Robert S

Venus did not look well yesterday in the singles. That probably had something to do with that.

Today the course is wet due to a couple of drops of rain and the leading Dutch cycler had a horrible crash.

So the little girl here is supposed to be an Olympic athlete:

The course was really nice, but the descent was something else. I don't want to think what would have happened if there was some rain.

The arena looks pretty empty even though all tickets were sold. The scalpers have to be sitting on a lot of tickets.

Austrian Olympic coverage is more horrible than ever, especially compared to neighbours Germany and Switzerland. 1.5 channels and no live streams even though the official broadcasters offers six of them. Sadly the German and Swiss TV geoblocks them and I am too cheap for VPNs. And now a couple of hours in the Austria TV chooses to show boxing which interests literally no one here (expect the guy doing the commentary).

The Austrian Paischer was choked out in 26 seconds with a guillotine choke, not something you are used to see in Judo. EDIT: My active time is long ago, but wasn't there some very questionable judging until now? For example the Yuko for the Brazilian against the Frenchmen looked strange as did the second Yuko of the Ecuadorian against the Swiss (without replay this looked like Waza-ari at least).

No medals have been awarded an Brazil already has its first doping scandal: apparently Brazil did not conduct a single doping test between July, 1st and July, 24th.

So they did not have a plan B for the cancelation of Pele. I really liked the projection show in the first hour and the flame sculpture BTW.

On German TV they showed a bit the current situation outside of Maracana. This almost looks like a warzone with "police" (army) and protestors fighting for turf.

I think more interesting than the medal table will be the "athletes robbed" table. -1 days in and you already have Australians and Danes on that list. Austrians missing out so far as only reporters and students working for the delegation so far have been effected.

Some IOC committee evaluated different sports that tried to get into the program for Tokyo and five sports were selected: surfing, karate, baseball/softball, skateboarding and sports climbing. All sports were proposed by the Tokyo organising committee. From what I understand there will be a vote next Wednesday on this issue.

To be fair it's not as if there are not other teams allowed to compete that very likely also have government sponsored doping. Some reports I have seen about Kenya come to mind for example, and what are the chances that North Korean athelets ever had to do a single "real" doping control while staying in their own country.

That turned out to be wrong. The IOC put the decision if Russians are allowed to compete in Rio to the respective governing bodies.

213 hours here, though I think I spent 2 or 3 times that on Civ II and III. I barely played Civ IV. I fear I have to get a new PC to play Civ VI as my current one is barely good enough for playing Civ V.

This cannot be (completely) true as he is currently playing for German 2nd league club Kaiserslautern, before he played for Viking Stavanger in Norway. I guess there might be some truth there as the Norwegian league has a long winter break.

That escalated quickly.

those cool and stoic Scandinavians

wrong Habsburg Monarchy country

Apparently Switzerland has the same shirt manufacturer as Hulk Hogan (four shirts got torn apart in the game against France).

At least Almer had a good evening, not much positive to say about most of the remaining players.

I don't think I (my heart) could deal with that. Though at least the last 10 minutes are halfway okay from an Austrian point-of-view, the rest was... well... horrible.

Good for France that a game lasts 90 minutes and not 88 (ignoring injury time, of course). My Austrians had a really bad start to the tournament yesterday. Though I must say that I am not surprised, the friendlies this year were not really good either and quite some players seem to be off-form. Austria is still waiting for a win at a Euro or World Cup since 1990 (2-1 against the US), 7 non wins (3 draws, 4 losses) in a row.

I suppose Ubisoft does not show the best games of all press conferences of E3 but they definitely so far have done by far the most entertaining show.