heywoodu

Ah, right. The thing I hear a lot about the Netherlands as well, and about quite a few other countries

To be fair, Cindy Klassen went home with five medals after Turin (including a gold), and other than that, it's not like Canada has that many situations where one of them is a big favourite. Especially yesterday's 500m...sure, Canada had good chances, but it was one of the most open events of the entire Olympics, literally half the field would have been a non-surprising medalist and so every single one of them had a bigger chance not to win a medal than the other way around And about the World Cup thing: that's speed skating, where the World Cup just doesn't really have much meaning. I think only in the 'X-Games events' the World Cup means less I've been watching speed skating for 20+ years and I don't think I remember a single season where there was more than a minute of talking about who would win the World Cup classification in a certain distance (or overall, I think they have as well now?).

They used to, at all major events, because....well, it's the only way to have a fair 500m competition. There wasn't even really ever any significant discussion about it, because everyone knew the two-run format was by far the best one (the only one, even). But then they decided people have the attention span of a goldfish and so there we go, one race lottery.

Alright race for Frenkie de Jong, but that's not enough.

It would be insane if it's not!

When the 500m was still fair instead of this one race bullshit

Impossible Without exaggerating, I think there really are at least 15 skaters with somewhat of a realistic gold medal chance. Some more than others, obviously, but yeah...it is incredibly open.

Broken ice machine

Which is also why he has been saying for quite a while now that Beijing 2022 might be his last big thing in skating, because there are simply many more adventures in life Like he said: "It's like climbing a mountain. You get to the top, but once you get there and you see the view is cool, you see another mountain in the distance and start wondering what the view would be from that one."

Awesome interview with the true Emperor of Japan on Dutch TV, Hiroyasu Shimizu His English wasn't that fantastic, but his enthousiasm definitely was! "What do you think of Morishige today?" "Yes! This weekend....very...start, and the corner."

Sure, I agree that sucks as well, but today the director literally skipped like 90% of the incredibly tense fight for silver and bronze so they could show a solo winner go all the way to the finish and then stay there a while after the finish....and then when they finally skipped to the actual fight going on, they missed the one in second position

I've seen worse this week though. Tour of Oman 1st stage finish at roughly 0:55

That was fun Just too bad that the most exciting part of what was already a good race wasn't even shown because the director was drunk.

Wow, camera director totally fucked up

Germany on the way to 5th this way

Haga in trouble. Norway stayed in the medal fight longer than was to be expected..

Norway is doing better than expected, but Sweden....damn. Even bigger surprise than Germany, but in the wrong way

Watched the replay: Weng moved and touched Eiduka's skis. So technically Eiduka did fall first, but because Weng pushed her skis from under her.

Ishida

Sauerbrey is impressive We were right in giving her the easier nickname of 'Destroying German' during the OPA Cup races

Right. It'd be cool if they also actually use this rule in regular relays, since there normally bad luck is simply that: bad luck and you're out. Unless someone actually commits a penalty, unlike this here.

Norwegian bowling Eiduka

This whole thing of women having significantly shorter races and events in so many sports is nonsense anyway. Deal with that first before coming up with all kinds of mixed events.

Latvia changed their original team and now Baiba is in

That makes me curious