heywoodu

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

Oh we already started I thought this was just about tomorrow until you came up with actual stats

Eurosport has taken over all exclusive rights for the Giro d'Italia and other RCS-organized races like Milano - San Remo for the next four years I don't know if it goes for all countries, but here it means both Dutch and (much worse) Belgian TV can't show anything live anymore...especially that last part is just pure horror for cycling fans in this part of Europe

I know one person who did not fill in Borat but who did mention something about Kazakhstan being the birth place of apple trees after a certain someone mentioned it to her I also suggested "I know Kazakhstan lost all four weightlifting gold medals of the 2012 Olympics due to doping and their biggest ever sports hero, Ilya Ilyin, lost two gold medals because of it", but thought the organizing committee might not like the sense of humour

No, she'll get her first actually new rifle when she gets a result below 200 IBU points

Finally, all athletes have been entered in the system apparently http://wuni2017.sportresult.com/nh/en/-360/Participant/List?letter=&countryId=&disciplineId=&eventId=&gender=&isTeam=false&isGrid=false&page=0&itemNumbers=25 I'm guessing the profiles will be filled out a bit more, since the athletes were asked to answer some questions like "What do you know about Kazakhstan"?

Only 1 miss for Poliakova, only 1 miss for Fialkova...not bad

Giraud Moine...that's not good.

Two misses...oh well, there's a clear rise in performance compared to earlier this month Not gonna be a 'you'll get a new rifle'-kind of performance, but a good one to end the biathlon part of the season

She's been throwing down 0's and 1's a lot in training this season in prone position, now finally she managed to do it in a competition! Standing is a different story, a lot of trouble in training, but Wednesday she shot clean in the last standing bout...so come on.

Five hits in prone, way to go Bruna

F*ck you IBU, showing all first 10 starters, then showing someone passing the 1st intermediate and skipping to the start of bib 12

Come on Bruna, one last biathlon race this season, give it your all

So that's why Cheryl Maas was able to keep someone behind her..

"We love you Iliev, we do! We love you Iliev, we do!" Everyone! "We love you Iliev, we do! Oooh Iliev we love you!"

Vladimir Iliev you awesome dude!!!

Uganda's snowboarding guy will compete in the Winter Universiade next week, so that might be interesting to see him in action in a big competition

Still nothing about athlete's profiles, but at least the well-known results lay-out for multi-events can finally be found on FISU's website: http://wuni2017.sportresult.com/fisu/en/-360

Tomorrow in the Junior Cup in Pokljuka we'll have the first ever single mixed and mixed relays of the series Start list for the single mixed: http://ibu.blob.core.windows.net/docs/1617/BT/JIBU/CP03/MXSR/BT_C51B2_1.0.pdf And the mixed: http://ibu.blob.core.windows.net/docs/1617/BT/JIBU/CP03/MXRL/BT_C51B2_1.0.pdf Obviously Brazil is going to shine in the single mixed They should definitely be able to keep Macedonia behind (especially Gabi is way faster than Jovanovska) and it could actually be a very nice fight with the Netherlands, meaning it's gonna be a very rare occassion where I will be cheering for Brazil in a fight against the Dutch in any sport I'm expecting Ukraine, Austria and France in the single mixed podium, and France seems to have a very strong team in the mixed, together with Ukraine.