heywoodu

Traitor is a nice way to describe him, really the only explanation for his actions (because I'm going to naively believe he is not actually dumb) is that he is a foreign agent and not even really hiding it, at all

Wouldn't 8 be better then, if 16 is too much (which, especially for the men, it is)? Then you can at least have a decent format, for which you need 4, 8, 16 or 32 teams (well, or 64 or 128 ).

Which ones? I added the biathlon pursuit day for Bruna and myself, the one I was still hoping for (category B, 2x200 for category A was a bit too much ) Some others would be nice too, but with her (hopefully) competition schedule, it would be unwise to go for something like the day between two competitions, sadly

16 women's teams, because 12 is a shitty number for a tournament - both because the forced continental representation will lead to it being a relatively weak tournament and because you can not make a decent tournament with 12 teams, you'll be forced to have the super awful 'best third placed teams' nonsense. 0 men's teams Instead of a total of 28, we go to a total of 16 teams. We gain 12 x whatever number of players are in a men's team for sports where the Olympics are important, we have a women's tournament with a decent format and we get rid of having junior championships at the Olympics, win-win-win

Wow, the final selection is already made now? Interesting, keep up updates please! I assume Kim Gilli will be on her way, normally?

Nothing too realistic. To be fair, rumours of Verstappen going to team X or Y (mostly Mercedes and Aston Martin) have been going on for years, I'm still expecting him to sit out his entire contract with Red Bull

But that's only a thing in the longer events, since one would generally go all-out in everything under 800 meters anyway. For short/long hurdles, they should simply do the 100/110/400 meter hurdles twice, if they so badly want to have it as a double thing. Having all the hurdle specialists do flat races is fun for a bit, not gonna lie, but it makes the whole thing feel mostly like an exhibition event. Besides, start this in a small stadium in the US instead of something big like this. Now it had the feel of a random training field somewhere in godknowswhere. Why does it need to be so massively American immediately, start a bit more...humble, and try and grow from there.

Oh, right, there is Hirscher But I think that's unlikely as well, given his injury that kept him out of almost the entire season and his results before that which were nowhere near what he would need to qualify....I highly doubt it. It'd be cool, but I doubt it.

Were you scouting interesting new countries to join TISC?

Ferrari has just been chaotic for years now One would expect Vasseur leading the team to at least take away some of the typical Italian chaos in these kind of things, but judging by the rainstorm of strategies and confusing moments....nah, not really

It will be McLaren and Mercedes are simply better, Ferrari is more inconsistent but should be better...and yeah, with Verstappen being the only one able to drive this car for real, that's gonna be tough. They won't magically find another driver who can (I mean, Lawson is not at all a bad driver, Tsunoda is definitely excellent as well and Hadjar, who has lots of raw pace, would probably face the same issue), and just making the entire car competitive for two drivers after at least two years where it's just been tough isn't gonna happen neither... Oh well, as long as at least the podium riders are within a few seconds of each other on the track, it's at least something

I'm sure they are aware of him, but he's just so far from qualifying right now that there is not really a reason for them to publish something.

Which tactical element, you mean in the long(er) distance races?

Sean Steenbakkers is definitely doing quite well and growing, but not at the World Cup level yet, let alone top-8 It is good that we actually have an active athlete though! It's been four years or so already since Max Teeling.

Interesting, as always! Sadly there is absolutely no way the Netherlands will actually have someone in Nordic combined, and alpine skiing is incredibly unlikely as well unfortunately.

I doubt he will improve much, he moved from a fast car in the first two races to a car that is just horrible to drive (with Verstappen basically being the only one capable of handling that thing), he did quite well this weekend.

Piastri in the green room: "Those were all the highlights? That was all?"

Nothing. Which simply means one thing: don't make a 'set' of races if there aren't enough events for that. It's like having this for field events, coming up with the set of events called "vertical jumps without extra equipment" and since that only means the high jump, they just add the discus throw as well. Just have the 100/110/400m hurdles as an event, instead of having the flat versions of them in the same set (especially considering those distances are also already part of another set anyway).

Why on earth is the flat 100m part of the "short hurdles" thingy? Edit: and the flat 400m is in the "long hurdles" thing, come on

And we're underway with De Ronde

Ah yeah, Dutch commentator's closing words: "Let's hope the few people who were on the grandstands enjoyed it and will bring some friends tomorrow"

Same here, Eurosport/HBO had one of the two usual Dutch athletics commentators (who is also an athlete manager I believe, so someone who knows what he's talking about luckily ).

Just finished watching. Let's see if they manage to improve the format for next time, this was arguably the biggest flop I've seen in terms of athletics events....I don't mean the races themselves, the few events that were there were fine, but man this was mostly a waiting game. Glad HBO has it here, so it was easy to skip through the many, many, many minutes of nothing. This was sort of like an undressed Diamond League evening. If they do this within one hour instead of two and also create a Grand Slam Field, who knows, it may become more interesting.

Yes, that's what I meant If it was a country-wide thing, one would assume all users from the country would have the same issue...odd, I'm very curious what will one day turn out to have been/be the problem.

Excellent, although 14 is still incredibly young.