heywoodu

Austria's Heinrich Messner, winner of the very first alpine skiing World Cup race ever, has passed away.

Hoping with you, vamos

Ouch, yeah....ouch

Cool Although in a serious situation, I'd much prefer 1500m runners or so. Enough raw speed to catch basically any ordinary person and enough endurance to make up the time they lose by having to react to the situation when not expecting people to steal stuff But yeah, this gives a nice taste of how fast these runners really are

It's strange seeing not a single team with a full team, considering 4 riders really can't be called a full team

Baiba Bendika has finally announced the birth of their baby boy, and also has her first training after giving birth done already

Right, but they are actually living it up in Qatar now. Hamas leaders are actually, physically in their nice offices and luxury hotels in Qatar, this is not a secret or something. There is nobody who actually believes they'll be staying in a sober closet there.

Brazil announced today that they have a men's road race quota, unexpectedly. Is that because of reallocation and is that next to the Pan American championships ticket? 99% sure Nicolas Sessler will get it for Brazil. Which is definitely cool for him (old mountainbike teammate of Bruna, so that's cool too), but kind of shows the flaw of the whole ranking stuff perfectly, since Vinicius Rangel is the only Brazilian actually riding at the top level.....but that leaves him with fewer points, because it's harder to get good results in World Tour races than in .1 races

Meanwhile countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia have condemned Israel for it, despite more and more evidence of it likely having been Hamas itself with a massive rocket failure. Kind of makes you wonder why the Hamas terrorists even fight, considering they surely know they're 'leaders' are right now chilling it up in luxury hotels in Qatar, with the finest food they can ever wish and any other dream coming true.

Right, yes, but what I mean is that massive wins can be overs or in wickets and small wins as well. Whereas first I thought that maybe "won by X wickets" meant it was a small victory whereas "won by X overs" was a big victory, because of a different unit of measurement being used. I still have 4,5 years or so to learn the basics...

The slightly updated qualification system for cross-country skiing has been doing the rounds amongst athletes, but I can't find it online anywhere yet (like on FIS' website), any idea where to look? Don't have it at hand right now, but I believe the main thing in terms of eligibility for athletes is being under 300 (men) or under 350 (women) FIS points at the 2025 world championships, which I think is a change specifically for the women. There's been massive discussion about this system for a while now, especially about the eligibility only coming from a single event (like, you qualify at the world championships or not at all).

It's not like there'd be another US president who could have really changed all that (for the better, that is). The last somewhat competent one, Obama, might at least have been able to talk to them, since he is the last one who was actually able to form complete and clear sentences, but that's besides the point The whole area is sadly way too much of a never-ending wasp's nest for a president's visit of any country to just solve it.

Right, that helps! So winning by overs or wickets says nothing about whether the victory was massive or tiny, the only thing it says is which team batted first.

Presumably the same as Hamas (destroying Israel/killing all Jews)? Plus it's probably not exactly a secret they both are rather heavily supported (and to some extent directed in what they should do) by one of Israel's main enemies

Yup, there is so much blood on the hands of the leaders of both Hamas and Israel (not just this month, of course). It would be typical Hamas and their human shield tactics if this hospital, for example, was also hosting munition storage or dozens of Hamas terrorists, technically making it a 'military target', but with so many potential civilians in there also making it a very ethically questionable target, so yeah.... There's also still the (somewhat smaller) chance of Hamas themselves being behind this. Normally they have those little rockets that genuinely cause less damage than some fireworks we see here at the end of December (with the damage coming from Hamas having thousands and thousands of them), but theoretically they could have gotten their hands on something bigger and either aimed it at the hospital or failed massively in firing it at all.

Right. A few days ago I thought I got it when I saw a team won by X wickets, but it's won by runs instead of wickets then I think I'm not really getting it yet

With how many wickets and runs and overs did we win?

A few Swedish football fans (yes, on the whole number of foreigners visiting a city like Brussels on a daily basis, it is only a few) really isn't a reason to raise the alert level significantly. For certain matches, like if it were Belgium playing Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey or something like that, yes, security level would be raised (not so much because of terrorist threats, but because those kind of matches are notorious for resulting in trouble). The much bigger issue is in not kicking people out of the country the second there is a hint of radicalization. Which several years ago there apparently was in the case of this Tunisian guy, so there is still a failure in that sense of course. Although somehow I have a feeling Tunisia wouldn't have accepted him back anyway.

The lasers were there at every important moment, like both penalties, unfortunately. Luckily for Greece the first one was taken by Weghorst, who took the Poorest Penalty of the Year Award Didn't really see questionable calls yesterday to be honest. Both penalties were clear penalties, Greece was lucky the clear foul after 96 minutes or so didn't end up in another one (the guy attacked, I believe, Dumfries and then coincidentally slightly brushed the ball with his foot afterwards)... I would imagine Greek fans must have been incredibly annoyed with Gustavo Poyet as well? He was asking to be sent off all the time, and was lucky he only got it in the last 2 minutes or so... I do agree Greece deserves to qualify in the end (more so than the Netherlands, by the way), so hopefully it works out through the playoffs. Shouldn't be too much of an issue though, the luck of being in league C

Van Dijk scoring a 92nd minute penalty, straight in the face of some Greek loser with a laser light middlefinger.gif

Some drunk Greek asking for a stadium ban with his laser light.

In which sense?

After missing out on 2022 in such a bad way, I'm not sure how I am going to handle the situation here at home if now 2026 would be entirely cancelled.....so no please And sliding sports being cancelled would be awful, I'd much rather see ice hockey or figure skating be cancelled (but much much rather see nothing cancelled obviously). St Moritz seems unlikely I guess, but would be super awesome

Meh, that is highly unfortunate. Understandable, but unfortunate Innsbruck is a fun little track, but that's just it: little. It feels way too short for a modern-day Olympic sliding track..

Massive coincidence. I was reading a CNN piece on the Hamas attacks, where they wrote about using SunCalc (a website) to geolocate/time certain videos. Right, I checked the website out, noticed that if you click on a place it shows the next solar eclipse (partial or full) and saw that here in the Netherlands in March 2025 there is a 24% eclipse happening. Cool. Clicked on Brazil out of curiousity and....turns out there is a large partial to almost full eclipse in large parts of the America's......today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_October_14,_2023 Seriously, the coincidence. It's not like these things happen on a daily or even monthly basis. So if you're in the Americas, read up a bit and enjoy (with care for your eyes, obviously)!