heywoodu

Oh that's absolutely wonderful "This is...hardly a spectactors sport. Only race officials are allowed on the course"

And indeed it is

You can still use it by using [ spoiler] to begin and [/ spoiler] to close the spoiler (without the spaces), but it's weird that the button is gone.

Those Brazilian clothes could have been more.....Brazilian if you ask me.

And if he isn't gonna be fit, I suppose it would be Van Gelder, or does the athlete have to have competed in the test event?

Results of the men's individual at the Open European Junior Championships today: http://biathlon.com.ua/results.php?lang=eng&id=2300 Pay attention to the last place finisher, Kyriakos Kiouras of Greece. He literally missed every single of his 20 shots and finished 38 minutes behind the winner

Well to be fair, jumping 1.95 and 1.99 when you're only barely 18 is seriously impressive.

I honestly have no idea how they're all standing, I just know their goal is to qualify the team and of course Zonderland's goal is to win gold Infostrada are just looking at last year's World Champs I suppose and falling off the bar won't help in getting a medal.. And when talking about him being fit, I mean for the test event, because apparently he is still struggling with injuries and by now it's only a month before the event..

It's an American site...they also always think Galen Rupp will win most races and Jenny Simpson is the clear favorite in every 1500m she runs

Exactly. In his place there will be someone who is able to do more than one apparatus at a reasonable level (no idea who that will be by the way). Now it's only hoping Zonderland will fight off the injury troubles.

Right, Wikipedia (where S-A is still listed) confused me

I thought South Africa wouldn't participate in continental qualifiers?

As hoped and somewhat expected, Yuri van Gelder won't be in the team at the Olympic Test Event

That's just ruining the competition by letting them participate anyway...

Considering they absolutely love any support, I have no doubt they'll be happy to hear they have support from the Czech Republic Yeah, money is a real issue, but the Brazilian snow sports federation is (according to the 2 biathletes I know) one of the best sports federations in South America, so they're helping as much as they can. By the way, for years I had the thought in my mind of "One day I will spend some of the money I won with sports betting to help some athletes from small nations" Now I know Brazil is not small, but of course in biathlon they are. Considering that (and mostly the fact that they are close friends of mine by now) I'm sponsoring some relatively smaller things. For example, I'm paying the gym membership for one of them so for the first time she can train in the gym all off-season instead of only in the few weeks in European training camps. This leads to a summer of 2 trainings per day (one rollerski training + one gym training session), which doubles last summer's training effort and should very much increase next season's results. Nevertheless it's still a real issue, mostly because finding sponsors in Brazil for biathlon is nearly impossible (I mean...biathlon? Snow? What? ).

I'll add Esparza and Jennings to the list when I have time to create a list Retired athletes didn't really miss out on qualification, they simply didn't try to qualify.

Wonderful gymnastics performance in 1924, including synchronized sit-ups

True...especially about the list for qualifying points. I mean, how many points you get is determined, amongst others, by the number of points of the other competitors in the race, but it's like this list of points is "secret".. To take my Brazilians as example once more: in order to know whether or not they're on track to reach the individual requirements to qualify for WCh/Olympics, I have to manually keep track of their IBU points for every competition and manually work out the averages and then hope I did it right and IBU doesn't suddenly come up with a much higher number.

Not really

And another note (I know, it's hard to make a clear set of rules ): I would not add athletes who are banned, like Zaripova (?) or athletes of nations who are banned, like Russian athletics. It's not like they actually missed out on qualification, they just aren't allowed to participate.

As for individual team members, I wouldn't list them I think. Without looking at rosters I'm sure almost every medal winning team of 2012 will have some new names this time. Therefore, for team events I would just look at the nations (like the Romanian women's gymnasts, the mentioned fencing teams, the Russian basketball team or the Japanese football women).

I would say so, because technically they were apparently not good enough to be chosen Although these athletes could get an asterisk at their names or something similar.

Yeah if the rule is actually changed now and wasn't already announced last year I can definitely understand.

That's a shame to do it like that, especially if that would mean the Olympic champions aren't the best in their class but only are lucky to not have to compete against stronger competitors.