DFL

Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they're there, and you're not.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Late Results for Thursday, February 23

Anastasia Gimazetdinova (Uzbekistan)
Clyde Getty (Argentina)
Figure Skating: In women's figure skating, 25-year-old Anastasia Gimazetdinova of Uzbekistan was 29th after the short program with 38.44 points, and did not advance to the free skate (the top 24 did).

Freestyle Skiing: Clyde Getty, the 44-year-old from Colorado who's representing his parents' country of Argentina, is getting a bit of attention at these games; he's easily the media favourite among last-place finishers in Torino. During the 1990s he was on the U.S. team, but switched to Argentina when he could no longer make the cut. This is his second Olympics. He drew notice when he face-planted on the landing one of his jumps, losing both of his skies, in the preliminaries for the men's aerials on Monday, but his age (on the high side for just about any sport except curling) and his raw enthusiasm don't hurt either. He ended up finishing 28th, incidentally, with a score of 79.88; the next-to-last-place finisher's score was 70 points higher. (He received zero points for landing on his second jump.)

Standings to date: Argentina adds a second last-place finish; Uzbekistan enters the race.

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Early Results for Thursday, February 23

Biathlon: The women's 4×6-km relay ran this morning, and the team from Latvia -- comprised of Madara Līduma, 23, Anžela Brice, 35, Linda Savļaka, 22, and Gerda Krūmiņa, 21 -- came in 18th. Their time of 1:26:21.3 was 10:08.8 behind the gold-medal team, but there were five teams who were nine minutes or more back.

Curling: The finals aren't done yet -- the gold-medal game runs later today for the women, and the medal games run tomorrow for the men -- but the last-place finishers in round-robin play have already been assigned, so I might as well not wait any longer to report them. On the women's side, that's Italy; on the men's side, that's New Zealand. Each team finished 10th.

Hockey: Similarly, even though we won't know who won until Sunday, I can report that Latvia finished last -- 12th -- in men's hockey, thanks to their single point in the preliminary round.

Sara Fischer (Sweden)Snowboarding: The last snowboarding event is the women's parallel giant slalom, which just wrapped up. Swedish competitor Sara Fischer, 26, did not finish one of her qualifying runs and as a result was ranked 30th in the competition.

Standings to date: Sweden finally enters the standings, in 34th place; New Zealand enters in 28th. Latvia, with two more last-place finishes, moves up to 8th place, while host country Italy defies expectations with only its second last-place finish, moving into 17th place.

Later today: men's aerials, women's figure skating.

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