The Big Air competition is well-named. While the halfpipe and slopestyle events ask skiers and snowboarders to do runs with multiple tricks, Big Air is just One Big Trick. They take a freaky elevator up to the top of a 180-foot tall ramp, ride down, and try to max out one jump.

The elevator is legitimately terrifying. Here’s a video of the ascent from one of the athletes, and here’s an article about it if you prefer reading about scary things instead of seeing them. (As a reader of Wikipedia plot summaries for horror movies, I get it.)

The snowboarding competition was last week, and it was a good appetizer. While snowboarding has great vibes and a rebellious reputation … you can do bigger tricks on skis. You can go faster, spin more, and land more easily.

Heading into the final round of the event, Forehand needed to post one of the highest scores of all time to pass Frostad … and he did it. Forehand’s trick scored a 98.25. That’s the highest score anybody has ever received in any Olympics freestyle skiing event — big air, slopestyle, or halfpipe.

I also went back and checked: Nobody has ever received a score that high in a big air event at an FIS World Championships. This was the greatest trick of all time.

Was Carlos Alcaraz in the building? Because this looked like a Forehand winner!

Then the Norwegian came down, and the judges decided that Frostad Flips were more than good — they were grrrrrreat! (I am so sleep-deprived that I truly have no idea whether I should type the jokes I’m typing. Stay tuned throughout the week.) Frostad got a 98.5 and the gold medal. Forehand had held the record for Coolest Trick Ever for exactly one jump. Sorry. New coolest trick ever.

This was a huge upset. Forehand was the silver medalist in this event at the last World Championships and won the most recent X Games Big Air competition; Frostad was 37th at the last World Championships and wasn’t invited to the X Games. He hadn’t reached a podium in any World Cup Big Air event since winning an event in December 2024.

And it seemed like a surprising result to my untrained eye, Forehand had done more spinnies and flippies than Frostad. ISN’T THIS EVENT ABOUT FLIPPIES AND SPINNIES?

After the event ended, the announcers hinted at a potential philosophical dilemma among the judges. (The announcers also did that very Olympics Broadcast On NBC thing where they were like: “Are the judges going to reward the guy from Norway or are they going to reward the MUCH COOLER thing our AMERICAN HERO did?”) Were they going to reward sheer spinniness or Frostad’s more unique trick?

Forehand had landed a 2160 (SIX FREAKIN’ ROTATIONS) and Frostad had only done a 1620 (4.5 rotations, pathetic), but the judges felt Frostad’s was more creative and technically difficult. Frostad spun clockwise while Forehand had spun counterclockwise; he rotated his body forward (“bio”) while Forehand had gone backwards (“cork); he landed backwards, and he did a half-rotation before even taking off (a “butter”);Nobody had ever done Forehand’s trick before, but nobody had ever done Frostad’s trick before, either.

In some judged sports like gymnastics and figure skating, scoring can be impossibly arcane and complex, since every potential move has been assigned a specific degree of difficulty. Freestyle skiing … not so much. The judges are just judging from 0-to-100 based on “overall impression.”

The rulebook waxes poetic about why this method should be used. (Yes, this is in the rulebook.)

There are some guidelines about how things should be scored, like what sorts of deductions should be taken off for bad landings, and what judges should look for in certain events — the judges in Big Air are instructed to look for amplitude, which is just a fancy way of saying Big Air — but they’ve gotta figure out for themselves what’s impressive.

So did they pick the right winner? Here’s what Forehand — THE GUY WHO LOST — had to say.

“His tricks don’t have a lot of spinning - I did 21s, and he did two 16s - but the way he does it with his approach on takeoff is so unique and so different, and no one has done his two tricks either before. It’s good to see that, and it’s good for our sport as we can only spin so much, and it’s pushing the boundaries in a different way.”

Personally, I disagree. Mac, your air was bigger! The event is called Big Air! You deserve to win for that alone!

But if Mac is cool with it, I’m cool with it. The judges are judging on a scale of 1-to-100, and they’re running out of numbers. Simply asking athletes to spin-to-win has an upper limit on how far it can go and how interesting it can be to watch. I can’t speak to which tricks are more difficult to execute, but rewarding creativity seems like a better future for the sport.

That said I’m still pretty mad Norway is beating us at freestyle skiing. Stick to Gun Skiing and leave Fun Skiing to us!

Not only did Germany sweep the podium, it was their second-straight podium sweep in this event.

It could have been worse. At the 2024 World Championships, Germany swept the two-man bobsled, the four-man bobsled, the two-woman bobsled, and won gold and bronze in the monobob. (Elana Meyers Taylor got that silver, though!)

Remember: Only 17 luge/skeleton/bobsled tracks exist, and four of them are in Germany. That may explain how they can sweep this event, win both luge singles golds, and take home six-of-nine skeleton medals.

And yes, there’s a dude named Alexander Schüller who won the silver and a different dude named Alexander Schaller who won the bronze. They’re both brakemen, but someday they must team up and win gold together.

You see a sweep and think “there’s no way this was interesting,” but there was actually an upset! Francesco Friedrich is the bobsledding GOAT, while Johannes Lochner has had the honor of finishing behind him time and time again. Freidrich had four Olympic golds and 18 World Championships entering the event; Lochner had two silvers and is an eight-time first-runner-up at World Champs.

This time, Lochner got the W!

When it comes to sliding sports, “a different German won than usual” is about as good as it gets most of the time.

Brutal collapse by the heavily favored Americans, who hadn’t lost a race all season. They were in front halfway through the race, but ran out of steam and lost by four seconds — an eternity in this sport.

Worst of all, Italy hit the Americans with the Steph Curry “Night Night” celebration as they crossed the finish line:

I guess if there’s one big downside to America having a slew of generational athletes with signature celebrations, it’s that sometimes other countries do them against America in other sports. Small price to pay.

I wrote yesterday about how Team USA revolutionized the team pursuit by introducing the world to “bump drafting” ahead of the 2022 Olympics. Clearly, they debuted their discovery too early. Everybody else now uses the strategy, and Italy used bump drafting to crush Team USA for the gold. The Americans should have sat on their discovery for five years until, like, January.

Team USA did win Olympic bronze in 2022, silver in 2026, and a World Championship in 2025 with bump drafting. But this does feel a little like a Moneyball situation, when the Oakland A’s developed a paradigm-shifting strategy, but only squeezed a few ALDS appearances out of it before the rest of baseball caught up and closed their window to win a gold medalWorld Series.

Fourth place for Team USA here. Gotta be a real bummer to qualify for the semifinals of an Olympic event knowing you just have to win one of your remaining two races to get a medal … and then lose both.

That’s FOUR medals at these Olympics for Sturla Holm Lægreid. Gonna be honest: I’m a little disappointed he hasn’t made increasingly distraught pleas for his ex to take him back with every new trip to the podium. Like that one Robin Thicke album.

The other day, I asked why France is so good at biathlon if they’re not really into cross-country skiing. I just assumed they were good at the Gun part.

But in this race, France shot terribly — they were the only nation among the top six to miss so many shots that they had to take a penalty loop — and just skied so well that they won gold. They missed three more shots than Sweden and still beat them by a minute.

Which brings me to the next event …

I know this is going to be controversial, but I’m brave. I’m going to say it. I’m going to trash the least popular sport in the Olympics.

I’m over Nordic Combined.

This is Oftebro’s second gold of the Olympics. Basically, he’s just OK at the ski jumping part (fifth in the normal hill, seventh in the large hill) but clearly that doesn’t matter much. He’s better at cross-country skiing than everybody else, and the scoring is slanted towards the cross-country guys, so that’s enough to win.

As far as I can tell, this is just how the event works. The last time a Top 3 finisher in the ski jump won the gold medal in either of the two individual events was 2014.

How many different Olympic events do we need for People Who Are Good At Cross-Country Skiing? There’s cross-country skiing and shooting, but today the team that wasn’t even good at shooting won … and there’s cross-country skiing and ski jumping, but today the guy who wasn’t even good at ski jumping won …

The final ski race of the Olympics, and the one we’ve been waiting for.

Mikaela Shiffrin is the greatest slalom racer of all time. She’s won 71 career World Cup races, the most by any racer in any one ski racing discipline. She’s won six of seven World Cup slalom races this year, finishing second the only time she wasn’t on the top step. She has sealed the World Cup overall championship for this season even if she does not participate in any of the remaining races.

Shiffrin finished off the podium in the giant slalom last week, but that’s not her race. This is.

However: Shiffrin botched her slalom run in the Alpine combined event, and famously took a DNF in the slalom at the 2022 Olympics.

Today, we’ll see whether the GOAT in this event can keep it together for one more race.

The last, best chance for Jessie Diggins to win one more Olympic medal. As you may remember: Diggins famously won gold in this event in 2018.

Lets watch it again!

HE-EEERE COMES DIGGINS!

HERE COMES DIGGINS!

YES

YES

YES

YES

GOOOOLD!

This time, Diggins will be paired with Julia Kern. They’ve won multiple World Championship medals together — silver last year, and bronze in 2023.

One boost for Team USA is that each country can only submit one team. Sweden have already swept one podium and won seven of nine potential individual medals; you have to imagine they’d be able to take more two podium spots if they were allowed to.

Time for the knockout rounds! Team USA has outscored its opposition 16-5 in three wins so far; they’ve got a big rest advantage as Sweden just had to play yesterday afternoon against Latvia.

Klæbo goes for 5-for-5!

This is one of the biggest locks of the games; Norway has won back-to-back-to-back-to-back World Championships and Klæbo just seems unbeatable right now. He’s paired with the bronze medalist from the 10km freestyle, Einar Hedegart.

I really, really, really don’t think I can jinx this one. Really.

This is the event where they do LOTS of flippies and spinnies. Like even more flippies and spinnies than the Big Air.

Pretty much just flippies and spinnies tbh. No grabs or “butter” or anything like that. Much less philosophical debate. It’s basically Ski Diving.

The favorite is Kaila Kuhn, who hails from the very tippy-top of the Michigan mitten. She’s the reigning World Champion — here’s her winning jump. I think she did three flippies and three spinnies, but it’s easy to lose count.

American Red Gerard was a media darling after his shocking win in this event in 2018 — as a 17-year-old, he nearly overslept the event because of a late-night Netflix binge — but he finished fourth in 2022. He’s the back-to-back X Games champ, but he also almost failed to make it out the qualification round.

Surprisingly, Mark McMorris could be a contender here after a brutal crash in training for the big air competition left him with a concussion. He was cleared to compete Thursday and had the second-best qualifying score Sunday.

Sometimes the differences between men’s and women’s Olympic events feel so unnecessarily insulting. Like, the men go 7.5km in their relay and the women go 6km. Really? You think they can’t go an extra 1.5km?

I’m picking the Dutch.

The pressure is on Canada’s William Dandjinou, the best short track skater in the world this year, who has finished fourth and fifth in the first two short track finals. He’s won three of four World Tour 500m races this year …

And the fourth was won by American Andrew Heo. Probably a fluke — it’s his only career podium — but I’m keeping an eye on him, too.