heywoodu

Half the para-alpine world championships in Maribor have already been cancelled due to a lack of snow and a course that simply isn't wide enough for downhills or super-G's. Athletes are understandably beyond mad, because this was so predictable when choosing a venue with a questionable level of 'snow certainty'.

55th place for Duda in today's U23 sprint qualifying. That's 11 points for Brazil in the ranking, alright, but more importantly for us: 11 points that @brunamouracan definitely make up in Trondheim. Make up, you say? Yeah, here is the double situation: we want Brazil to get in the top-30 and have a second ticket, obviously, since it increases everyone's chance, including Bruna's. However, if Brazil has two tickets, the federation has decided that the first one will go to whoever gets the most points for the nations ranking. Duda is the only junior/U23 athlete who is in the fight for the Olympics, and therefore she obviously has a massive advantage simply because of her age - she can start in the U23 world championships, after all. She'll have the sprint, interval and mass start races to score points, plus the mixed relay. That is quite a big points haul that is hard to overtake, considering she will of course also compete in Trondheim. The good thing about Trondheim is that, at least according to the federation's own rules, Duda is out of the team sprint, and so Bruna can make up quite a bit of points there. Finish way ahead of her in the sprint and the 10k as well, and the Schilpario points can be made up. In other words, mixed feelings: we need Duda to do well in Schilpario, because of Brazil getting in the top-30, but we also need her not to do that well, or else a potential second ticket will simply be hers by virtue of being young enough to compete in the U23 world championships. By the way, if Brazil ends up with 1 ticket, it will depend entirely on their internal rankings, which Bruna is leading with a large margin at the moment.

Isn't Argentina literally always there? I'm only missing Belgium this time

I had totally missed it, but Tereza Nova suffered a bad crash in training for the Garmisch downhill a bit over a week ago, and was kept in a coma. Can't find anything more recent, not sure that's a good sign or not...

Yeah that's even worse. The sports should be confirmed at least like 6-7 years before the Olympics and the actual program really should be confirmed before the preceding Olympics. I know they don't, but they really should.

She had always made it very clear that she came back with 1 specific goal: Trondheim 2025 and specifically the 50k.

So again we only get it shortly before the Olympics, leading to athletes still not being sure exactly what they should focus on in order to qualify....just ridiculous by the IOC.

Although one can hardly really call it a sea-level when organizers simply decide to create a very strong wind to help speed things up. I mean, it is sea-level still, but that was some fake stuff in terms of times

There's some doubts as to whether all three of the top Brazilians will compete though, so we'll have to wait and see about that. Might be two of them plus another who is significantly lower down the rankings, that would not help. Most important is for them to, no matter what, compete in the relay. Four years ago they didn't, because they were too late to register and simply hadn't realized until January that the top-30 was....well, important.

Awesome, thanks! I've been tracking the women's list as well (because of Brazil, obviously), and I believe I have some different numbers. I'll post it later, because I am very curious where I made some mistakes. You counted the Tour de Ski overall standings for example, I think? I hadn't done that yet, but started realizing I probably need to. Still in time, since only from today on (with the junior sprint) it starts to get real interesting in terms of the top-30 and so a potential extra Olympic ticket As for Brazil, it'll mostly be interesting to see if their 2 junior girls, 3 U23 girls and 3-4 women at the world championships (including a team sprint and relay) will beat out Taipei, Andorra and Armenia, who have 1 athlete who is better than every Brazilian, but don't really have a 2nd, let alone a 3rd athlete. I'd have to consult my other list, but off the top of my head other countries to look out for should be Argentina, Croatia, Great Britain, Spain (unless they decide not to focus on it, which I think might be the case given that their best competed at home yesterday and aren't in Schilpario) and a few others. Also, China will absolutely be on this list. They started the season with no FIS points at all, I guess hadn't competed since Beijing, but already destroyed the points for a few races in Norway (by being in the top-5 while not having any FIS points). Their absence in recent years means they'll compete in the qualifying 7.5k in Trondheim in the world championships, since they don't qualify directly, which then will mean they'll destroy the points there as well, like Baiba Bendika did in Oberstdorf (which led to FIS changing it's qualifying rules ). Oh well, interesting weeks ahead, I already can't count the number of hours I have spent on this (rankings, calculations, and so on) both on my laptop and in my mind!

That's good, and looking down on that page it seems like it will be available to watch on-demand as well. Which I think is arguably even more important for a streaming platform and which is why YouTube usually beats out every other way of live streaming

Tomorrow the junior/U23 world championships start, which is always a bit of a gamble to see whether it will be shown anywhere....so far, I have found nothing, which isn't a good sign. Anyone? Schilpario, by the way.

That's alright, presumably they still have a lot to learn anyway. Like the fact that team events in biathlon don't mean you're shooting at the same target at the same time.

It just looks like it, on Totallympics you'll hear about many athletes passing away who you wouldn't read about anywhere in non-local media.

The Austrian town of Fiss votes 'aye!'

"FIS and snowboarding" seems like an odd name

Looks like also two 1994 world champions, pair skaters Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who have been coaches in the US for years.

But there is zero indication, at all. Tarjei has been hinting on retirement for years, JTB has always made it clear he didn't want to continue after Cortina and simply moved it up a year, and Riiber has a disease.

This does not at all seem related, as Crohn's disease is given as the - understandable - reason. Also might explain why he hasn't been that dominant lately. Same for the Boe brothers, that feels entirely different than the Braathen thing.

Just to check I didn't miss anything, but there doesn't happen to be any way of dowloading the entire season's calendar in some sort of a CSV format, correct? https://www.fis-ski.com/DB/cross-country/calendar-results.html I'm looking for weekends that have both a classic sprint and a freestyle distance race, but I guess that's going to be manual labour

The issue with that is that it's undoable to, say, track the category 'best male athlete'. That doesn't really split the work, since that person would still need to keep track of all sports, just only the men. It might be easier to split it on a per-sport basis, or something like that. There's plenty of people who follow non-Olympic sports for examplex, but not a lot who follow all non-Olympic sports. I'm perfectly capable of following stuff like Formula 1 and MotoGP, since I watch those anyway, but....I don't know, chess or something, no idea

Sounds like the classic example of an athlete not taking the time to read the rules....

Individually, yes, Iran might well end up on top of that. Sami Beyrami has been really strong this season, would not at all be surprised to see her fight for the win in the qualifying race in Trondheim. As a team though, both Brazil and Greece should easily beat Iran at least in the women's competitions Their 2nd, 3rd and 4th best athletes are all far ahead of Iran's 2nd best. The interesting fight for a potential second Olympic ticket will also be against the likes of Armenia and Andorra, who have a strong woman, but not at all a strong team. Katya Galstyan and especially Gina del Rio can score quite a few points, the question is if that will be enough to hold off countries like Brazil which have enough eligible women for a team sprint and a relay.

And there we are. Brazilian federation posted the rankings and they did so with the, in my opinion, wrong interpretation. They got the same results as what I assume the coaches got, but different than mine. An email was sent about this and it has been corrected immediately, so oddly enough, from my little sofa in the Netherlands I was the only one who actually interpreted the criteria correctly in a language I barely speak, not even the federation that made the criteria did it correctly at first Quite astonishing. Bruna Moura, Jaqueline Mourão, Eduarda Ribera and Mirlene Picin have qualified for the Trondheim world championships, that much was already clear. However, instead of Bruna and Eduarda, as the federation said and as everyone's coach seemed to think, it will be Bruna and Jaqueline doing the team sprint, because they are in fact the top-2 in the national sprint ranking.

Makes me curious who they picked over him, even though his progress seems to have stopped a bit this season.