth Olympics this winter) became unwell due to the heat....and again, it was not even 9am yet. Today is classic sprint day, so shorter but even more intensive and also, later in the day, because there's qualifyings first and then heats and finals and such, and the organization has declined the idea to move the starts to 7am. It's going to be even warmer today and probably tomorrow for the skiathlon as well, I am honestly worried about the health of the athletes and find it irresponsible for these races to go on...

Or we just ditch all the new-fashioned nonsense altogether and have five individual distances, like we had for decades and was always more than fine Team pursuit is okay...ish. Team sprint, meh. The current mass start format is still just nonsense and maybe at best 20% of the distance a real mass start race should be, mixed events just don't work well at all. Nah, 500, 1000, 1500, 3000/5000 and 5000/10000 are more than fine.

If we're in need of extra events, I'd much prefer the relay over the team sprint. That just adds nothing at all, it's basically just the team pursuit...but short.

Well, whoopsie for Vlhova Nice podium for Popovic

That's the most expected result of the week considering the past few days there