selkie
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Posts posted by selkie
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21 hours ago, MerBearStare said:
And as a Chicagoan, I loved the Chicago mural at the American restaurant.
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.
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On 11/12/2022 at 9:16 PM, PurpleTentacle said:
In germany and france (and some other european countries) I've literally never seen a parking garage that didn't have a machine you could pay at with cash. Paying with a credit card directly at the barrier you'll only find in newer parking garages, but paying with cash is the same everywhere.
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.
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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.
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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.
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16 hours ago, Haleth said:
That is surprising. I would have loved if the show had included them being pulled over by the police. Perhaps the police officers refused to be on camera though.
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.
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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.
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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.
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6 minutes ago, aghst said:
I think we've had discussions about whether they should just let them use phones.
They obviously ask onlookers to borrow phones all the time.
Sure with phones they almost eliminate the possibility of getting lost.
But is the race more about navigation or is it about performing on tasks?
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.
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On 9/16/2022 at 9:45 PM, Mittengirl said:
Is there any kind of deadline as to when the Olympic medals from ‘22 must be awarded? Or can the decision just keep being put off until (they hope) everyone has forgotten about the whole fiasco?
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.
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18 hours ago, aghst said:
Were they right that the pit stop was near the park where they did the barrel roll.
I think navigation played a big factor. Also, onlookers everywhere, including the start. Looked like most of the teams asked onlookers to look up places on their phones. And the onlookers were American?
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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The story broke on the Inside the Games blog, which is a mouthpiece for the IOC and any other sports governing board that will send them a press release, It's not usually an investigative journalism site- announcements of the start of the African continental sambo and judo tournaments are their usual speed.
So it seems like there might be legs to the story because it is from a site that usually tries to mitigate controversy, not create it.
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1119022/beijing-2022-figure-skating-medal-delay
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19 minutes ago, ShellsandCheese said:
The whole system is a joke and needs to be overhauled.
Kostner's boyfriend at the time was racewalker Alex Schwazer and a 2012 chain of events led to him being given a 3.5 year suspension for a doping violation. Shortly after he returned from suspension, he was suspended again though there are some questions about his second positive-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Schwazer
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1105694/alex-schwazer-sebastian-coe
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15 hours ago, emmawoodhouse said:
I remember an inquiry from Aly Raisman on a beam routine. Mehi was running around like a dog chasing its tail. She won.
Was that during the era when, IIRC, you had to pay 100CF in cash to file an appeal and you'd have team delegation members waving around fistfulls of bills toward the official in charge of appeals? The optics of that were ... not good to say the least.
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I'm disappointed but not surprised to hear that Aleksandra Soldátova retired last year when she could not get back on track after being treated for bulimia. (And am still not sure what to think about the 'kitchen knife accident' that seemed to set her on the path to recovery)
https://olympics.com/en/news/aleksandra-soldatova-opens-up-about-bulimia-struggles
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My DVR started to pick up rhythmic a few years back (it's set to record anything with the keyword 'gymnastics') and I'm kind of able to tell the difference between very good an excellent at this point.
I actually kind of dig the Russian influence because apparently in Russia there is no middle ground between high culture ballerina and tacky as heck and I dig the extra level of WTF? you get from the music and costuming as the women do amazing things with their bodies.
I mean I'm working my way through the qualifiers now and the Bulgarian gymnast did a perfectly lovely performance to a bad synthesizer folk version of 'Eye of the Tiger' and how can you not appreciate that?
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Two Belarusian officials sent home over their role in the Tsimanouskaya events-
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1111310/belarus-tsimanouskaya-ioc-president-bach
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I discovered that Sanya Richard-Ross has a workout series on my smart treadmill (same one that Michael Phelps is selling to US viewers). She's actually better than she is doing sports broadcasting because she's got a lot of interesting things to say about how to make it as an elite athlete couple and how she wants her son to be healthy and active but she's definitely not going to push him to be just like Mommy or Daddy in their realms.
Also a good mike drop moment where she had a post-game field pass when her husband was playing in the Superbowl- shortly before the game ends, you report to the correct corral for post-game field access and then they turn you loose when the final whistle blows. She zeroes in on her husband at the whistle, who's on the far other side of the field and bolts toward him at full speed. There's a security guard near him who is all 'how did you get here so fast?' Sanya just shrugs and says 'Olympic gold medalist'
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Racewalking remains on the Olympic schedule for 2024 but it's changed from 50K to 20K for both men and women.
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Evan Dunfee is a big reason why Russia remains banned from global track and field even as its rehabilited itself in other sports. Around 2015 his old blog was posting about how Russian racewalkers were still competing domestically while they were supposed to be suspended for doping violations and posted a bunch of links to pictures and race results that proved it.
The Russians pulled the pictures and results down, did a little photoshopping and reposted to the site, claiming that it was archive footage from 2012 and therefore the athletes in question were competing pre-ban.
The problem was, as Duunfee and others on the blog pointed out, was that a lot of the shoes and uniforms the athletes were wearing in the '2012' pictures was not even made available to anyone including sponsored athletes until the very end of 2014 and therefore the dates had to be totally wrong.
Thrilled to see him come away with a medal- he's one of the best advocates for clean sports athletics has got
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jan/14/elena-lashmanova-iaaf-investigating-race-ban
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Japan Airlines complains to the Australian Olympic Committee about Aussies behaving badly
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4 hours ago, blackwing said:
Congrats to Elaine Thompson, she is amazing. Back to back victories in both 100 and 200. I was really cheering for Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and disappointed she didn't medal. I'm assuming this is her last Olympics. Glad she at least got a medal in the 100. To get a silver at age 34 is incredible.
If they can get clean exchanges, which is admittedly always a big if in the 4x100, there's no one else who has the speed in that relay to beat Jamaica so SAFP has a high probability for gold in that one.
Figure Skating
in Sports
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.