heywoodu

Poor Sofie Hopkins. 105 of 106 girls have finished and she just came out of the shooting range and still has a full lap to go.

Exactly! This is one of the most surpising performances I have seen in quite a while...I wonder where she finished when taking out the Juniors and only looking at the Youths..

Dear Lord, if Anna Weidel really was skiing at near-competition speed when Bruna followed and then passed her on the tracks yesterday, that's some promising stuff for January

Young Ukaleq Slettemark has been impressive by the way! 5 misses, which is a shame, but she's keeping almost 30 girls behind her when looking at skiing speed only

Gabi is kicking a whole lot of ass, including some names I didn't have on my list, but unfortunately it won't be enough as she's 62nd now. Still, very nicely done!

Oh come on, of all people of course Carine Leijn shoots clean resulting in her probably finishing around 20-25 seconds ahead of Gabi

The first standing shot missed, but the rest were hits, well done! Now let's start counting

She could also be the 4th Brazilian in history to shoot clean in an IBU competition, but now we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves

31...damn, that's a whole lot. I wonder if they're all international or near-international level. Also curious whether athletes of the new generation (Kaisheva, Slivko etc) are on the list..

Clean prone shooting for Gabi

Yep, all of those small nations who have one more or less World Cup-regular. Yesterday I heard something that gave me a lot of hope for the IBU Cups in January: at the training in Hochfilzen yesterday, Bruna was skiing behind one of the German girls who was going at near-competition speed....and then passed her If she's actually improved that much, then..wow, this is going to be interesting..

For us there's only one Gabi (although I happen to know she definitely enjoys sharing her first name with Koukalova ) They are all going home for the holidays next week and travel back to Europe very early in January. I know Bruna (Moura) is going to do the IBU Cups in Martell and Arber and the OECH in Poland and I'm 99% sure Gabi and Caio will be at both IBU Cups as well, not sure about Lucas, but I'll ask it later today. My guess is that the team that goes to the IBU Cup will go to the OECH as well, for 2 main reasons: there are IBU points to be won at the OECH and it would probably be more cost-effective than sending someone to Poland and someone to Pokljuka, also in terms of finding a coach to accompany them and their rifles. I do know that they'll be going to Russia (...) for the junior worlds, but it's indeed annoying that it's after the World Champs

Yep...there's no WiFi like there was in Lenzerheide, so I'm not getting trackside updates this time unfortunately I hope it's because of mist instead of wind though, seeing as Gabi loves shooting in the mist because it helps her focus. Wind might be a chance for the athletes from smaller nations as well: if they manage to get a good number of hits in, they could take advantage of a ton of athletes missing. Look at Maria Tsakiri in Beitostoelen

I guess then she's also the daughter of Uiloq's husband? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Øystein_Slettemark Who, I didn't know, was born in Rio de Janeiro Greenlandic and Brazilian biathlon connects!

Cool! I didn't find her in any IBU results, FIS results or the Youth Olympics, forgot to check the Arctic Winter Games...some convincing results for her in the three junior races It all says sprint, but it's actually (in order) Individual, Sprint, Mass Start

Yes I was very surprised by Drndic' results, she was actually way in the top half in terms of skiing speed! I remember seeing results of relays in the Europa Cup (what is now the IBU Cup) like 10 years ago, where there were mixed teams...mixed in terms of nations, so also smaller nations had athletes in relays. I wonder if that's possible here for Gabi, to compete with for example two Bosnians (or Greenlanders, imagine that ).

In case you're interested in some help following the slower athletes, my little noted start list for tomorrow At first I used "x" to mark the slower athletes, but then I thought "hey this athlete is not just slower, she's REALLY slower" so I used xx, and the same process happened again resulting in xxx for the athletes who were several minutes behind Gabi (in skiing time) last weekend Sadly it's horizontal so you'll have to break your neck to see it, but hey, it's all part of being a Biathlon Brazil Fanclub member (it's hard to guess where Greenland's girls would be in terms of speed, but they might be able to fight against the two Serbians and the Moldovans)

Biathlon Brazil fanclub update: tomorrow we have the Junior Cup sprints in Hochfilzen, the venue of the (senior) World Championships. This time it's followed by a pursuit, and the interesting but slightly bad news is that the start lists are huge! 116 guys is not so special at this level, but 108 girls is more than I've seen at IBU Cups..Gabi will have to keep 48 girls behind her to qualify for the pursuit! I have identified 24 athletes who, in my opinion, Gabi should 'easily' be able to keep behind her in terms of skiing speed, so now it's a matter of hoping she has a good day on the tracks and a better time on the range and who knows what's possible

Eurosport Player is always a good thing to have anyway

First ever penalty assigned by a video ref, finally after way too long, football is starting to go with the time

The man with YouTube videos of every crash

The whole live thing is mostly better (although it's incredibly annoying that it doesn't update when you're on another tab, so when you spent 5 minutes on another tab and then go back, first it's superspeeding through everything that happened in those 5 minutes). The rest is worse.. The documents don't have a lot to do with it though, they just slightly changed the PDF formats resulting in a difficulty to parse the information into Excel I'm still hoping the guy who made the Excel for me can fix it though.

I truly wish I could answer that, but since the Excel sheet isn't yet working with the slightly altered IBU's PDF formats, I can't

On the other hand, if they would finish in the top-22 and Lithuania or Estonia would be out, I'm fairly sure both countries would still have a good chance at having 2 athletes in the best 6 non-qualified anyway

1 quota for South Korea as a minimum if they finish outside the top-22, only if the 6 highest athletes from non-qualified countries contain 2 South Koreans, they will get 2 quota Basically, Korea reaching the top-22 could be very useful for example for Amanda Lightfoot or Vicky Padial .