- Feb 20, 2010
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If Ilves gets a good result today they might get a better showing at the weekend, and Otepää always has that weird factor of the athletics stadium next door to the biathlon stadium so there's always an ocean of empty seats for the disused part of the facility, but NoCo just isn't a draw, and Otepää is rather out of the way, even for day-tripping Finns who might have turned up if Herola or Hirvonen were going well. Even a 'good' audience for NoCo in Estonia will be pretty sparse and it just doesn't look good on the sport.
NoCo tends to come and go in waves; when Jason Lamy Chappuis was the star, the French had a great support team, but after he retired, those same athletes were suddenly completely anonymous, because the team's budget just went through the floor and the French federation focused more on the XC and biathlon teams. Likewise Germany had that run of domination when Eric Frenzel was the best and there were half a dozen Germans in the top 10 every race, but now they've dropped back from prominence and are getting better again in XC and ski jumping. NoCo is a really cool sport, but it's just so peripheral. Ski jumping is such a niche interest that you simply have to take up in childhood, so you will only ever build your field out of people who started out as ski jumpers or who never specialised in either ski jumping or XC, an XC convert will never go to NoCo unless they spent years ski jumping in their youth, so it doesn't have the possibility of replenishing itself through converts the way biathlon does; there is the occasional convert on the women's side (Tara Geraghty-Moats had been a junior biathlete when there was no women's ski jumping World Cup, so she had several years of competing in Nordic sports before she started; same goes for Svenja Würth, who had done youth-level XC alongside ski jumping when there was no professional women's circuit) but none on the men's - and if anything they lose talents to ski jumping because there's more money in that individual sport than the combination. When I've been to the Lahti Ski Games and the Lillehammer events where they have the full schedule of the Nordic sports on, it's always treated as the red-headed stepchild, with the jump taking place bright and early before most of the audience has arrived, and the ski taking place almost as a palate cleanser across lunchtime to allow the audience to get some food and drink between the more valued XC races.
The sport is very much set up to fail, so we shouldn't be surprised when it does just that.
He is completely correct. You're coming off terribly; you may not care but it's a small community and I would wager a high percentage of the other posters do care.
Agree 100% with you Eddy; Salvarani is way out of line here and seems to be tripling down on it rather than admitting he/she/they are wrong. Fruitless to continue engaging I'd imagine.
Yeah, that’s one of the points that people here are making…
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That's exactly why he shouldn't do really high volume training with 85-90% of it being double poling like the Ski Classics guys. Physically he's clearly ahead of the curve, so the focus should be turning him into a well rounded skier and working on his technique.
Funny to me. Your own choice to be mad. Have a good day.
And fyi everything seems to have gone completely over your head.
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- Nov 28, 2021
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Clip from the Technical zone today which was at the lower slopes of the climb behind the snow storage.
So that's the women's sprint and Pursuit decided for Simon.
Stand by, Tandrevold is faster than I thought she could be.
Stand by, Tandrevold is faster than I thought she could be.
Not good from Elvira or Hanna. Maybe ski issues as that's slow.
Disaster from Tandrevold there
Disaster from Tandrevold there
- Sep 26, 2020
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The Norwegians had terrible standing shoots. At least their ski speed is there but that's the pursuit gone for all of them (and everyone else for that matrer).
Absurd leads can do funny things to people, but I can't see all 3 of them having a melt down.
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All of them having it on the same is unlikely, unless they get the waxing as wrong as they've got it right so far.
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Latvian tradition.
Still, while it isn't nice to see a team totally dominate the podium like this (let's just wait until Richard goes, because they have an extra starter because of Simon being the defending champion in the pursuit), it is nevertheless a bit of a rarity in that it isn't Norway. The women's competitions are far more open in terms of nations competing in biathlon, so it's far rarer to see a podium lockout at the top level. It has happened a good few times at the IBU Cup level (Russia in particular having a few thanks to their glut of fringe WC/top IBUC athletes), but I'm struggling to remember a total lockout on the women's World Cup this side of Germany in Fort Kent 2011 when Henkel, Gössner and Neuner made up the podium, all long since gone from the sport.
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Hochfilzen 2015 with Hildebrand, Hammerschmidt, Gössner could be the most recent one.
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