DFL

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

Thursday, February 23, 2006

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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Sunday, February 19, 2006

Qualifying Rules: Curling and Hockey

Part of a series looking at just how hard it is to get to the Olympics; see previous posts on biathlon and cross country skiing, ski jumping and nordic combined, speed skating, short track, snowboarding, figure skating and freestyle skiing.

Now let's turn to two completely team-based sports in which my own country seems to expect to win all the time: curling and hockey.

In curling, a total of 10 teams qualify for each of the men's and women's competitions. One of these is Italy, as the host nation. The remaining nine countries are determined by the results from the World Curling Championships since the last Olympics.

In hockey, there are eight teams on the women's side and 12 on the men's side. In both cases, Italy qualifies automatically as the host nation. Most of the countries are determined by the IIHF world tables as of the 2004 championships -- the best eight men's teams and the best four women's teams qualify. The remaining three spots on each side are determined by whoever wins Olympic qualification tournaments -- the page doesn't say, but are these regional or continental qualifiers?

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