heywoodu

Deal Fun fact: if you happen to see a photo of the village somewhere and you notice a Brazilian flag in front of a window: that's the flag from the opening ceremony of the IBU Open European Championships in Poland last week

No idea yet, they basically arrived, threw down their stuff, sent me some pictures and went to sleep, understandably I'll definitely ask today though before they're off to the opening ceremony

Athletes in the rooms are greeted with a nice big Almaty Photo Guide, a ton of Universiade stuff and....a nice and detailed Coca Cola bottle And yes, this means Team Brazil has arrived...it's almost 6am, but they arrived

Oh you mean in Poland, yes I had forgotten Mika is still there, but she only drove to Prague yesterday to take Bruna to the bus station (to start the travel to Kazakhstan) and then went back I gues... Well, Gabi and Caio were in the single mixed in the Junior Cup in Pokljuka this week

Wait what?

'Official' photos will be available here, cool https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5d0UBLbsmd8LVRtLTYya3B3WUE

That's a bit of unfortunate planning Meanwhile we're getting close to 5am and no word out of the athletes' village yet...oh boy, I hope Monday's performance isn't gonna suffer too much because of this

Meanwhile it's deep, deep in the Kazakh night (03:00) and the plane from Frankfurt (GER) carrying, among others, Team Brazil (one athlete, one official) has landed at Almaty airport a few minutes ago. That's gonna be a very late arrival before they can finally get to bed...(remember, they've mostly been travelling non-stop since yesterday afternoon already, with a few very short hours of sleep in between). Oh well, they're in Kazakhstan, let the adventure begin

But well done, even on a forum full of international, sports addicted loonatics, you've managed to find something for which you're still the only one who watches it

Right

Two fantastic fights so far, Rydzek vs Frenzel is definitely one of the best head-to-head fights in winter sports this season

Kazakhstan 16-0 vs China so far with 76-8 SOG....I think Kazakhstan entered all their best players in a university or something

Nice

Yes!

I mean, if you're from an exotic nation....come on, get an exotic suit

Haha cool Talking about suits, I'm still waiting for the biathletes (and XC skiers) of Brazil to switch to the kind of awesome suit skier Nathan Alborghetthi has

5 (!) Belgian guys in the Junior Cup sprint in Pokljuka today

The sun came up this morning, water is wet and Vonn crashed

Kazakhstan does have some strong teams here....for example their women's biathlon team is simply their full-on World Cup relay squad Nearly the same for the men and in speed skating they have world class sprinters like Roman Krech and Yekaterina Aydova.

This is the exact feeling I have in all team sports at Universiades "Oh this country is good at this sport, they might win this!" and then it turns out they sent some small town school's team or something

Yesterday in Duszniki-Zdroj the Russian Ana Nikulina started right after her in the sprint (biathlon) and only passed her halfway through the first lap and for the rest of the lap Bruna managed to stay within a few meters of Nikulina and even closing in a little on the uphill....trust me, she got motivated there

Anyway, FIS points are so hard to compare. A certain performance could result in 140 points in one race and in 300 in another race depending entirely on which other athletes are in the race...that's why I'm trying to compare a lot of the athletes with 'known factors', like athletes who competed against Mirlene Picin this season (because she competed all over Europe already and I sort of know how to compare Bruna with her). Someone like Abdykadyrova was 4 minutes slower than Gabi Neres at the Hochfilzen IBU Junior Cup sprint (skiing time) so that's a safe bet that Bruna can beat her since she's on somewhat the same level as Gabi

Hard to say, so far I only looked at FIS points but today and tomorrow I'm going to take a closer look at the exact results of athletes with for example above 150 FIS points to see what's possible All participants ranked by FIS distance points: Bruna would have considerably less points if the races in Ushuaia in July/August weren't cancelled by the way, probably something like 170-180

And she might have a decent chance considering there's not much World Cup-action among the athletes And yes I was just as surprised about Georgia By the way, 10 of 70 female cross-country skiers don't even appear in the FIS Points List. Mostly because they didn't compete any FIS races in the past year or so and in a few cases because there's simply no profile of them