The mid tournament bounce

While in most swisses teams find their levels reasonably well after 4 or 5 rounds, the olympiad occasionally throws up a slightly odd round. It normally happens in round 7 or so, when a couple of teams bounce up from the bottom, and a couple of teams bounce down from a higher group. This happened to the PNG team, which has just one two matches in a row. Having bounced up from the bottom groups, it ran into the Faroe Islands, which was bouncing down. In fact in round three the Faroe Islands were playing on board 3(!), having won their first 2 matches. Since then they have had to play teams like Azebaijan, Georgia and Singapore, so I suspect they were relieved when they saw PNG as their round 7 pairing. Given that they have 3 IM's on their team, the 4-0 win was not a surprise, even if they rested one of their masters. Of course PNG was not the only team who got blanked in that round, with another 7 teams suffering the same fate. As a result these teams have enjoyed their brief moment in the sun, before returning to more familiar surroundings.