Between the IIHF World Championship and the Olympics, there have been 32 gold medal games to decide the best women’s hockey team in the world. All 32 have been won by Team USA or Team Canada.

Thirty of those 32 games have been matchups between Team USA and Team Canada. (At the 2006 Olympics, Sweden won the silver medal; at the 2019 Worlds, Finland won the silver.)

But it’s not enough to just say they play each other a lot. The difference between these two teams is thinner than the blades on their feet. Nineteen of the 32 gold medal games between these two countries have been decided by one goal.

Thirteen of the 32 gold medal matches between these two have gone to overtime, including the Worlds in 2011 and 2012, Olympics in 2014, Worlds in 2016 and 2017, Olympics in 2018, Worlds in 2021, 2024, and 2025, and now the Olympics in 2026. That’s 10 of the last 16 gold medal matches!

These are not just the two best teams: They are, for better or worse, the only two teams, locked in perma-battle. They are the only teams that ever win, and the only teams that have ever won.

And not only are they the two best teams: There is no clear 1-2 between them. They are the co-greatest, taking turns on top. Canada have won a few more golds (18 to 14), but neither team has ever dominated for an extended stretch of time, and the games are always close. (Canada did win four straight Olympic golds from 2006 to 2014, but they also lost seven of nine World Championships during that period.)

When the Olympics aren’t happening, the players on these teams are trying to build a better women’s hockey world together. The PWHL is in its third season, and it is dominated by players who you just watched in these Olympics. (Specifically, the Top 5 point-scorers in the league all played in this game.)

Other sports have great rivalries. How many of those rival teams are so close that opposing star players somewhat regularly fall in love and get married? Like, there are at least three married couples consisting of former Team USA and Team Canada women’s hockey players.

(And to think they made a gay hockey show about men’s players, for some reason.)

And as fun as it is to know that my team won this time, it’s easy to see each USA-Canada matchup as a celebration of their mutual greatness.

This is what it looks like when two teams live to play each other. This is what it looks like when two teams are perpetually locked in a battle to be the best. This is what it looks like when two teams keep forcing each other to get better and better and better and better.

Team USA and Team Canada are like two giant tectonic plates: They’ve been pushing up against each other for the last billion years, and will continue to do so for the next billion. And by ramming themselves into one another at full force, forever, they’re building a mountain range, forcing hockey higher and higher.

Quick Alysa Liu career summary. Liu was a skating prodigy, becoming the youngest-ever skater to win the US national championship at just 13 years old in 2019. (The winner of the junior championship that year was four years older than her.) At 14 years old, she won it again.

And at 16, she retired. She had started skating at five years old, it had taken over her life, and she no longer found it fun. She wanted to be a normal person. She went to college.

And then, in 2024, she came back — but only if she could have agency. A quote from a piece in The Athletic: “When Liu, 20, decided to return to skating after retiring at 16, she did so with conditions. She’d wear what she wants. Dance to the music she wants. Eat what she wants. Take breaks when she wants.”

In April, she won the World Championship following a flawless free skate to MacArthur Park. As she walked off the ice, microphones caught her muttering “how did I do that?” to herself. (I wrote about it last April — shoutout to anybody who has been reading this newsletter since then!)

Let’s talk MacArthur Park for a second. Everybody always skates to some melancholy strings or a medley from Moulin Rouge or a dramatic movie score. Liu skated to a 17-minute long Giorgio Moroder-produced disco song from 1978. (She didn’t skate to all 17 minutes — that’s illegal — but she did apparently listen to the entire song before deciding to go with it.)

(Technically, Giorgio Moroder’s involvement makes this ANOTHER win for Südtirol at these Olympics.)

Liu debuted a Lady Gaga routine for this season — but in January, she announced she was going back to MacArthur Park. That’s right folks — she found that recipe again.

(I already made that joke once but whatever. I’m having a great time.)

Skaters have been allowed to use music with lyrics since the 2014-15 figure skating season. Liu is the first women’s gold medalist to use music with lyrics. The winners in 2018 and 2022 both went classical.

Liu won the gold and cameras spent the next 20 minutes or so following her around, following this woman in the happiest moment of her life — cheesin’, goofin’, and just like last year, saying “holy shit!” over and over again. (Here’s a brief thread of Alysa Liu post-skate content.)

It was a sharp contrast from four years ago, at the 2022 Olympics. Then, too, cameras found the new gold medalist backstage. She was sitting all by herself, looking like the saddest girl in world history, with nobodyto comfort her besides a giant stuffed teddy bear.

The 2022 women’s figure skating competition at the Olympics is one of the few sporting events that can be accurately described as “haunting.” The heavy favorite, 15-year-old Russian Kamila Valieva, tested positive for banned substances she was almost certainly forced to take by the Russian figure skating machine. She cracked under the pressure, with a brutal performance that dropped her off the podium. Rather than comfort her, her coach berated her. (A 15-year old.) The gold medal winner, Scherbakova, said she felt “emptiness inside” after her victory. The silver medalist, Alexandra Trusova, was seen screaming and crying afterwards, yelling “I hate this sport!”

Four years ago, figure skating felt like a sport designed to break young girls. Valieva, Scherbakova, and Trusova had been pushed to extremes to win and make others happy. Clearly, they weren’t happy themselves.

With Alysa Liu’s win, it now looks like a sport where skaters can win by chasing joy, by choosing their own path.

At one point, somebody off-camera complimented Liu. She laughed and replied “thank you, I enjoyed my program a lot too.” So did we. What a concept!

The first day of Olympic SkiMo RULED! The races were exciting and the crowd was hyped. And most importantly for me, a Weird Sports fan: It was weird as hell!

Harrop was the heavy favorite in this race, but came in second because — and I am not making this up — she took too long switching between the various accessories required for the event.

OK, quick explanation: The race starts with uphill skiing, transitions to a “bootpacking” section in which the racers run up a long, steep flight of stairs with their skis strapped to their backs, then they ski uphill some more, and then finally they ski downhill.

This sequence means they have to do three equipment transitions: 1. Taking their skis off, 2. Putting their skis back on, and 3. Removing their “skins,” which are the grippy little strips on the bottom of their skis that give them enough traction to ski uphill and not slide backwards. (They also have to store the equipment properly at each transition point — strapping the skis to their backs, putting the skins in a big pouch, etc. — or face time penalties.)

The sport has notes of biathlon. Quickly removing items clearly takes coordination when your heart rate must be through the roof from sprinting up a hill with skis. The cold weather and heavy snow probably make it harder, too.

But it also felt like an Olympic version of Going Through TSA. Take your shoes off! Put them in a bin! Don’t take too long though, the guy behind you is getting antsy! OK, the metal detector guy is waving you through! Now put your laptop back in your backpack and put your shoes on and get going, your plane boards in 13 minutes and it’s all the way on the other side of the terminal, go go go go go!

So back to Harrop. Watch the race. Harrop was the fastest skier on the course, but her poor transition time absolutely cost her the gold!

In the final, Harrop’s transitions totaled 35 seconds, her worst performance in transitions of the day. The winner, Marianne Fatton, took just 24.7 seconds. Fatton won by fewer than three seconds, and won the transitions by more than 10.

Gonna be honest … the race felt a little bit too dependent on how quickly Harrop put on her skis. I wish the course had been a little bit longer, so that the best skiers had a bigger advantage.

But we’re definitely cooking here.

Also, some fun stories: American Anna Gibson made the semis despite literally picking up the sport last year; Spain’s Ana Alonso won the bronze despite getting hit by a car in October.

First winter gold medal for Spain since the 1978 Sapporo Olympics! In case you’re curious, that medal was in slalom skiing.

I had a pretty lengthy debate about what emoji to use for the International Neutral Athletes. I also considered: 😶, 🏳️, and 🤷.

Actually pretty thrilling?????? Norway and Finland battled down to the finish line in the snow. I’m back in on Nordic Combined. Don’t take this sport out of the Olympics, it’s good actually.

Bizarre moment, though, in the ski jump: One of the guys assigned to keep the jump clear of snow didn’t notice that American jumper Ben Loomis was already hurtling down the track, and actually hit Loomis with the leafblower as he prepared to jump through the air at 60 mph. Loomis was fine and actually decided not to take a redo after a solid jump.

A shocker! Stolz won every World Cup event at this distance this season! But he started poorly here and actually had to fight his way back onto the podium in the second half of the race.

Ning set an Olympic record at 1:42.98. Stolz posted a faster time than that just a few weeks ago, but different tracks have different speeds, so it’s not apples-to-apples.

Already covered the gold medal game, but wanted to give a quick shout to Switzerland for winning the bronze medal. (If Team USA and Canada are gonna win every gold and silver, we should celebrate the bronzes!)

It was the first Swiss medal since 2014, and it came on the back of goalie Andrea Brändli. The Swiss were outshot in every single knockout round game, but Brändli made 115 saves on 118 shots — a 97.4 save percentage! — and the Swiss beat Finland 1-0 in the quarters, lost 2-1 to Canada in the semis, and beat Sweden 2-1 in overtime to win the bronze. They gave tournament MVP to Team USA’s Caroline Harvey, but damn, it really might’ve been Brändli.

My goodness. The absolute roller coaster this USA women’s curling team has made me ride.

After a strong start, Team Peterson could’ve clinched a spot in the semis on Wednesday with a win over Great Britain. They had a lead and the hammer. They could have won by scoring. They could have won by simply Not Scoring. They could have gone into OT with the hammer by giving up a single point. Instead they gave up a steal of two, and lost. No clinch.

On Thursday they played Switzerland, again hoping to clinch a spot in the semis. They led by three in the last end … and gave up three points. They had a shot to win in an extra end, and nearly biffed that, too. Here’s how close it was:

The yellow rock is Team USA’s, and it was apparently closer than the two red rocks.

So Team USA won. And now they’ll play Switzerland. Again.

All this to say: I do not want to watch this game. It is going to come down to the last shot and something stupid is going to happen.

I can’t wait.

This should be more of a mismatch than the quarterfinals against Sweden — Slovakia only has five NHL players, most of whom are not particularly prominent.

But then again … Slovakia was the only team that actually looked good in their quarterfinal matchup, thumping Germany, 6-1. And they finished on top of their group after beating Finland.

Slovakia’s big star is Canadiens forward Juraj Slafkovský, the #1 pick in the 2022 NHL Draft, who leads the team with three goals and four assists.

Biathlon is easily the sport which I have had the largest appreciation increase over the course of the games. I legitimately enjoy watching it now!The tension when they start shooting is legit!

But we all know the real storyline: Whether Sturla Holm Lægreid can win his fifth Olympic medal in five events.

Hilary Knight won a gold medal immediately after proposing to Brittany Bowe. Can Brittany Bowe win a medal immediately after getting proposed to by Hilary Knight?

Pretty rare to find an event at the Olympics in which Team USA just straight-up doesn’t have a competitor!

Kinda caught me off-guard, tbh! Like, we have so many great ski racers, and nobody doing cool ski racing?

Brutal early-morning update here: The favorite, Finley Melville Ives, was stretchered off the course in qualifiers after suffering a huge crash. Melville Ives was the reigning World Champion and had won two of four World Cup events this season.

After medaling in several World Cup races this year, Team USA’s Stoddard wrote an absolutely brutal Instagram post the other day: “This whole experience has been incredibly unfortunate, and I feel embarrassed by how many times I’ve crashed, especially since I’m not an athlete who’s known for falling often. I also feel embarrassed by how much I’ve choked on the Olympic stage over and over again. This isn’t what I planned to show the world I was capable of.”

But Stoddard’s Olympics aren’t over. She’s medaled in this race before. And we’re rooting for her to get Team USA’s first medal in short track since 2018.

It’s The Chaos Race! Enjoy!