heywoodu

That's her big goal, yes. The problem is that Jaqueline Mourão so far has a much lower amount of FIS points and as @dcro has pointed out to me on numerous occassions, getting two quotas is gonna be very, very hard for Brazil and requires both of them getting under 100 FIS points average. It's a shame of Bruna's injury since the beginning of January which definitely affected her. Next month she finally gets her first real chance to compete against Mourão directly on snow (at the WCH), but it's hard to say if it will be a fair fight considering the physical problems of the past weeks.

My full list so far So an athlete like Ukrainian Mazur was 2:40 minutes slower than Mika in a 10km freestyle in December and 40 seconds slower in a classic sprint qualifying. That's definitely beatable for Bruna. The numbers at the far-right are the chance for Bruna to beat the athlete, with 1 being basically impossible, 5 being somewhat 50/50 (as far as I could guess) and 10 being 'easy' Everyone under 100 FIS points isn't realistic so I'm not gonna check them any further, but I'll look at the Koreans, Slovaks, couple of Ukrainians and the other Mongolian later

26 euro for every euro you place on a Czech win 61 for a Slovak win

It's so incredibly hard to predict by the way, way harder than in biathlon. Like these Chinese: they only ever competed in China (with the exception of the previous Universiade for one of them) so it's nearly impossible to know how strong they are. Same thing for the Koreans, who finish minutes behind other Koreans in local races, but again, hard to predict..the Americans are even worse, with some of them only competing some non-FIS college races. At least a good number of Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian and even Mongolian athletes competed against Mika in December, which gives me a bit of a comparison

Double your money if Sweden finishes ahead of Slovakia (thanks to Sima's last leg)

06:00 CET tomorrow....everyone root for BIB 15 please http://wuni2017.sportresult.com/nh/en/-360/Comp/Info/StartList/CCW005101

Yeah she's a very interesting prospect! There's usually a ton of Serbians who are miles behind in skiing speed (Lucic last season, Hasimovic, Sinanovic now) or people like Inesa Zekic shooting only about 20% in a season, but Drndic is rapidly rising way above that kind of level

Well, nope

I doubt USA sent anywhere near their best college players Just for fun I looked at their roster and took one example: Cassandra Dunne plays at Penn State University, yet on PSU's website she's not even listed in the team roster so maybe she's not even in the 'main team' there or something...apart from that, the college season doesn't stop for the Universiade, so I'm guessing colleges want to keep their best players.

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