Team USA beat Italy 9-8 in the semifinals by scoring two rocks in the final end. The game-winning shot was set-up by this perfect double takeout by Korey Dropkin:

(“Double Takeout,” of course, is also the name of the stats site that says Dropkin and Thiesse are the best team in the world.)

The Italian team USA beat were the defending gold medalists and the reigning World Champions, and they were playing at home. (Literally — Stefania Constantini is from Cortina, home to the curling venue at these Olympics.) Unfortunately, Korey and Cory did not care their dreams of winning gold in front of your home fans!

That sets up Team USA with their matchup with Sweden in the gold medal game. It’s just the second time that an American curling team has gone to the gold medal game in any Olympic curling tournament — men’s, women’s, or mixed. The other one, of course, was also against Sweden in 2018 — and John Shuster’s team won the gold.

They’re playing against the Swedish doubles team of Rasmus and Isabella Wranå … which I will absolutely take. They knocked out the #1 seed, Great Britain, who beat Team USA earlier in the tournament.

These teams already met earlier in this tournament, and Team USA won 8-7 — but that’s only because they shook hands before a relatively easy shot that would’ve given the Americans two more points. It’s the game where Dropkin did this.

Dropkin is just unreal right now. He’s shooting 84.9 percent for the tournament; that’s the highest accuracy of any curler in any of the three mixed doubles tournaments in Olympic history. But I think that’s really underselling the difficulty level of some of the shots he’s hitting. You know what, I’m gonna include another link to that exact same shot against Sweden just to make sure you guys watch it.

Nothing more to say besides…

First of all, the medals are the most expensive of all time, so, fair dues there. However, this is mainly because the value of the gold and silver, which are skyrocketing rather than some miraculous craftsmanship. The gold and silver have thousands of dollars of metal in them. (The bronze has like, $7 bucks of metal in it. Not a joke!

But those medals keep falling to the ground right off the winners’ necks, because something is messed up with the ribbons. It keeps happening! This video from the AP shows Breezy Johnson talking about how hers fell apart minutes after she won it:

And the German biathlon team literally posted the video of theirs falling off doing mild celebratory jumping:

To ber clear: The medals themselves are not breaking, just the crappy ribbons. But it still makes it tough for the winners to actually wear the medals around their necks, which is what you’re supposed to do with medals.

The Milano-Cortina hosting committee says they’re paying “maximum attention” to the situation, which seems like overkill — just buy less crappy ribbons and slap them on there! Every other Olympics ever has done this just fine!

After Sunday’s team event in figure skating, there were complaints about the surface of the podium, which dulled the blades of the medal-winners’ skates. The skaters were on the podiums for several minutes, which is a really long time, considering you always see skaters put on blade-guards immediately as they get off the ice. Skaters from all three countries seemed to notice the issue immediately, with Italian ice dancer Marco Fabbri saying “as soon as we we stepped down (onto the ice) everyone was like, ‘I cannot move anymore, I cannot slide anymore.’” Japan filed a formal complaint over the incident.

This is, apparently, a much bigger issue than non-skaters realize. Skates take a long time to break in and skaters try to wear the same pair for a whole season.

The hosting committee has acknowledged the issue with the “anti-slip surface of the podium” and promised to make a skate-sharpening service available to the skaters.

However, the damage may have already been done. After the event, figure skating journalist Jackie Wong (who has been all over this story) said the people most affected would be the ice dancers, who would have to skate again Monday after the podium incident on Sunday.

And then, there was a major surprise in Monday’s ice dancing. Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who have dominated the sport over the last four years and won back-to-back-to-back World Championships, finished second in the rhythm dance.

In their skate last week in the team event, Chock and Bates received the highest score of any pair in any rhythm dance all season long; however, when they skated a day after the podium incident, they suffered a surprise downgrade on one pattern step. although ice dancing experts were left confused as to why, exactly, the judges issued the downgrade happened.

They’re behind France’s Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry … whose French team failed to qualify for the finals of the team figure skating event, and therefore didn’t have the same podium-caused skate sharpness issue. (There are, uh, some reasons you should root against Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry.) The gap between the two teams is small, but it could be the difference; we’ll find out after the free skate on Wednesday.

First off: We are talking about ice dance. Picture Olympic figure skating, a spectacle that combines grace, beauty and power. None of that here! There are no jumps and no throws — just ballroom dancing, but with ice skates on. The Figure Skating Internet talks about ice dancing like it’s their disgusting uncle with terrible politics who they have to see at every family event and would love to never see again but he’s a part of the family and there’s nothing they can do about it.

While the other forms of figure skating have a short program and a free skate, ice dancing has a “rhythm dance” and a free skate. The rhythm dance has mandatory step patterns and dance moves which the skaters must use, and every year, a new theme is selected by the International Skating Union.

For example: In the 2017-2018 season leading up to the Pyeongchang Olympics,the theme was “Latin American rhythms” that led to the usage of samba, rhumba, and cha cha.

This year’s theme: “THE MUSIC, DANCE STYLES, AND FEELING OF THE 1990S.”

I wrote down a list of some of the 1990s songs people danced to on Monday:

That’s right. Three separate Ricky Martin routines.

Anyway: These requirements have caused PROBLEMS. Here’s a video from British ice dancer Phebe Bekker explaining the issues with the 90s music selection process more broadly. (She wanted Oasis — very British of her — but the song had to be “upbeat.”)

The requirement that skaters use songs from the 1990s has led to copyright issues — rarely a problem when dancing to classical music or more generic ballroom dancing. Canada’s husband and wife pair of Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac couldn’t clear the copyrights to their Prince routine, and changed to the song “Sex Bomb” by Tom Jones in the last week before the Olympics. “Prince has grit and confidence, and that brought us here,” Lauriault said. “Tom Jones and Prince are not the same vibe!”

And if you try to skate to a song from 1989 — like Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry did when they picked “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode — the ISU will fact-check you. They thought they were good because the song came out on an album in 1990 but the single itself was released in 1990.

BUT! Even though using a song from 1989 is not OK, it’s actually fine to use a song generated by AI “in the style of the 1990s.” To be clear: A song popular in 1990 that was actually released in late 1989 is not 90s music even if it was stylistically influential in the 1990s, but a song spit out by AI in 2025 is totally fine.

Only one Olympic pair, the Czech brother-sister pair of Daniel Mrázek and Katerina Mrázeková, skated to AI music. But they ran into a problem — the first time they asked AI to spit out a 1990s song, it plagiarized the lyrics to an actual awesome 1990s song, “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals. (A true banger, maybe my favorite 1990s song, tbh.) The video is STUNNING, I have no idea how they thought they could get away with it. For the Olympics, they swapped that one out for a new AI song, which also sucks but isn’t directly stolen from anybody.

You can kinda see why the figure skating people thought AI music was a good idea — if you merely want to replicate “the style of the 1990s” and want the song to have 120 beats per minute with upbeat feel and no explicit lyrics, without any of those pesky copyright concerns, why not just plug that into a computer?

But the actual fun thing here is watching these dancers take songs we love and be creative with them. We do not love these AI songs, because we have never heard them, and AI can never be creative, because it is just a computer taking things humans have made and splicing them together. Get it the hell out of our human sports!

Possibly the biggest upset in the Olympics. Raimund had zero wins in 80 career World Cup starts, ranking 30th, 20th, and 24th in the World Cup standings over the last three seasons. And then there’s the fact that …

… Raimund actually withdrew from a ski flying event in Slovenia last March citing acrophobia. “As some of you may know, I am scared of heights,” Raimund posted on Instagram. “I usually have it under controll, and it usually isn't a Problem while ski jumping, but from time to time, I have the issue (mainly while ski flying) that my body is reacting without me controlling it.”

HE IS SCARED OF HEIGHTS.

THE OLYMPIC SKI JUMPING CHAMPION.

IS SCARED OF HEIGHTS.

The Olympics are so good, man.

Sounding the CORRECT PREDICTION FROM RODGER siren. I told you our boy Franjo would win this!

(I’m not gonna start actually posting predictions because I am wrong about most of them.)

That’s right — two silvers!

You can, in fact, tie for Olympic medals, although it didn’t happen in any of the 109 events at the 2022 Olympics. Here’s a Wikipedia page with every tied Olympic medal ever.

I don’t know why this is so funny to me, but I can’t get over all the silver medalists crowded together on a medal stand built for just two skiers. Look at that foot hanging off the edge of the podium.

As you can see, there was also a tie for bronze in the ski jumping event. (Zero ties in any events in the entire 2022 Olympics, and two on Monday in five events. Wild!) Hoping they gave the bronzes that were supposed to be given out in the alpine event to one of the bronze boys in the ski jumping.

Three events so far, and three Olympic records in speed skating. And two of the silver medalists finished highly enough to set Olympic records, too!

Leerdam is engaged to Jake Paul! No further comment here, just letting you know facts about the Olympics!

These will be the only world/Olympic records set in these Olympics, btw — all the skiing and bobsled and luge tracks are different from other tracks across the world so you can’t really set “world records” in those sports.

Yes, that’s really her last name.

Side note, every Olympian is asked to record the preferred pronunciation of their name for the Olympics website and American skier Mary Bocock cracked up while doing hers.

A near-exact replica of the 2022 slopestyle final: Four years ago, Gremaud squeaked past Gu for gold, winning with a score of 86.56 as opposed to Gu’s 86.23. This time, Gremaud scored 86.96 to Gu’s 86.58.

Close score, but not particularly dramatic. Gu had two chances to beat Gremaud, and fell on the first and slipped on the rail on her second.

That allowed Gremaud to do a victory lap with the Swiss flag draped around her neck, which has to feel like the coolest thing in the world.

You know what absolutely rips? When someone stomps the best trick of the competition on their final run and wins the gold medal. That’s what Murase did here — bummer for Sadowski-Synnott, who has taken bronze, silver, and silver in the last three Olympics.

HUGE medal chance for Team USA. We’ve got Mikaela Shiffrin, skiing for the first time in Cortina, paired up with Breezy Johnson, who just won the downhill gold medal. They also won the world championship last year.

Honestly it wouldn’t be shocking for Team USA to take gold and another medal here. Jackie Wiles finished just off the podium in downhill and her partner, Paula Moltzan, is sixth in the current World Cup standings.

The downhill run already happened by the time I sent out this email, and Johnson left Shiffrin in first place. She’s the best in the world and she’s got a head start. Lock it in.

Another big medal chance for Team USA!

Alex Hall is trying to defend his 2022 Olympic gold while Mac Forehand won silver at last year’s World Championships. (The existence of a skier named Mac Forehand implies the existence of a tennis player named Steve Switch Triple Cork 1980 Mute Grab.)

BUT! Norway’s Birk Ruud is the back-to-back world champion.

Simply put we cannot let Birk Ruud win this. Norway runs up the gold medal count in sports like cross country and biathlon. WE CAN’T LET THEM GET A FREESTYLE SKIING GOLD. We must defend Cool Tricks genre of Olympic sports since we have no shot in the Enduring Non-Stop Pain In The Cold events against Norway.

LET’S GOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! (Already wrote about this.

Do I need to say anything? It’s time for the KLÆBO SHOW!!!!! (I don’t know whether this rhymes in Norwegian.)

Klæbo is expected to win everything in Milano-Cortina, but the sprint is his event — he’s won back-to-back-to-back-to-back world championships and 23 of his last 24 sprint races. (Possible I lost count somewhere in there.)

Germany has won six straight gold medals in the women’s luge and they’re gonna do it again. Julia Taubitz and Merle Frebel are in first and second after the first two runs with a healthy lead on everybody else.

OK look. I used Sunday’s newsletter to tell you that Slovenia’s Nika Prevc was gonna dominate and she got silver. Then I used Monday’s newsletter to tell you her brother, Domen Prevc, was going to dominate the men’s competition, but he finished sixth.

It stands to reason that a team with Prevc and Prevc should dominate this but I’m DONE hyping up this Slovenian ski jumping family. Apologies to Luka Doncic, Tadej Pogacar, and Janja Garnbret.

NOT a medal event — we’re still in the prelims, and both teams are guaranteed slots in the medal round.

But you’ve gotta watch it when the USA plays Canada in women’s hockey. They’ve played in six of seven gold medal matches at the Olympics and 23 of 24 world championship gold medal games.