the fourth cross-country skiing medal in American history

the third curling medal in American history

the third luge medal in American history

Do not question Mikaela Shiffrin’s credentials. She’s the greatest slalom skier of all time. She’s won the most World Cup events of any skier ever, male or female; including 68 in the slalom specifically, the most of any skier, male or female, in any single event. She has 15 World Championship medals, the most of any skier ever, male or female.

And she has been absolutely dominant this year. In the slalom, she’s won seven of eight World Cup races, with a lone second-place finish in January in Slovenia. She’s already secured the season title in the slalom with multiple events to go, like a soccer team 15 points clear at the top of the table.

In last year’s World Championships, Johnson finished fourth in the downhill, giving Shiffrin a .51-second gap to make up. She did it easily, and Team USA won gold.

And then … this. Of 18 finishers in the event, Shiffrin had the 15th-fastest time.

I looked it up. Shiffrin hasn’t finished 15th in a slalom race since March 17, 2012. (You have to clock “show more” at the bottom of this page to scroll down that far.)

It felt like Shiffrin was skiing tentatively, trying to avoid the DNFs from Beijing, but now I’m getting into armchair psychoanalysis.

But the trend here is hard to ignore. At the World Championships, Shiffrin has won 15 medals (including eight golds) in 18 total events. That’s an 80 percent medal rate! But at the Olympics, she’s won three medals in nine total events. That’s … worse. 'And this one should’ve been a layup.

I don’t know what to do about this. I want to tell everybody how freakin’ good Mikaela Shiffrin is at skiing — but even doing that feels like a damning indictment of her failure to perform in the Olympics.

Shiffrin still has her two individual events remaining — the giant slalom on the 15th, and her signature event, the slalom, on the 18th. Hopefully she sorts out her Olympic yips before then.

After winning a bronze medal in the biathlon, Norway’s Sturla Holm Lægreid swerved, totally unprompted, into a wild personal confession during an interview with Norway’s NRK. He said that he’d cheated on his girlfriend three months earlier, that he’d told her a week ago and she’d left him for it, and that this was the worst week of his life and that he was hoping “committing social suicide” in the biggest moment of his life could win her back.

Here’s the original interview in Norwegian, although it’s probably going to get taken down at some point for copyright reasons:

Weirdly, Lægreid elaborated that he met this woman six months ago and cheated on her three months later. IDK man! Maybe make it to a year before doing this.

Lægreid seems to have a reputation as an attention-seeker — one post I saw referred to him as a “famously messy biathlete” even before the incident. Two years ago, he was suspended for firing his biathlon rifle inside his hotel. He has bragged about his personal intelligence and shortly before the Olympics, publicly took an IQ test to prove it, something he mentioned in response to the cheating incident: “I may be in MENSA, but I do stupid things.”

In the movies, this comes across as a grand romantic gesture. In real life, it’s humiliating to tell the whole world you cheated on someone, and manipulative to use public pressure to make them seem like the bad guy for not taking you back. He’s like the final boss of guys who propose to their girlfriends on the jumbotron at sporting events.

(Especially in an era when men online love to sleuth out women who they feel have wronged their fellow men and doxx them and send them death threats.)

But let me tell you what really bothers me about this incident: The winner of this race, Johan-Olaf Botn, is Lægreid’s Norwegian teammate, and sort of came out of nowhere to win this gold — he’s 26, and had never won on the World Cup circuit before this season. And the story of his victory is much, much more moving than anything Lægreid had to offer.

Botn’s training partner and close friend, Sivert Bakken, unexpectedly died about six weeks ago. Botn, a 26-year old who had never won a World Cup event before this season, was clearly emotional about winning the gold so soon after his friend’s death. He pointed to the sky while crossing the finish line and while on the medal podium, paying tribute to his late friend. “When I crossed the line I broke down,” Botn said. “I was thinking about him all the way through the last lap. I started to think about the whole year and us training every day for this. It had been such a clear goal for us. I felt that he was with me that whole lap. I hope he was watching today.”

And instead of talking about the guy who won gold and his beautiful tribute to his late friend, we’re talking about Mr. I Fell In Love With A Girl I Just Met But Not Enough To Avoid Cheating On Her.

During the post-race press-conference, Lægreid turned to his gold-winning teammate and apologized for taking his spotlight. “Of course, now I hope I didn’t ruin Johan’s day,” Lægreid said. “Maybe it was really selfish of me to give that interview. So yeah, I don’t know. I was, I’m a bit, I don’t know … I’m not really here mentally,” later saying that “I hope this is just a day-or-two long thing and then your Olympic gold medal is forever.” It’s almost like this dude has a problem with figuring out who he should be prioritizing in certain moments!

That’s Isabella Wranå, the Swedish sweeping glasses assassin. I’m gonna have nightmares about her.

Wranå was absolutely lights-out in Sweden’s gold medal win over Team USA’s Cory-Korey squad. She shot 97 percent for the game. I don’t want to get too deep into explaining how the curling accuracy stat works, but it basically means that almost every shot she took accomplished exactly what it was supposed to do.

Time and time again, Team USA left her in a position to make where she needed to make a near-perfect shot with the final stone of the end, and she came through every single time. She hit the game-winning shot to flip a 5-4 USA lead into a 6-5 Swedish win, although it was one of her easiest shots of the game.

This Swedish team ran hot and cold. Earlier in the tournament, they became the first team in Olympic history to be totally shut out, losing 9-0 to Norway. Then the next game they set the Olympic scoring record by beating Switzerland 13-7.

Much respect to our American heroes, Cory and Korey. The near-perfect shotmaking from Korey Dropkin ran out at the end — he had some bad misses in the gold medal match — but what a run. I wouldn’t be surprised if this team is favorite of these games when all is said and done.

Oh, yeah btw Team USA won bronze in this event after Mikaela Shiffrin dropped off the podium. Yes I am part of the problem for focusing on an athlete failing instead of these athletes succeeding.

The most remarkable performance of the day came from Aicher, who won a silver medal on Sunday in the downhill and then silver in this event. What’s incredible about that? Aicher skied the slalom in this event, not the downhill.

That means Germany’s coaches turned to the skier who just had the second-best time in the downhill and picked somebody else to ski the downhill instead … and it was the correct call. Aicher posted the best time of any skier on the slalom.

You’re really not supposed to be good at both, which the whole point of creating this Olympic event allowing countries to pair specialists in each one. But Aicher could’ve won as a team all by herself.

That’s two gold medals for Klæbo, who has made cross-country a must-watch event. Look at this freak:

But more importantly: SILVER MEDAL FOR TEAM USA!

It’s just the fifth cross-country medal in American Olympic history, and the first by a man since 1976, when Bill Koch took silver in the 30km, an event that no longer exists.

Incidentally, they’re both from Vermont and Ogden grew up racing in a youth ski league named after Koch — someday, there’ll be a kid from the Ben Ogden Ski League.

Ogden is a knitter — “my needles are waiting,” he said after winning silver — and a 3-time NCAA champion for at the University of Vermont. That makes him one of TWO UVM alumni to win medals today — Paula Moltzan also skied for the Catamounts.

OGDEN! HIT THAT ONE FROM THE PARKING LOT! (We gotta get Gus Johnson on the call for the Olympics someday.)

FIVE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

…really, FIVE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Really! FIVE!

Sure, Team USA had won its first first three games by similar scorelines — they’d outscored their opponents 15-1, with the one goal coming on a flukey breakaway where a Czech skater came out of the penalty box at the exact time her team got the puck.

But this was Canada. The defending gold medalists. The team that went to overtime with Team USA at last year’s World Championships. When these teams play, it’s supposed to be close — the 2014 gold medal game went to overtime; the 2018 game went to a shootout.

FIVE?!?!?!?!?!! Five To NOTHING?!?!?!?!

Canada was without its captain and arguably best player, Marie-Philip Poulin, the reigning PWHL MVP and the points scorer at last year’s World Championships. It’s a big loss … but FIVE?!?!?!?!?!

It’s possible Canada is just cooked. They lost all four matchups in last year’s Rivalry Series by a combined score of 24 to 7, including a shocking 10-4 win by Team USA.

But it’s also possible Canada pulls out the gold anyway. The rivalry series is fun, but it’s just exhibitions, and this game counted for next to nothing with both teams through to the quarterfinals. Don’t sleep on Canada until the medal is around Team USA’s necks.

Team USA gets the #1 seed heading into the knockout round, which means they play Italy, the hosts who massively outplayed expectations to make it this far. Feel-good story! Time to die!

GET IN LUGERS! WE’RE GOING MEDALING! Farquharson’s medal is just the third luge medal in American history, all since 2014.

Here’s Farquharson’s bronze-winning run — electric stuff. After a slow start, she kept picking up speed and immediately burst into tears after crossing the line in podium position:

Farquharson only has two career World Cup podium appearances, on the two American home tracks in Lake Placid and Park City, so it’s definitely a shock to see her podium at the Olympics.

A spot on the podium opened up because of one bad run by Germany’s Merle Fräbel, who had either the best or second-best time on three of four runs — and hit the wall twice on the other one, enough to drop her into eighth place.

A Swedish sweep! Ahhhhhhhhhhh I just had curling flashbacks again. Man.

Podium sweeps are surprisingly common at the Winter Olympics, where a small number of countries like this can totally dominate sports. There were a total of four Summer Olympic podium sweeps in the last 2016, 2020, and 2024 Olympics combined out of almost 1,000 total events; meanwhile, there were eight podium sweeps in the 2014 Winter Olympics alone.

ANOTHER gold for Italy! The hosts are up to 11 total medals, as many as they won at the entire 2006 Olympics, with well over half the Olympics to go.

A key member of the winning team was the iconic Arianna Fontana, who medaled at her sixth Olympics. She launched her career with a bronze medal at the 2006 games in Torino at just 15 years old. Fontana has won medals at every games since, and at every short track distance.

Most think Fontana will retire after these Olympics although she hasn’t announced it — but first, she’ll race in the 500m and the women’s 3000m relay. One more medal and she’ll tie legendary fencer Edoardo Mangiarotti as the most decorated Italian in Olympic history.

Ilia Malinin has the high score after his short program in the men’s figure skating and is surely the favorite to win gold, considering he outscored everybody in the team event after falling …

But the moment of the night surely goes to the Olympic debut of his teammate, Maxim Naumov. Naumov lost both of his parents last January in the plane crash over the Potomac which killed dozens of members of the American figure skating community.

The routine was a tribute to his parents, the 1994 World Champions in pairs skating. He held up a childhood picture of himself with his parents after leaving the ice.

Naumov seemed likely to finish just outside the Olympic spots headed into the 2025-26 season, and had talked to his parents about how to fulfill his goal of making the Olympics shortly before their crash. Somehow, he did it.

I have no idea how he did it. I can barely type about this without breaking down. I can’t imagine how he’s walking and eating, let alone skating and competing among the best in the world. No matter where he finishes, it’s an incredible story of resilience.

It’s Jordan Stolz time!!!!

I wrote about Stolz in my Olympic Primer. He’s a potential speedskating GOAT. He could win four gold medals for Team USA in Italy…

But the 1,000m is his best event. He holds the world record and has won gold at 13 consecutive World Cup events. He hasn’t been defeated in the 1,000 since November, 2023, when he won bronze instead of gold.

How does he do it? Pizza. You too can eat the Jordan Stolz diet.

The American husband-and-wife pair of Madison Chock and Evan Bates have won back-to-back-to-back World Championships, but…

… they’re trailing the deeply problematic French pairing of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron by 0.46 points headed into the free skate.

It’s less than a point, and it’s totally possible for Chock and Bates to make it up. However, Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry have a higher season-best score (135.50) than Chock and Bates (133.23) so if both pairs skate their best, France will win.

Nordic Combined is a combination of ski jumping and cross-country skiing. It’s basically just stat-padding for Norway to get more Winter Olympic gold medals.

I’m joking but it’s literally named “the Nordic Combined.”

Nordic Combined is the last Winter Olympic sport without female athletes, which probably gives you the ick …

BUT! American Nordic Combined athlete Annika Malacinski has been urging people to watch the event anyway. “I get so upset when people comment on my posts saying, ‘Let’s boycott the men,’ because it’s the complete opposite,” Annika said. “We need people to be talking about Nordic combined and to be watching it.” If nobody watches, the IOC will be more likely to cancel the men’s events than add the women’s events in 2030 and beyond.

Yes, this is the sport where two people lie on top of each other.

(There is a little seat on there, to be clear. I asked Ken Childs about it.)

The dominant team here is Germany’s “Two Tobis” sled of Tobias Arlt and Tobias Wendl, who have won back-to-back-to-back Olympic gold medals although, oddly, they haven’t won a World Championship since 2016.

Historically, doubles luge has only been for men. However …

This is the first Olympics with women’s doubles luge!!!!

THAT’S RIGHT! WOMEN CAN NOW LIE ON TOP OF EACH OTHER WHILE HURTLING DOWN AN ICY TRACK OF DEATH AT 80 MILES PER HOUR TOO! GENDER EQUALITY FTW!!!!!!

This was actually the last thing. The two genders are now fully equal. Congratulations to women!

Despite our relative lack of luge success, this new event could be a medal opportunity for Team USA. The team of Chevonne Forgan and Sophia Kirkby won bronze at the 2022 and 2024 world championships and are currently fifth in the World Cup standings.

It’s the women’s event so I think we’re probably clear on any of the medalists grabbing a microphone to messily confess adultery on international TV.

Bumps and Jumps!

The favorite for gold is Australia’s Jakara Anthony, who won gold in 2022 and will (obviously!) be Australia’s most decorated Winter Olympian if she wins again. She only recently returned from a collarbone injury that caused her to miss almost a year … but she’s won four events in a row since coming back