Late Results for Saturday, February 25

Alpine Skiing: The men's slalom ran today, and it was brutal: a total of 41 DNFs, as well as four DNSes and five disqualifications. In other words, more athletes were unable to complete the race (50) than put in a result (47). Amidst the carnage, in 47th place was Japanese skier Yasuhiro Ikuta, 26, whose time of 2:23.28 was more than 40 seconds off the pace. But at least he finished -- although I get the impression that alpine skiing is one of those events where it's not necessarily considered better to DFL than DNF.

Bobsled: In the men's four-man bobsled, the Brazilians came last. Yes, while Jamaica may not have qualified a team, Brazil did -- presumably through continental qualification (see previous entry for bobsled qualifying rules). Anyway, the boys from Brazil are Ricardo Raschini, 38, Marcio Silva, 25, Claudinei Quireno, 35, and Edson Bindilatti, 26; their time after three runs was 2:58.94, or 5.32 seconds off the pace at that point. Teams below 20th place didn't get a fourth run. There was one DNS.

Short Track: Three finals today, so three attempts at divining the last-place finisher in an event where time matters less than place, and there's heats.

In the men's 500-metre and women's 1,000-metre events, I'm awarding the DFL to the person who puts in the slowest non-advancing time in the heats (on the basis that if you have an even slower time but advance, usually it's because someone else was disqualified, meaning they interfered, and because you invariably put in a better result in a later race).

So, in the men's 500-metre heats on Wednesday, 21-year-old Anthony Lobello of the USA had the slowest non-advancing time: 1:13.722. Most other competitors had races in the 42-44 second range, so a fall is likely here. In the women's 1,000-metre heats, also on Wednesday, Latvian skater Evita Krievāne had the slowest non-advancing time: 1:39.986. Her time, on the other hand, was only a few seconds off the pace.

The men's 5,000-metre relay, on the other hand, was easy to figure out: the German team of Thomas Bauer, 21, Andre Hartwig, 22, Arian Nachbar, 29, and Sebastian Praus, 25, finished last (er, second) in the B final.

Speed Skating: One event left -- the women's 5,000-metre, in which Katarzyna Wójcicka, 25, skating for Poland, finished 16th. Her time was 7:28.09, about 29 seconds off the pace. It's worth mentioning that this is Wójcicka's fourth event: she finished 10th in the 3,000-metre, eighth in the 1,000-metre and 11th in the 1,500-metre races. Don't for a moment think that last-place finishers are always in the back of the field; 'tain't always so.

Standings to date: With only one event still to report its last-place finisher -- the men's 50-km cross-country ski race -- we're almost there. Japan inches into second place, with as many last-place finishes as Romania but more than three times the athletes. Poland and Latvia move up the top 10, from eighth and ninth to sixth and seventh, respectively. Brazil, Germany and the USA add their second last-place finishes and move into the top 20.

Late Results for Saturday, February 18

Short Track Speed Skating: This is always a complicated event to report, especially when the slowest athlete in the heats nevertheless qualifies (and then puts in a faster time in the semis) and others with faster times are eliminated -- that's heats-based sport for you. So, especially in the case of the men's 1,000 metre, I've had to go with the slowest nonqualifying time in the heats (which took place on Wednesday), to wit, that of 19-year-old Russian skater Vyacheslav Kurginian. His time of 1:36.070 was not the slowest, but everyone who had a slower time qualified out of their heats and then put in a faster time in the quarterfinals, so I've had to go with Kurginian for an admittedly arbitrary DFL.

In the women's 1,500 metre, it was a good deal more straightforward: Chinese skater Cheng Xiaolei, 24, had the slowest time in the heats: 2:50.017.

Ski Jumping: In the individual large hill (K120) event, Canadian Graeme Gorham, 18, finished 50th with a score of 61.1 and did not advance past the first round. Here's a profile of Gorham from the Sun media chain. [I made an error in these results; see correction.]

Speed Skating: In the men's 1,000-metre, Chinese skater Lu Zhuo, 25, finished 38th with a time of 1:12.69 -- less that four seconds off the gold-medal pace. It's marked as a reskate in the results; presumably something happened the first time around that resulted in the skater he was paired against being disqualified and him being allowed a do-over.

Standings to date: The law of averages almost requires that large teams -- like Russia's and Canada's -- will have multiple last-place finishes: your team has more depth, and there are more opportunities for things to go awry. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for medium-sized teams like China's -- and there aren't many countries with more than 80 athletes. Anyway, the upshot of this is that Russia takes the lead -- briefly held since this morning by Chile -- with four last-place finishes despite its large contingent. China is now sixth, and Canada -- with one of the largest delegations here -- is at the back of the single-last-place-finisher pack.

Results for Wednesday, February 15

Alpine Skiing: Algeria sent two athletes to Torino; one of them, Christelle Laura Douibi, 20, finished 40th in the women's downhill today. Her time of 2:09.68 was 13.19 seconds behind the gold medallist's time. There was one DNS and four DNFs.

Freestyle Skiing: In men's moguls, Russian skier Vitaly Glushchenko, 28, finished 35th in the qualifying round, with a total score of 12.75, and did not advance to the final; the gold medallist's score in the final was 26.77.

Luge: A pair of 18-year-olds from Romania, Cosmin Chetroiu and Ionuţ Ţăran, finished 18th in the luge doubles; their time after two runs was 1:39.593, about five seconds behind the gold medallists. Three teams did not finish.

Nordic Combined: The remainder of the team event has been postponed until tomorrow. Bad weather.

Short Track Speed Skating: The women's 500-metre final was run today, but the heats were run on Sunday. The slowest heat time was put in by Hungarian skater Rózsa Darázs, whose time of 1:10.558 was considerably behind the rest -- the gold medallist's time in the final, for example, was 0:44.345. The 18-year-old Darázs was Hungary's flag-bearer during the Opening Ceremonies; I haven't been able to find any news that indicated a fall or crash, but it's almost certainly something along those lines.

Standings to date: Additional last-place finishes move Romania and Russia up the standings, Romania into first place -- overtaking South Korea! -- and Russia into fifth. Algeria, with only two athletes at these Games (more on small delegations from Runner-Up) slides into sixth.

Qualifying Rules: Short Track

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, and speed skating.

Short track speed skating's qualifying rules are a little less straightforward. Quotas everywhere. First of all, there's a total quota of 110 athletes -- 55 men, 55 women -- and a national quota of 10 (five and five) per country if they're sending a relay team, or eight (four and four) if they aren't.

Each country gets a fixed number of athletes per individual event based on their athletes' performance in World Cup trials, and there are a maximum of 32 athletes per individual event. If you have three athletes in the top eight, you get three places; if you have two athletes in the top 32, you get two places; the rest are filled by the highest-ranked athletes from other countries until the quota of 32 per event is filled.

Only the top eight national teams participate in relay events -- and Italy, as host, is guaranteed a spot even if they aren't in the top eight. (Italy's a relatively strong short-track country, though.)

I'm amazed that they can make all these quotas agree with one another; surely there have to be conflicts here and there.

Late Results for Sunday, February 12

Speed Skating: 24-year-old Nataliya Rybakova of Kazakhstan finished 28th in the women's 3000 metre event. Her time of 4:38.76 was 36½ seconds behind the gold medallist and 12 seconds behind the next-to-last-place finisher.

Luge: An extremely slow third run put Mark Hatton, 32, of Great Britain in 35th place in the men's single competition. Compare his combined time of 4:12.899 (after four runs) with the gold medallist's time of 3:26.088. Two other competitors had runs in excess of a minute. It turns out that you need to complete all four runs to finish; a spill on the fourth run created the event's lone DNF despite three clean previous runs.

Ski Jumping: Estonian ski jumper Jaan Jüris, 28, received a score of 88.5 in the preliminary round of the individual normal hill event and, like everyone else not in the top 30, did not advance to the final round. He finished 50th overall; the gold medallist's score after two rounds was 266.5, or 131.0 and 135.5 on each jump, respectively. [I made an error in these results; see correction.]

Short Track Speed Skating is a little trickier to report on because it's based on heats rather than times: it frequently occurs that a winning time in one heat is slower than the slowest time in another. Your time, in other words, doesn't matter insofar as the standings are concerned. So I'm making an executive decision to post the slowest time overall, whether it comes in the heats, semis or finals. (If nothing else, they record world-record times in this sport, don't they?) Anyway, that's a long enough prologue to some actual results, to wit, those from the men's 1,500-metre individual event (results: heats, semis, finals), where 23-year-old French skater Jean-Charles Mattei had the slowest time -- 2:43.543, well back of other results. Though I didn't see his race, that time suggests to me that he crashed, got up and finished, or something along those lines -- I've seen that sort of thing happen often enough in short track.

Standings to date: Nothing earth-shattering to report; just a bunch of countries putting their first last-place finishes on the board. South Korea still leads for the moment.