heywoodu

The winner of the mass start will be placed in here, but if things work out 'normal', those will already qualify in a regular distance (Bergsma and Schouten mostly). In that case, the federation can select who they want as second place and put that skater in the table.

Maria Cecilia Dominguez of Argentina got an amazing 110 points in Turkey today. Argentina has one female ticket and the deciding criteria was easy: the one with the best FIS points - all races count, including rollerskiing and 'obscure' races - goes to the Olympics. Alright, clear enough and with a second or so to spare in the last rollerskiing race in Brazil, Dominguez moved up to first: So today's 110 improved her points to 124 or so. Hooooooowever.....now all of a sudden, criteria have changed: Dominguez has been told she will need to get the A criteria (under 100 points, near-impossible) in order to be sent by the Argentinian federation (FASA). If she doesn't, whoever is in second place will be sent to the Olympics (A criteria or not). It's basically like saying "runner A, you need to run the marathon in 2:10 to qualify, but runner B, you can go as long as runner A doesn't get that time and you have a time of 3:00 or so". It's...insane.

There we go. Ter Mors is out, Wüst will have to wait and see. Leerdam wins in 1:14.09, De Jong second in 1:14.61 and Wüst third in 1:14.80 Men Women Selection order Distance Rank at OQT Athlete Selection order Distance Rank at OQT Athlete 1 1.000 1 1 5.000 1 2 5.000 1 2 MS 1 3 1.500 1 3 3.000 1 4 1.000 2 4 3.000 2 5 10.000 1 5 500 1 6 MS 1 6 1.000 1 Jutta Leerdam 7 1.500 2 7 1.500 1 8 500 1 8 5.000 2 9 1.000 3 9 1.500 2 10 1.500 3 10 1.000 2 Antoinette de Jong 11 5.000 2 11 3.000 3 12 10.000 2 12 1.500 3 13 500 2 13 1.000 3 Ireen Wüst 14 5.000 3 14 500 2 15 500 3 15 500 3

Reigning Olympic 1000m champion Jorien ter Mors is the first victim, she's out (not at all surprisingly, but still).

To be fair, Schouten and Groenewoud together are an insanely hard to beat duo, the women's mass start really should be very high up on the matrix. Different for the men though.

Basically it's going to be a matter of simply filling in the 'matrix' and at the end picking the first 9 names (including the team pursuit names and the second one in the mass starts). Shouldn't be too complicated, but it's Dutch speed skating qualifiers, there's gonna be a lawsuit here or there Men Women Selection order Distance Rank at OQT Athlete Selection order Distance Rank at OQT Athlete 1 1.000 1 1 5.000 1 2 5.000 1 2 MS 1 3 1.500 1 3 3.000 1 4 1.000 2 4 3.000 2 5 10.000 1 5 500 1 6 MS 1 6 1.000 1 7 1.500 2 7 1.500 1 8 500 1 8 5.000 2 9 1.000 3 9 1.500 2 10 1.500 3 10 1.000 2 11 5.000 2 11 3.000 3 12 10.000 2 12 1.500 3 13 500 2 13 1.000 3 14 5.000 3 14 500 2 15 500 3 15 500 3

If there is, it'll be on the NOS website https://nos.nl/uitzendingen

Today is the day, day one of arguably the world's strongest speed skating championships: the Dutch Olympic qualifiers At 14:00 it's the women's 1000m, followed by the men's 5000m at 14.45. First chance for some, make or break for others. Some are going to have their worst day of Christmas ever

Wow, I had totally forgotten about Padial Hernandez for the past years Whatever did happen to her? She wasn't a World Cup podium contender or anything, but she surely wasn't half bad!

I do believe I thanked you And yeah, that was very helpful...the language seems clear in their document, but you never know At least this is a confirmation we (including you!) were right, which is excellent news for us!

I would assume several reasons. Both just not at all living in the Netherlands anymore, but also increasing her Olympic chances. That would sound odd, since Sweden is strong*, but presumably getting into the top-5 of Sweden (or so) was more realistic than getting in the top-8 of the World Cup, which the Dutch would surely require. *remember this was still before the Swedish women exploded all of a sudden, that happened a little later

Brazilian snow sports federation CBDN posted their first mid-season ranking, which confirms two things: 1. The points and tables I've been posting are 100% correct, so that's good 2. As we suddenly realized a few weeks ago and tried to have 100% confirmed: athletes who DON'T have the B criteria (under 300 points) in both sprint and distance, are out of the fight if at least two athletes do have it (as is and will remain the case). This means Mika needs to get her sprint average under 300 points, otherwise her position in the ranking doesn't matter and she's out anyway. It also means that, as of now, the two female tickets are for Jaque and Bruna. Of course there's still races to go, both for Mika to get her sprint average under 300 and for everyone to improve their points. https://cbdn.org.br/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/12/ListaCBDN-OWG-CC-20211223.pdf

The Netherlands only accepts them if they get actively involved in improving the national program and athletes and such. Michael Rösch was first planning to compete for the Netherlands actually, but this is what made him change to Belgium. Good thing for Belgium, because even though he might not have been constantly training in Belgium, it would simply be an outright lie to say he didn't influence Belgian biathlon in a really good way in a matter of a few years. They're of course not front runners, but just the fact that they could realistically compete in World Cup relays with Belgian-born athletes only (so not counting Claude) was unimaginable not very long ago. Although like said before, of course Lotte Lie's situation is not at all comparable with Michael Rösch, who already had had a great career and fell off in his later years, so wanted another option, whereas Lie has had the Belgian nationality literally her entire life.

Happy Christmas and such, the first tasty dinner is done, two more to go I believe

Of course it was done on purpose, it's not like anyone will coincidentally have the anthem of Palau under their Ctrl + V

Dutch women's road champion and triple + reigning madison track world champion Amy Pieters was involved in a crash within the track team during a training ride in Spain today. She lost consciousness and was brought to a hospital by helicopter, where she received surgery to her head. The Dutch federation has just announced this, out of respect for her privacy and that of her family they made no further details public.

End of the road for Qhubeka-NextHash, team manager Doug Ryder has announced to his riders and staff that no sponsor has been found anymore. The final end of what once appeared as Africa's Team, which in the past few years strayed more and more away and barely had anything African left anymore. Made a deal with some shady crypto currency company nobody knew (NextHash), which turned out to be a disaster, and sponsors have generally been paying late, if at all. Not a lot will be missed, since like I said, the whole beginning of promoting African cycling has sadly already been left far behind and the team was largely made up of old European riders nobody else wanted anymore just so the team could ride the Tour de France, but at least with the tiny bit of it's origins that still remained it added something more than the 266549th random French team that will replace them

The Dutch awards were yesterday, for both 2020 and 2021 (two-in-one). Jetze Plat was voted Paralympic athlete of the year, the track cycling sprinters were Team of the year and the female and male prizes, rather unsurprisingly, went to Sifan Hassan and Max Verstappen. Excellent choices all over the place

A and B were answers I had listed as well (although instead of using the word Saturnalia, I described it more as "B) The church wanted to piggyback on a Roman festival" or something similar)

Murnan 80 left: S20, so 60 left D20 (?), so 20 left ... ... Another throw towards D20

Thanks, I'll try and get some more in! I sent in a few questions not related to sports, like "Why is Christmas generally celebrated on the 25th of December?" and "Which is NOT a name of Santa Claus?" (with his Frisian, Portuguese and Finnish names and the correct answer being the name of some dude from Estonian mythology which I once came across while watching a World Cup in Otepää )

I'm normally not a fan of short course, but I've actually seen a ton of finals which were super close all the way to the end, so that was good

Controversial? Isn't that like the number one sentiment worldwide? I haven't really met anyone yet who thinks "Yay COVID!"...

You know he's just copy-pasting the same thing Sad that the ice hockey tournament will be some B-level thing again though On the other hand, it frees up some time to watch the other things

That would be a little odd. They already eased the criteria there - although just for women I think - and he (sadly) wasn't anywhere close to getting a quota at the world champs, plus is nowhere near eligible in terms of FIS points. They'd have to nearly eliminate most of the criteria.