Biatlon #32 Nederland leeft en de World Cup is begonnen

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Op dinsdag 18 december 2018 19:54 schreef heywoodu het volgende:
Geen Johannes Dale op de IBU Cup morgen, benieuwd of hij nu al in de World Cup start of dat hij de individuele in Obertilliach gewoon overslaat (vrijdag en zaterdag is er ook nog een supersprint en sprint).

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Op donderdag 20 december 2018 17:57 schreef Faraday01 het volgende:

[..]

kan het niet zien helaas, jij voorspelt een afgetekende zege voor de nieuwe God?

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Hello. Somebody asked me for further details about current situation of Gabi and her husband, so here you are. I know my English is not perfect so I am sorry for that.

Gabi Soukalova started dating Petr Koukal back in the summer of 2014. During first two years of their relationship it didn’t influence her negatively. Koukal was the guy who was waiting for her behind the finish line in lots of races and Gabi was racing on the very top level. In May 2016 they got married and that is why the letter “S” in “Soukalova” changed to “K” - Mr. Koukal -> Mrs. Koukalova, that is how it works in our country.

Suddenly, during 2016 she started to experience problems with her calves. I am not the right person to judge, but there is very popular opinion in our country saying that the “calves problem” was not such a big deal and that most importantly it had to cover something else. Koukal is very unpopular because of the fact that he completely controls and manipulates Gabi and tells her what should she do etc. She is addicted and devoted to him and she believes everything he says - so some say that he started to tell Gabi things like “Maybe you should not race anymore”or “You should rather focus on your after-career life”. Hhe had some salty arguments with members of Czech biathlon team as well. He criticized their work and they obviously weren’t happy about that.

Koukal wanted to transform Gabi into “money-machine” - that is why she wrote THAT book where she describes, in a nutshell, this: “I lost my virginity before I turned 15 and I once sent my panties to Jaromir Jagr (most famous hockey player in our history). I loved biathlon when I was young, but I slowly started to pretty much hate it because of, besides other factors, my former coach Jindrich Sikola. He kept telling me that I am fat, and that is why I started to have problems with my diet which led to bulimia. I also do not like half of the people in Czech biathlon including some former or current biathletes (especially her and Veronika Vitkova supposedly couldn't stand each other).” She trash-talked about lots of people in that book.

The head coach of our biathlon team Ondrej Rybar, who is very respected person here, didn’t want to comment on this book, but few months after the book has been released, he said basically only one thing: “I doubt that she would be able to compete on this level if she really had bulimia.” You don’t need to be the most intelligent person in the world to think that he pretty much wanted to say “I think that most of the things written in the book are just a bunch of lies.”

Some say that Koukal “forced Gabi” to write this book in order to make a business on this. The truth is that this book caused real boom in Czech Republic, for a few weeks the book became a bestseller here and “Gabi’s confession” was the biggest topic going on here. The statement about Gabi being a business instrument of Koukal is supported by the fact that few months after the book was released, Koukal and Koukalova started doing weird things - They for example started selling tickets for tour of meetings called somehow such as “Our honest confession - Would you like to ask us anything about our personal life?” - for 500 Kč, which is around 20 ¤ - people could come to meet them and ask them questions about their life. That’s all. Obviously, nobody actually wanted to spend money on this, so they had to cancel the tour due to “hate campaign against them”. Everybody knew that the true reason was simple - they were unable to sell the tickets.

By the way, there was a very popular joke based on their failure:

"Gabi and Petr had to cancel their special fan-tour. All 4 people who paid for the tickets will be given their money back.” :-)

My opinion is that Koukal is the guy responsible for decline of Gabi. She probably really struggled with her calves, but had she not met him, she would overcome this in few months and we would see her competing at the top level as she used to. But he basically made a business on her and I think he kept telling her things such as "You do not need to race anymore, your calves are really bad and maybe you will never be that good again, let's focus on something else, let’s make some money, let’s write a book that will cause hell of a boom, you hate half of the people in the Czech team anyway..”. In some way Koukal is very admirable guy because of the fact that he beat cancer and was an olympic flag-bearer in London 2012 (he was a badminton player). But as a person, he seems to be a real prick who controls Gabi and doesn’t care about anything but his own profit from this situation.

My niece is actually one of the best junior badminton players in our country and member of junior badminton national tem as well, so she got to know Koukal few times and she knows about him much more than most of the people. She told me that "nobody in Czech badminton likes this guy and I definitely understand why”. Whatever she meant by that, Koukal doesn’t seem to be a nice gentleman..

On the other hand, people who like Koukal say that "Gabi was not able to face the pressure which was put on her anymore. She did not have that big problems with her calves, but she had problems in her head. Koukal is the guy who helped her to reduce the pressure put on her and showed her that there are other ways how to spend her life then by being a biathlete hunting the best possible results in kind of “sport rat race”. In the book Gabi only wrote what she wanted the world to know for years, but she couldn't tell this to anyone as she was still a part of the team.

Latest rumours say that Gabi in considering some kind of comeback, but this may definitely be just a fiction. Maybe our sport journalist just don’t have anything to write about. It would truely shock me if there would be something like “Gabi’s comeback”. Moreover, she has burned many bridges in the past few months, so she really can’t just come to the training centre one day and say “Hello my dear girls, I am back”. It would be much more complicated.

Hope I helped you to understand the situation at least a bit more.

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Op zaterdag 29 december 2018 18:00 schreef Stoner12 het volgende:
Wat vinden wij van Biathlon auf Schalke?
A) machtig mooi
B) uitmelkgenot voor verdwaalde voetbalsupporters
C) Neutraal Zwitsers
D) Genieten van Shipoelin zn afscheid