Meyers Taylor was the most decorated bobsledder in American history even before heading to Italy. A former college softball player, Meyers Taylor helped the two-woman sled win bronze at the 2010 Olympics. By 2014 she was driving her own sled, and she won medals in 2014, 2018, and 2022. In total, she had five medals from four Olympic games.

However, all those medals were bronze and silver. She’d won a handful of world championships, but never Olympic gold.

She looked set for silver again Monday. She was in second place after two runs, behind Germany’s Laura Nolte, who won gold in the 2022 two-woman event while Taylor won bronze.

But in Run 3, Meyers Taylor set a track record and put herself just .15 seconds off the lead. And after Run 4, she took over first place. Nolte botched her fourth run, and Meyers Taylor became the Olympic champion.

Meyers Taylor’s win was monumental in Olympic history. At age 41, she is the the oldest Winter Olympic champion ever. (Germany’s Benjamin Karl had the record for eight days.) And she became just the second Black woman from any country in any sport ever to win an individual gold at the Winter Olympics, joining Team USA speed skater Erin Jackson. She has written about the abuse she has faced as a Black woman in the white world of bobsledding.

In 2020 and 2022, Meyers Taylor gave birth to two boys with special needs: They’re both deaf, and her oldest has Down syndrome. Rather than step back from competition, she pushed forward. Her sons travel with as she competes in bobsled events across the globe. The live together on the road for months at a time. From USA Today:

Of course, her kids were there when she won the gold.

Meyers Taylor could have retired after winning all those medals. She could’ve retired after deciding to become a mother, or after realizing that her children needed more attention and care than she’d expected. The choice would have been understandable.

Instead, she achieved the greatest success of her career and became the best bobsledder in the world.

HOW?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Meyers Taylor’s career has surely become more difficult now that she is a 41-year old mother of two. I’m not a bobsledding expert, but I’m sure there’s no competitive advantage to spending your free time frantically fishing in toilets for your child’s medical equipment.

But Meyers Taylor simply decided that just because things got harder, it wasn’t going to stop her from getting better.

McGrath has been one of the best slalom skiers in the world. Born in Vermont to a former American Olympic skier, McGrath was leading the World Cup slalom standings this season and took silver at last year’s World Championships.

The first slalom run yesterday was brutal — the conditions were horrible, and more than 50 skiers DNF-ed. The second run, not so much. Only two skiers failed to complete the course. One was the guy in first place.

It happened right away. McGrath straddled a gate. Skiing rules fun fact! Both of your skis have to go inside of the gate. McGrath only got one in there. He knew it right away.

1st-to-DQ performances do happen from time to time. In fact, you only have to go back two Olympics, to 2018 when Henrik Kristofferson led after the first slalom run and took a DNF, the only one of the top 25 skiers who failed to finish the course. Again:

As we keep saying: There’s something very real about Olympic pressure.

McGrath screamed. He put his head in his hands. He threw away his poles. He took off his skis. There’s video of the whole thing.

He walked over to the side of the course. He ducked under the protective netting and started walking over across an empty, snowy patch of mountain, heading towards the forest, like the deranged penguin Werner Herzog met.

He stumbled and fell in the snow, and kept walking, for about 90 seconds. Eventually, cameras caught him lying down in a snowbank, his head in his hands.

McGrath wasn’t just dealing with his poor performance in that moment, but also personal grief: His grandfather died the day of the opening ceremony. "I'm normally very good when it comes to perspective on things,” McGrath said. “If I don't ski well in a race I can at least say that everyone I love is healthy. But that's not been the case here. I’ve lost someone I love so much and that makes it really hard.”

Surely, he knew what was waiting at the bottom of that hill: The cameras. The fans. His teammates and coaches, probably offering words that couldn’t possibly console him. The media mixed zone, where he’d have to answer questions about what went wrong and what he was doing. So he decided to just stay up there.

Of course, hiding didn’t work. It’s the Olympics. There are SO MANY CAMERAS. His entire walk was captured and broadcast across the world, for jerks like me to meme. If anything, McGrath’s journey into the woods brought even more attention to his brutal outing. “I thought I would get some peace and quiet … which I didn’t because photographers and police found me out in the woods,” he told the Olympic media service. “I just needed some time for myself.”

It’s not over for McGrath. Remember Kristofferson, the guy who DNF-ed after leading the 2018 event? He’s still around. He finished third Monday. Bronze medal! He would’ve been knocked off the podium if McGrath had finished his run. Sometimes you’re the guy hiding in the woods after a dramatic failure; sometimes you’re the guy who benefits from the failures of woods-hiding guy.

In some ways, McGrath cannot wait this out. That gold medal is gone, forever. There will always be people who will remember him as the guy who crashed out on the course, then crashed out off the course.

But at some point all the cameras and attention that the Olympics bring will go away, and he’ll be able to refocus on being the best skier he can be. I hope he finds someplace nice and quiet to lie down until then.

The figure skating at these Olympics has had some shocking results — Malinin’s tumbles, the judging controversy with Chock and Bates that led to some problematic French skaters winning — and I’m so glad to report it kinda RULED.

Japan’s Miura and Kihara were the favorites after winning the 2023 and 2025 World Championships, and crushing their performance in the pairs portion of the team event. But a failed lift in the pairs’ short program dropped them into fifth place. They needed to be perfect in their free program to win gold.

And while skating to Hans Zimmer’s score from Gladiator, they were absolutely perfect. The program ended with Kihara lifting Miura over his head like an Olympic weightlifter, after which the two immediately burst into tears.

I do wish they’d thrown their skates at the judges and yelled ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED but that might have been a deduction.

The performance received a score of 158.13, the highest score of all time, vaulting Miura and Kihara well into first place.

(As I predicted yesterday 😉)

Zimmer has now composed the soundtrack for two of the three gold medal-winners in these Olympics (Mikhail Shaidorov skated to Dune in his short program.) If you’re using this pattern to pick winners, note that Italy’s Lara Naki Gutmann is gonna skate to Inception in the women’s singles.

I probably should congratulate Georgia for winning their first Winter Olympic medal ever — go Dawgs! Not a 100 percent feel-good story, though: both Berulava and Metelkina are Russian born, and while Berulava has Georgian ancestry, Metelkina is one of the Russian skaters who went looking for another country after Russia got banned from international competition.

Beyond McGrath, it was a brutal day on the course. Of the 96 starters, only 39 finished. NBC made a DNF compilation reel.

Of course, as noted yesterday, a lot of the skiers were not Olympic quality. I won’t make fun of most of them because I think it’s good that people from all the countries of the world can make it to the Olympics …

… HOWEVER …

In my video from last week, I talked about how a Taiwanese-American businessman from Utah somehow wrangled Guinea-Bissau citizenship for his son so that he could compete in the Olympics, despite being the 2,949th-ranked slalom skier in the world. He made it through like 5 gates before looking like this.

Bizarre event here. Snow started dumping on the venue about halfway through the third and final run, hampering visibility — disastrous for ski jumping. (Pretty pictures, though.)

Obviously, officials had to pause the event. But instead of postponing the final round to later in the week — totally feasible, since the men’s super team was the final ski jumping event of the Olympics and the venue should be free going forward — the round was simply canceled, wiping out all the third-round results and giving medals to whoever was leading after jump #2.

That means a bronze medal for the Norwegian Crotch Parachute Merchants. They were only .3 points ahead of Germany — 538.0 to 537.7 — with Slovenia and Japan within three points as well. A single bad jump by the Norwegians (or a great one by any of those countries) could have knocked them off the podium.

Quick shoutout to Humphries — also a mega-multi Olympic medalist (now five medals, three of which are gold) and also a 40-year old who became a mom since the last Olympics.

Humphries and Meyers Taylor have been on the podium together five times! The only event where one medaled and the other didn’t was the 2022 two-woman, where Meyers Taylor got silver.

Another win for the Dutch …

Fun fact: The Netherlands is ninth all-time in Winter Olympic medals, and only one has ever come on snow. Heading into these Olympics, they had 133 medals in speed skating, nine in short track speed skating, three in figure skating, one in skeleton, and one in snowboarding.

That’s two gold medals for Canada now …

… and still zero for China, as Gu has come up with silver twice. Remember, China had nine gold medals at their home Olympics just four years ago, tying Team USA for third on the medal table.

I was hoping gold would go to Tabanelli, the 18-year old Italian who tore her ACL in November and posted the highest scoring trick of the night, a huuuuuge 1620 …

But this is one of those events in which the winner is the person with the best two scores rather than the best one jump. IDK how they decide which event is going to be scored which way.

Yes, we’re getting a USA-Canada gold medal match!

Team USA has now outscored their competition 31-1. The one goal they allowed was a flukey play in which a Czech skater got out of the penalty box at the exact moment her team regained possession, allowing her to sneak behind the defense for a breakaway goal.

My tournament MVP is Swiss goalie Andrea Brändli, who nearly got Switzerland to the final despite her team being outshot 86-22 in the knockout rounds. In the quarters, the Swiss beat Finland 1-0 after being outshot 40-14; against Canada, the Swiss lost 2-1 after being outshot 46-8.

I have to think the second Canada-USA game is going to be closer than the 5-0 whooping in the prelims … but Canada struggled Monday while Team USA effortlessly beat their sixth consecutive opponent.

Potentially big medal opportunity for Team USA … AND FOR SCIENCE!

The Team Pursuit is an eight-lap race in which three skaters from each team race at the same time. Historically, the three compatriot skaters would take turns leading and drafting off one another.

But then, USA Speed Skating commissioned an aerodynamics expert to run a study. The organization found that the most effective strategy for team pursuit is to just keep the skaters in the same order the whole time, with the two skaters in the back keeping their hands firmly on the butt of the person in front of them, transferring their energy forward into the lead skater.

(Yes. They’re doing The Tush Push.)

The maneuver is called “bump drafting” — although we can keep calling it the Speed Skating Tush Push if you’d like — and NASCAR cars do it all the time.

It’s been hugely effective. American men used the strategy for bronze at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, won a dominant gold at last year’s World Championships, and then set the world record in November. Here’s the video of their World Championships gold, which also features plenty of discussion about bump drafting.

The problem is, the strategy may have worked too well. Everybody else in the world now does the Bump Draft.

Team USA’s men’s team is totally locked in. They train specifically for this race; Casey Dawson withdrew from the 10,000m race to be fresh for this one.

The event is being run tourny-bracket style, and both the men’s and women’s Team USA squads are in the semis. The American men will face China, while the women will face Canada. Those races are at 8:30 a.m. ET, with the final set for 10:30.

Working on a theory that Johannes Høsflot Klæbo could win this event by jumping a few meters and then kicking everybody’s ass in the skiing.

In the first Nordic Combined event of the Olympics, the gold medal winner was in seventh place after the ski jump, but just outskied everybody.

Norway is the favorite here. If Sturla Holm Lægreid wins gold, do we start talking about him as a great biathlete instead of the cheating guy?

I mean. Obviously not, but. Something to consider.

After the first two runs, Germany is in gold medal position …

… and silver medal position …

… and bronze medal position …

BUT! American Frank del Duca, one of the flagbearers from the opening ceremony, is one-tenth of a second back from third place. With a great day Tuesday, he can break up the medal sweep.

American Mac Forehand had the best score in qualifying after winning this year’s X Games Big Air competition.

In case you’re curious, his real name is “McHenry.”