selkie

So a Lady Gaga and Celine Dion duet is apparently on the schedule. I like this- Lady Gaga has a good track record of working well with folks who have health issues.

That’s a longer ban than you’d normally see for a first time opting offense by a minor. I think there’s a certain amount of Sending A Message to the Russians going on. Hopefully we’ll finally get a nice medal ceremony for the 2022 Olympic team awards at Worlds this year. As for Jason Brown, I feel like as long as a professional athlete still enjoys going to work in the morning and is making enough money to cover their expenses, then hey, go forth and keep competing.

And of course the waiter was an Australian faking being American because no matter where you go in the world, you’ll probably find an Aussie on a short term work visa there.

The problem can be finding the machine in large ramps where directions to it are not clearly marked. We literally spent 40 minutes trying to find the lone pay machine in the bowels of the Munich Airport Hilton ramp and then finding out car again after we paid.

Dropping in to do a late spectating report- we were on the final hill for the Megeve stage (July 12) because we figured that Alpe d’Huez on Bastille Day in the middle of a pandemic wasn’t the best idea. If you ever have a chance to see a stage in person- go for it! Le Tour is pretty much a three week moving tailgating party and slow tourism at its best. Pick your spot, preferable on an uphill so the riders are a little less blurry when they go by and then hang out with your picnic supplies until the publicity caravan comes by. The polka dot t-shirts were getting passed out pretty freely because it’s the French way to make thing look good for the tv cameras and all and I got multiples of both the shirts and the hats. They say to listen for the helicopters to know when the riders get close; the other thing to listen for is the other fans down course starting to scream ‘Allez! Allez! Allez!’ To urge the riders on. While there are the occasional idiots who want to run too close to the riders, the vast majority do respect the social contract of the race. The ASO, who is in charge of the Tour De France, is utterly amazing at the logistics of getting the race run and televised around the world. They’ve got multiple teams of semi trucks who leap frog over each other to make it all work, and those semi drivers are going up some crazy switchbacks to get to some of the mountain finishes. If you ever need to arrange to have a small foreign country invaded, see if they’d take the contract because they’d be really good. Our hotel had some of the teams booked in there- the ASO handles all hotel bookings in an attempt to equalize things so the high budget teams couldn’t take the nicer options to give their riders an advantage. The Ineos Grenadiers were down the hall from us. We saw a few support staff in the common areas of the hotel but the riders disappeared into their rooms pretty quickly after the stage for covid control reasons. There was a note above their drinks station in the hall reminding them to ‘use your Dysons for sanitary purposes’ I assume they mean air purifiers. 12/10 of an experience, plan to go back again in a few years to chase more stages.

The thing that makes no sense to me is that it’s perfectly within anti-doping rules for Russia to say ‘results from competition where anti-doping sample was positive were voided; athlete was given a warning and no further sanction because of her age’. It would make pretty much everyone outside of Russia very very angry over that but there’s probably a 75-80% chance that CAS would uphold that ruling by RUSADA. Which would actually let Russia and Kamala get their OGMs but it’s like they figure they’d rather see her as a martyr than in possession of Olympic gold.

There was a stage of the Tour de France that got disrupted by protestors this summer. The global tv feed cut off coverage of the protest, going to the riders that had been ‘neutralized’ (told to stop) and were just standing around on the road, so the swat teams were not shown as they roughly unstuck the protestors who had glued themselves to the road. The policy now seem to be to keep the gendarmes off tv cameras as much as possible.

Having experienced similar this summer, we were rolling with laugher when the twins were struggling to escape from the underground parking garage of the dammed. Because every parking garage seems to have a slightly different pay system and less than half of them seem to have a Union Jack button for English language instructions.

I wish one of the streaming services would run ‘Kung Fu: The Legend Continues’ because it was better written than the concept suggests (some of the same producers as Equalizer:Original Recipe) and they had some genuinely fun episodes like the Dragon’s Wing where they’d get Robert Vaughn and Patrick Macnee to guest star. But it’s stuck in a vault at Warner somewhere and, unlike Babylon 5, doesn’t really have the fan base to get it dug back out again.

Both tasks and navigation- the best seasons have typically been when Racers aren’t spoon fed how to get from task to task. And given the covid concerns at time of filming, I suspect this season will be heavy on self-driving and the drama of someone accidentally ending up in Lichtenstein or such. Did anyone get a good look at the car windshields? I saw Munich city congestion stickers on them but was wondering if there was an Austrian or Swiss toll road sticker too that might be a clue on where they’re headed next episode.

Something like 8-10 years, or whenever the window for retesting drug test sample closes. Shot putter Adam Nelson infamously got his reallocated medal nine years after the fact at a Burger King in an Atlanta airport food court. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/behind-the-lines/2016/sep/01/olympic-games-usa-gold-medal-shot-put-burger-king

Even though they avoided the main train station/central business district, driving in Munich is not for the weak or directionally challenged and doubly so if you’ve got to rely on a paper map and not GPS. With limited time, they did a decent job of showing the challenges that some of the teams faced- miss one turn and it’s adding 10 minutes getting back in the right direction. At least they provide the Racers with parking spots. Though they pretty much had to if they wanted to finish the leg in a reasonable amount of time.

If she is given a non-provisional doping suspension, then those are normally backdated to the date of the doping offense and any results during that suspension time including her European title would then be vacated.

Because Russia is not currently allowed to do its own anti-doping sample processing, Kamilla's sample was sent to Sweden for screening. Apparently by reindeer of the non-eight tiny variety. And with every other sample of a Russian athlete at Nationals who just might compete internationally in the next two years so that data can be part of their biological passport. Combine that with a lab that was probably told to prioritize processing for athletes in sports that are seen as higher risk of doping like in the nordic skiing and it seems to just kind of sat in the queue because well, who really expects a figure skater to dope so it's just a formality to run those batches of tests- no rush, right?

Boyang has so many ups and downs and I'm so glad to see him have a good day in front of a home crowd.