After writing a recap for 18 NFL Sundays and the first 3 rounds of the NFL playoffs, my plan kinda assumed I was going to write a recap for the Super Bowl.

And then several thousand of you subscribed for daily Olympics updates and several hundred decided to pay me for Olympics updates. Plans changed. You have to give the people what they want, and clearly what you want is daily Olympics updates.

So I am going to do both. I am going to provide both a full recap of the Super Bowl and your usual ridiculously comprehensive daily Olympics newsletter. First, the Super Bowl.

The Seahawks kicked the Patriots’ asses.

There. That covers pretty much everything you need to know about The Big Game.

Now it’s time for the best Olympics daily writeup on the internet! Here’s the link to get it in your inbox for the rest of the Olympics and here’s the link to upgrade your free subscription to a paid one.

To be clear, there are absolutely no benefits to a paid subscription. You’re just making it possible for me to continue doing this. Without your support, I couldn’t dedicate three weeks of my life to increasingly unhinged coverage of these Olympics.

Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, and thanks for supporting!

– Rodger Sherman

I’ve seen posts the past few days joking about the difference between the Winter and the Summer Olympics. The summer games are about pleasant activities — swimming! running! playing games with your friends! — and the winter games have 11 separate terrifying ways to almost die hurling your body at maximum speed down an icy mountain.

Sunday, those jokes were proven a little bit more true than you’d hope. Lindsey Vonn’s attempt at competing just a week after tearing her ACL ended with another injury. Just a few seconds into the women’s downhill, Vonn violently crashed after flying through the air at top speed. She stayed down on the course for about 20 minutes, her screams of pain audible on the broadcast, and eventually needed to be air-lifted off the course via helicopter. Later on Sunday, she received surgery on a fracture in her left leg. Th

Plenty of people had the same thought: oh man, it was a really bad idea for her to race on her torn ACL. There are a lot of people out there very eager to literally add insult to Vonn’s injury by claiming she was selfish or foolish to keep trying to compete after her ACL tear

But if you watch what happened, you can see the crash actually wasn’t caused by her already-injured knee giving way. It was sort of a freak accident: Her pole happened to catch one of the gates on the course as she was flying by, whipping her body off balance. It’s possible her bum knee made her take a bad line that put her in that position — truthfully, only Vonn will ever know. But once she went flying off balance at 70 miles per hour, the world’s strongest ACLs couldn’t have saved her at that point.

I don’t think Vonn crashed Sunday because of her injury. I think Vonn crashed for the same reason she crashed last week, and for the same reason she crashed many other times in her career: It’s downhill skiing.

Of the various skiing events, downhill skiing is the fastest and most violent. The downhill is one of two events where the governing body of skiing has recently mandated that the skiers wear tiny little airbags in their chests. It’s a sport where they have a helicopter on standby for medical emergencies. It’s a sport where, every once in a while, someone good enough to compete or win at the Olympics or World Championships dies in training or competition. (Not often … but not never.)

Vonn’s career injury list is 20 years long and doesn’t fit in a single iPhone screenshot. She was one of two skiers airlifted off the course Sunday; Andorran skier Cande Moreno also had a horrible crash and ended up as a footnote in the stories about Vonn. The eventual winner of the race, Breezy Johnson, tore her ACL in a 2022 crash on this same course in Cortina D’Ampezzo and missed the 2022 Olympics. The eventual bronze medalist, Italian Sofia Goggia, has an “injuries” section of her Wikipedia page, including a fractured fibula at Cortina in 2022; she won silver at the 2018 Olympics after a partial ACL tear. Somebody made together a supercut of crashes and injuries on the Cortina course in last year’s World Cup downhill; it is eight minutes long.

When the cameras showed the crowd after Vonn’s injury, they were hushed and horrified. But when the cameras showed the other skiers in the competition, they were kinda just doing their business as usual — preparing for their runs, chatting with each other. That’s not because they’re heartless. It’s because they take part in a sport where this happens all the time. If they were thrown off their game every time one of their competitors tumbled out of control at 70 miles an hour, they’d have to quit the sport.

This year, the broadcast features footage from drones flying behind the athletes, rather than the stationary cameras that have long filmed these events. It might be the greatest addition to the broadcast of any Olympic event. It fully communicates the speed, the chaos — and the breathtaking terror — of what these athletes do:

I don’t know what motivated Vonn to come back. I don’t know what motivated her to keep going after her ACL tear. But I suspect it was pretty close to the same thing that motivates each one of these athletes every time they stare out of the starting gate at something that can kill them, and still decide to push forward.

🥇Breezy Johnson, 🇺🇸U-S-A! U-S-A!🇺🇸

🥈Emma Aicher, 🇩🇪Germany🇩🇪

🥉Sofia Goggia, 🇮🇹IItaly🇮🇹

First of all: It’s really not fair that Breezy Johnson’s gold medal got overshadowed by Vonn’s storyline and crash. And I’m participating in it by leading with Vonn and following up later with Johnson, so, apologies to Breezy.

But also: Is Breezy Johnson the clutchest athlete alive? She’s started 106 career World Cup races with zero victories … and yet, she’s won two World Championships and now an Olympic gold medal! I wrote about this last February when she won the downhill at Worlds — a treat for longtime Sports! readers — and she followed that up with a season where she never reached a podium in World Cup competition and then won the Olympics. Shoutout to Big Game Breezy!

🥇🇫🇷France🇫🇷

🥈🇮🇹Italy🇮🇹

🥉🇩🇪Germany🇩🇪

France won thanks to an incredibly clutch shooting performance from Julia Simon on the anchor leg — the only shooter on the team to hit all of their shots. A pretty solid way to re-earn her team’s trust after GETTING CONVICTED FOR STEALING HER TEAMMATE’S CREDIT CARD IN NOVEMBER.

🥇Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, 🇳🇴Norway🇳🇴

🥈Mathis Desloges, 🇫🇷France🇫🇷

🥉Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget, 🇳🇴Norway🇳🇴

One race into the Olympics, I am a convert to the Church of Klæbo. About 19.5 kilomters into this 20 kilometer race, the Norwegian superstar was in a pack of five or six skiers. Then he made his break, seemingly firing every muscle in his body simultaneously, taking two strides for every one his opponents were able to make.

He looked like he was on 1.5 speed. In a matter of moments, he’d put hundreds of feet in between him and his competition. After a stunning win in one of his lesser events, it really does feel like he has a shot at all six cross country golds in Italy.

🥇 Sander Eitrem, 🇳🇴Norway🇳🇴

🥈 Metoděj Jílek, 🇨🇿Czechia🇨🇿

🥉Riccardo Lorello🇮🇹Italy🇮🇹

Every four years, I think “maybe the United States, the richest and most sports-mad country in the world, can win more Winter Olympic gold medals than Norway, a nation with the population of South Carolina.”

And every four years I am wrong.

🥇 Max Langenhan 🇩🇪Germany🇩🇪

🥈 Jonas Müller, 🇦🇹Austria🇦🇹

🥉Dominik Fischnaller🇮🇹Italy🇮🇹

Langenhan set the track record on every single run in these Olympics — in fairness, the track had been out of commission for decades before these Olympics, but still pretty incredible to post the best time in each run and get better than your previous run in each run.

🥇Benjamin Karl, 🇦🇹Austria🇦🇹

🥈Kim Sang-kyum, 🇰🇷South Korea🇰🇷

🥉Tervel Zamfirov, 🇧🇬Bulgaria🇧🇬

Incredible lore with this event. The bronze medal match was so close that it came down to a photo finish, with Zamfirov juuuuuuuuuuust squeaking his pinky across the line before Slovenia’s Tim Mastnak. (Although I do have questions about the straightness of the line?)

Then Austria’s Benjamin Karl won to defend his 2022 gold medal. Karl is 40 years old and retiring after this race; by winning, he became the oldest Winter Olympic gold medalist ever. He immediately, meticulously removed each of his many layers of ski gear to flex for the camera:

🥇Zuzana Maděrová, 🇨🇿Czechia🇨🇿

🥈Sabine Payer, 🇦🇹Austria🇦🇹

🥉Lucia Dalmasso, 🇮🇹Italy🇮🇹

Big shock here as Czechia’s back-to-back gold medalist Ester Ledecka was knocked out in the quarterfinals … but, hey, another Czech snowboarder won!

Since its introduction at the 2014 Olympics, the figure skating team event had never been close. In fact, in all three of the first editions, the gold medal had already been clinched by the final routine.

But after seven skates this year, Team USA and Japan were tied, putting the entire event on a showdown between Ilia Malinin and Shun Sato. Sato had an exceptional skate, but Ilia Malinin is on another level. (I watched with my wife, who had never seen Malinin skate before; she screamed “WHAT THE F*#*!” when Malinin did his signature backflip and then laughed uncontrollably for like 30 seconds.)

Malinin outscored Sato and sealed the gold for Team USA despite a major fall on one of his earlier leaps.

But my favorite part of the American win wasn’t Malinin’s dramatic finish, nor was it the Chock-Bates team which had the highest score in both ice dance competitions. It was the pairs performance by Danny O’Shea and Ellie Kam, who finished fourth in their free skate.

This is the event in which Team USA’s Brittany Bowe holds the Olympic world record — and what do you know, I just made a video about her and her teammate Erin Jackson, who hail from the iceless, snowless town of Ocala, Florida. (Ocala not pictured in the thumbnail.)

Here’s that link to subscribe to the Sports! YouTube channel. I have another awesome Olympics video coming out this week!

TEAM USA MIXED DOUBLES CURLING IS IN THE SEMIFINALS! They’ll face Italy, who they lost to 7-6 in the round robin tournament very early Monday morning. They’re guaranteed a spot in one of the two medla games — gold If they win, bronze if they lose. (Great Britain plays Sweden in the other semi at the same time.)

For good mojo, wanted to show you this absolutely nuts triple hit by Korey Dropkin in the final end of Sunday’s match against Sweden.

DAMN that’s satisfying to watch. That’s not a curling stone, that’s a spiky shell from Mario Kart. You’re only supposed to get those when you’re in last place!