On Sunday, Italy’s Lisa Vitozzi won the first-ever biathlon gold medal in Italian history. The biathlon course is, believe it or not, the largest venue at the Olympics, with seats for 19,000 spectators. And the Italian flags were waving as she crossed the line nearly a minute ahead of anybody else, celebrating and taking a bow before the finish line.

Just a few days earlier, Vitozzi had been part of a relay team which won a silver medal — just the second silver medal in Italian biathlon history. So they’ve gone from one silver to a gold and two silvers in a week.

Surprising to me that Italy has never won at biathlon, as they famously have the Alpini, mountain infantry troops who are strong skiers and shooters. It was a pretty big deal in World War I — a war I am passionate about NOT restarting, to be 100 percent clear.)

Also on Sunday, Federica Brignone became the oldest Olympic gold medalist in Alpine skiing when she won the giant slalom … breaking the record she set days earlier in the Super-G.

BTW, Brignone’s nickname is “the Snow Tiger,” which is why she has that cool helmet and why there’s a picture of a guy wearing a tiger shirt up there.

Brignone is an incredible comeback story: she broke her leg and tore her ACL last April. She was told she might never be able to “walk properly again” and that it would take two years to return to competition, if at all. She just won two Olympic golds less than a year later.

Also at these Olympics: Italy won bronze in the team figure skating event —particularly impressive because you need everybody to be good in the team event — just the third figure skating medal in Italian history …

… and Italy won its first gold medal in luge since 2006 … and then won another gold medal in luge …

… and Italy got just their second curling medal ever, a bronze in the mixed doubles (although that team did win gold in 2022) …

… and Italy jumped from two all-time speed skating gold medals to four, thanks to Lollobrigida’s double-gold.

They’re currently second in the medal count, which would also be their best finish ever.

Last week, we covered the many reasons this could be possible — better funding ahead of Olympics, familiarity with the venues and courses, normal home-field advantage but with more travel and logistics for all the outside nations than your standard sporting event — but I’d like to propose another.

American Jordan Stolz is on a GOAT run in speed skating, with two gold medals in Milan and two more to go. Four years ago, he was interviewed saying that he eats pizza every day. This time around he updated that to say he actually eats pasta most days, although he does eat pizza “pretty frequently.”

Clearly, Stolz proves that pizza and pasta are performance-enhancing foods (PEFs) — but Italians are so picky about their pizza and pasta that they refuse to eat them when not specifically prepared by Italians. (I am citing the many TikToks of people breaking spaghetti in front of their Italian husbands and family members and the Youtube of the Italian boyfriend eating at Olive Garden.) Therefore, Italy’s home Olympics advantage is even larger than most host nations.

What medals will they win in coming weeks? IDK man. They’re winning at biathlon and luge. Anything is on the table. I’m predicting golds for Italy in ski mountaineering and snowboarding.

After the accusation that their players were cheating, Canada’s first move was to accuse Sweden of running a sting operation. (Well, I guess their first move was yelling FUCK OFF at the Swedes, but then their second move was to accuse Sweden of running a sting operation.)

Marc Kennedy, the Canadian curling curser at the center of the scandal, softened his defense. “I’m not going to stand here and deny that I’ve ever done it, I’m just going to adamantly deny that I’ve done it on purpose.” But at the same time, he went on the attack, accusing Sweden of “premeditated planning to try to catch us … they've come up with a plan to catch teams in the act.” (Always love when “why were you cheating” turns into “why were you trying to catch us cheating.”)

The Canadians were caught in 4k (literally!) by TV cameras pointed at the hog line. (That’s the line on the ice where you have to release the rocks.) But why were their cameras pointed at that line in the first place? There aren’t usually cameras pointed at that specific spot on the ice, since it’s not normally where the action is. And why were the Swedes so confident their opponents’ infractions were caught on video? Suspicious …

The Swedish team denied they had set up a sting. The Swedish Olympics broadcaster, SVT, backed that claim up, saying that their camera operators had heard the accusations earlier in the match and moved cameras around to try and capture the infraction.

Either way, there is now an extreme emphasis on calling these infractions. Canada’s women’s team was accused of a double-touch, with officials actually stepping into the game and removing the rock. This infuriated skip Rachel Homan —”They said I touched the stone after I let it go, which is so far from the truth, it’s crazy.," she continued. "Just making something up, I don’t know. We have the Maple Leaf on our back, I’m not sure.” But the same thing happened to the Great Britain men’s team, which notably does not wear a maple leaf on their back.

As a result, World Curling has changed their policies mid-tournament — notably, to make their umpires less involved. While the two World Curling umpires present at each Olympic draw were initially supposed to stand by and monitor the four games happening at once, they will now only show up if specifically requested by a team.

If Sweden actually did have a plan to throw off Canada’s Olympics by dragging them into scandal, it hasn’t worked. Sweden is 1-4 and likely to miss the medal rounds; Canada is 4-1. (The Canadian women, though, could be heading for a shocking early exit — they’re 2-3 right now.)

The player in question is Rebecca Mariani, daughter of Marco Mariani, the Italian Curling Federation’s technical director. Mariani is an actual curler as opposed to a rando picked off the street, but Italy’s team had featured the same playing lineup for years, only for the coaching staff to select a new roster days before the Olympics.

Mariani actually hasn’t played yet in these Olympics — she’s the team’s alternate, waiting to be subbed in. So it’s not like Mariani’s poor play is tanking the team, but to include her, they had to cut a starter and bring in a bench player, since the team’s previous alternate has now been forced into the playing lineup to include Mariani.

The woman left off the team, Angela Romei, has been a teammate of skip Stefania Constantini since 2018 and helped the team win silver and bronze at European championships. She filed a lawsuit at the Court of Arbitration for Sport — the Switzerland-based organization that makes rulings in cases like this — but the court “did not find it likely that the head coach of a national team would agree to include an athlete in the Olympic team that is inferior to another athlete, simply to help a member of the federation to include family into the Olympic roster.”

IDK man. I am starting to find it pretty likely.

The actual curling team is clearly upset by all this. Constantini dedicated her bronze medal in the mixed doubles competition to Romei.

The curling federation’s defense is pretty weak. They argued that the team needed a substitute who could play any role on the team. But teams rarely play their alternates at the Olympics — there aren’t many curling injuries — and disrupting the team’s usual lineup just to bring a more versatile substitute seems absolutely nuts. They also made the choice just days before the Olympics, not giving the new lineup any time to work together.

And her father just played dumb: “Rebecca is talented; she didn't get here through connections,” said Mariani. “Was I supposed to exclude her just because she is my daughter?”

The whole thing seems foolish. You made your daughter the center of a controversy so she could be a part of a winless team that hates her. Congrats! If Mariani is really talented, she would have gotten her way to the Olympics at some point or another.

THE FIRST CANADIAN GOLD OF THE OLYMPICS! I made a graphic to celebrate:

Sorry, couldn’t come up with good representative animals for Great Britain or Kazakhstan.

I don’t think the most interesting thing about the Winter Olympics is “how many medals did each country win” but we already did the Italy thing … and what’s happening with Canada is probably wilder. They had won at least 10 gold medals at back-to-back-to-back games from 2010 to 2018 (including 14 when hosting in Vancouver,) but only had four in Beijing and now might do even worse than that. The fact that they also have eight silvers and bronzes shows that there’s some flukiness to it, but still. One gold medal through nine days.

Functionally, dual moguls turned into a second-chance event for Kingsbury and Australia’s Jakara Anthony, who were dominant in their sports but came just short of winning Olympic gold in the standard moguls event.

Turns out, that’s kinda how moguls athletes see it too. Last night I was listening to an episode of the Good Game podcast from last week — I’m like, a full week behind on my podcasts because of the Olympics — and she said the US ski team has a saying that “if moguls doesn’t go our way, there’s always duals day.”

4-for-4 for Johannes Høsflot Klæbo! He’s now the winningest Winter Olympian of all time with nine gold medals … and he still has two more events in Milano-Cortina, both of which he’s favored to win.

This was probably Klaebo’s easiest win of the games — his teammates handed him a 12-second lead.

2-for-2 for Great Britain in events where one guy goes down a hill and then when they cross the line a woman at the top of the hill waits a few seconds and then starts, or vice versa. Great niche!

The Brits have now won three golds, more than at any Winter Olympics ever. The snowboard cross medal was also their first ever in a “snow” event — their previous golds were in figure skating, skeleton, curling, bobsled, and believe it or not, hockey.

Yesterday I wrote about how the winners of the “sprint” event had a big advantage in this one, since they literally get head starts. But neither of them pulled off double-gold — Quentin Fillon Maillet finished 5th after missing five shots in the men’s event …

… and Keirkeede missed three shots and somehow managed to still get silver in this one.

And yes, that’s a third Olympic medal at these games for Lægreid! And he’s now gone two consecutive medals without confessing to adultery!

I think I was a little bit premature to say the Netherlands was bad at long-track speed skating now. I am canceled in the Netherlands. If I ever go there, they are going to send me to The Hague, which is actually not that big a deal for them, they have very effective rail system.

This was the first-ever women’s large hill competition due to male concerns that women’s uteruses might fall out if they competed in this event. Unfortunately, they were 100 percent right. Uteruses scattered absolutely everywhere. The ground was littered with them. Sometimes a jumper would land in a big pile of uteruses, resulting in a crash that caused their own uterus to fly out. Not even the expert Uterus Recovery Team hired by the IOC for this event could work fast enough to gather all the uteri. Terrible, terrible scenes on the ski jumping hill.

Just kidding, it was fine.

I will say I don’t understand how ski jumping works. Strøm had the longest jump in the first round, but actually scored behind Kvandal, whose slightly shorter jump received a higher score. Then Kvandal had the longest jump in the final, but was massively outscored by Strøm, who won both women’s ski jump competitions.

Sweden is on a really solid run. They outscored its opponents in the second-tier Group B by a score of 18-2, then got a surprise win in the quarterfinals over Czechia, a team from Group A.

But still. It’s Team USA. They just need to keep their focus for one more game before a gold-medal matchup with Canada.

After this one, CAnada plays Switzerland in the other semis; they won the pool play matchup 4-0.

Another medal chance for Brazil’s Lucas Pinheiro Braathen! But more importantly …

This is the event you compete in if you’re not actually good enough to qualify for the Olympics. The “faster” skiing events are too difficult. It’s where our guy from this video, ranked nearly 3,000th in the world competing for Guinea-Bissau, despite being Taiwanese-American, is competing.

Expecting a healthy list of DNFs and people finishing a full minute off the leader.

Got kind of excited when I saw this was called the “Super Team” — is this the one where the best ski jumpers from various countries team up, like LeBron joining D-Wade and Bosh on the Heat? — but nope! It’s just two guys from each country jumping off the large hill. Kinda feels like they’re doing too much with the name here.

Honestly, smaller than the “team” event held from 1988 until 2022, which featured four guys from each country.

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH SKI JUMPING. The “normal” hill is apparently never used in any competitions outside of the Olympics and World Champs. The “super team” is smaller than the regular team.

Germany’s Laura Nolte is in first place by .22 seconds, which should be enough for her to hang on for gold. But …

… Team USA’s Elana Meyers Taylor and Kaillie Armbruster Humphries are in second and third. Meyers Taylor is trying to medal for the fifth straight Olympics (seriously!) and Armbruster Humphries won gold in this event in 2022.

And right after those two, Team USA’s Kaysha Love is in fifth. If Team USA somehow manages to not get multiple medals after heading into the final two runs with three sleds in the mix, it’ll be a bummer.

Big shocker in the short program yesterday — world champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara from Japan botched a lift and wound up in fifth place. Their skate in the team event would have been more than good enough for first place.

It actually makes Monday’s free skate pretty exciting — they might be able to dig out of the hole they’ve gotten themselves into. They’ll need to outscore the German pair of Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin by seven points.

I am zigging where others zag by simply not having opinions about Eileen Gu. If somebody asks me about Eileen Gu, I will say “oh yeah, wow, sure” and then move on.