Diggins is the greatest American cross-country skier of all time, easily. The United States has a total of six Olympic cross-country medals all-time; Diggins has four of them, including the only gold, which she won in a spectacular comeback in the final moments of the 2018 team sprint event.

Diggins announced that this is her final season, and it looked like she had a decent chance at gold heading into Italy. She was leading the overall World Cup standings and won the Tour de Ski, a major cross-country series that quite frankly should get sued over its logo.

But in the first race of the Olympics, Diggins got caught up in a crash. She bruised her ribs. No broken bones, no torn ligaments, but the injury made breathing hurt.

It made BREATHING hurt. BREATHING.

Breathing is important in most sports. Including cross-country skiing.

She also said the injury has given her trouble sleeping, with “things clicking in and out.”

Thursday’s 10k freestyle was her best chance at a medal. It’s the event in which she won the World Championship in 2023. Breathing was going to hurt, but, well, whatever.

Even if you’re not a cross-country expert, you can watch the videos of her race and tell that something is off. Her form is labored. In the final meters, she looks drained of energy, and she flings her body at the finish line.

After crossing the line, she collapses — common for cross-country, and essentially standard for Diggins. But this time it looks worse than usual. She is holding her chest. Her pained scream-breaths are audible on the broadcast, sounding like a wounded animal. “I thought I was going to pass out … It would’ve been nicer if I could’ve passed out,” she later said with a smile.

Somehow, despite the poor form, despite all the pain, she came in third. Diggins told press she didn’t even realize she’d medaled. “I had no idea what place I was in at the finish, and I really didn’t care.”

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked the NBC play-by-play guy, dramatically.

His broadcast partner, Kikkan Randall, who won gold in the team sprint with Diggins in 2018, responded matter-of-factly: “We’ve seen performances like this from Jessie. Many times.”

Diggins still has a few races to go in these Olympics. She might even win another medal. (The team sprint is probably her best chance.) But it’ll be hard to find a more perfect Jessie Diggins performance than this one.

I was blown away by this win by 17-year old Choi Ga-On, who came back from a brutal crash to take down one of the biggest stars of the Olympics.

On her first run, she fell hard. Remember: the halfpipe is 20 feet tall, the snowboarders are getting 10 feet of elevation off the top, and the bottom is hard-packed snow that feels like frozen stone.

Choi stayed down for minutes after her first crash. Before her second run, the announcers actually told the audience that Choi had backed out of the competition due to her injury.

But Choi has gotten up before. After becoming the youngest-ever X Games winner in 2023 at just 14 years old, she broke her back in 2024, missing the entire year of competition.

And after her first fall, she got a pep talk from her mentor: Chloe Kim.

And then she got back out there and threw down a gold-winning run, hitting the same tricks that she crashed on earlier. “You got this,” Kim said she told Choi. “You’re a badass snowboarder.”

To an outsider, Choi’s win seemingly ruined one of the big storylines of the Olympics. Kim is an American media darling who was expected to win her third straight gold medal, which would have made her the first back-to-back-to-back snowboarding gold medalist ever.

But you know who didn’t seem mad about this at all? Chloe Kim, who ran over to celebrate with Choi immediately after falling and failing to pass Choi on her final run. Kim called Choi “a spitting image of me,” and now they’ve both won gold medals at 17 years old.

And hey — not bad for Kim, who suffered a shoulder injury in December and hadn’t competed in months. ““I’m here walking away with my third medal,” Kim said, per The Athletic story linked above. “What the hell? This is so sick.”

Francesca did it again! Two gold medals for Lollobrigida! From a country with only two speed skating golds in their Olympic history! Didn’t see her adorable toddler this time, though.

Italy is now up to six gold medals and 17 total in their home Olympics. Their all-time national record is seven golds and 20 total, from the 1994 Lillehammer games. They might hit those numbers by the end of the first week!

I picked the wrong Italian yesterday! Federica Brignone won by .41 seconds, which is a huge margin in a race like this.

17 of 43 athletes didn’t finish the course. One notable thing about the Super-G is that unlike the downhill, athletes don’t get training runs. They just go out there and throw their bodies down a mountain.

One of the people who didn’t finish: Breezy Johnson … whose boyfriend-now-fiancé proposed to her after the race! Johnson apparently hinted that she wanted to get engaged at the Olympics, so good call by the BF to propose after her crash (cute, shows you’ll be there at each other’s lowest) rather than after her gold medal (cringe, stealing her spotlight.)

Alright folks … you know what time it is …

🗣️ IT’S TIME TO GET MAD ABOUT THE DETAILS OF A SPORT I’VE NEVER REALLY THOUGHT ABOUT BEFORE

Moguls is the event in which you ski down a really bumpy slope and do some tricks. This makes scoring complicated. It’s unlike the other freestyle ski events, which are entirely based on the tricks you do. Your score takes into account style, speed, and overall skill.

Specifically: 20 percent of the score is your time, 20 percent is your tricks, and 60 percent is “turns” — how skillfully and gracefully you handled the bumps, as decided by the judges.

Despite this complicated scoring system, which grades down to hundredths of a point, there was a tie for the gold medal. Kingsbury and Woods both scored 83.71.

As we quickly found out, there’s a tiebreaker: The gold went to Woods because he had the higher score on turns.

I think this is dumb! You could have the skiers go again — the heats are only about 30 seconds long, and they’re already doing four of them in two days, so why not do one more to sort it out — or you could split the medal, which already happens in many other Olympic sports as we talked about the other day.

And if you need a tiebreaker, why use a category that you’re already weighting heavily! I think I’d be more impressed by a skier who can do huge jumps and impressive tricks while maintaining a fast time and great form — make that category the tiebreaker!

You’re probably thinking: OK, even if we disagree with the rules, tiebreakers are probably pretty rare. What are the odds that an event with a majorly complicated scoring system graded down to hundredths of a point would come down to a tiebreaker …

BUT IT ALSO HAPPENED IN THE WOMEN’S MOGULS.

And that one was much more heartbreaking. The tie was for bronze, not gold. France’s Perrine Laffont and Japan’s Hinako Tomitaka both scored a 78.00, but Laffont got the bronze on the tiebreak while Tomitaka got nothing and broke down in tears afterwards. "It's the first time my position was decided this way, but I've seen it happen to other competitors. I never thought it'd happen to me," said Tomitaka. "Thinking I could have gotten onto the podium by finishing 0.1 second faster, I feel it's really close … but the difference between finishing fourth and third is massive."

The men’s moguls result was at least a happier story. Woods beating Kingsbury is a huge upset, one of the biggest of the Olympics. The Québécois Kingsbury has nine World Championships and won gold in Pyeongchang; meanwhile Woods had just one career podium in 77 career World Cup starts, and is now an Olympic gold medalist.

Preposterously enjoyable event. My one complaint might be that the races are actually TOO close, and that every single race ends with a photo finish — you can zone out for the first 90 seconds of the race and then just look up and see who sticks their board across the line first.

Hämmerle and Grondin are repeat gold-and-silver medalists from 2022, which is wild, because this sport seems like a total crapshoot.

People are upset about American Nathan Pare getting disqualified after seemingly winning his semifinal heat, and … I dunno man, he kinda just ski-tackled a guy? The Athletic noted all six event judges unanimously voted for his disqualification, so it’s not a French Judge situation.

Yeah, Germany won. It’s their fourth straight gold medal in this event.

One more rundown of Italy’s luge roster: Verena Hofer, Emanuel Rieder, Simon Kainzwaldner, Dominik Fischnaller, Andrea Vötter, and Marion Oberhofer.

Again I’d like to say that I think that this is good and that I do NOT endorse the re-commencement of World War I, for this or any other reason. In fact, if for any reason, I encounter ANY archdukes, I will go to great lengths to AVOID killing them.

That said: What an electric event:

Velzeboer led from wire-to-wire — rare in short track racing, a sport in which there’s a lot of jostling and drafting.

But the result was expected. Velzeboer actually set the Olympic record in the quarters, then broke it and set the world record in the semis.

Another medal for the Italian legend Arianna Fontana. That brings her to 13 all-time, tying her for the most by an Italian Olympian, and the third-most by a Winter Olympian from any nation.

I talked about Fontana the other day, but I think I undersold how incredible she is. Fontana is going to bookend her career with medals at two Olympics in her home country, first in Torino in 2006 and now in Milano in 2026. She still has two more medal chances (the 1,000m and the women’s relay) so let’s see how high those numbers go.

Two very different short-track races, both finishing with the Netherlands on top. In this one, Canada’s William Dandjinou led basically the entire race, but got caught in the final moments, and Van ‘t Wout got his skate across the line first.

Cameras caught van ‘t Wout yelling WHAT THE FUCK after his win.

I might do a deep dive on this later, but something interesting going on here: The Netherlands historically prefers the long track to the short track in speed skating. They’re the most dominant long-track speed skating country of all time with 133 medals, and no other country has more than 75, but the nation had never won a short-track medal until 2014.

The old dynamic appears to have totally flipped: The Dutch have just one long-track gold in the first five speed skating events, and have now won the first two short-track medals of these games.

It’s so awesome that this Italian women’s team made the quarterfinals. Italy is obviously not a hockey country, and has never qualified for the Olympics without getting an automatic bid as the host nation.

And when Italy played in the 2006 Torino games, they were outscored 32-1 in three games, including a 16-0 loss to Canada and an 11-0 loss to Sweden.

But this time around, they beat France and Japan to make it out of group play. While the team has a handful of Canadian players of Italian descent, its leading goalscorer is 19-year old Matilde Fantin, an Italian-born player who came up through the country’s youth system and now plays for Penn State.

OK, cute story over. Think we can beat them 17-0 to top what Canada did 20 years ago?

Like I said: Snowboard cross is must-watch, and it’s really a wide-open field. The three World Cup races this year were won by three different women … and last year’s World Championship was won by someone else entirely.

Is this the moment for Team USA to win its first Olympic biathlon medal ever? Campbell Wright, the Kiwi racing for America, finished second in the sprint event at last year’s World Championships … and the guy who won gold, Johannes Thingnes Bø, retired!

BTW, while we’re all making fun of biathletes for having surprisingly messy personal lives, a quick shoutout to Bø, who retired after winning multiple World Championships with just one year until an Olympics citing the stress that Olympic competition put on his family. He was the one normal biathlete.

The men’s speed skating event that Jordan Stolz is not going to try to medal in.

Should be fun though, since Italy’s Davide Ghiotto is the world record-holder and back-to-back-to-back world champion in the 10,000. It’s a pretty long race — 13-ish minutes — but I can already imagine the crowd getting louder and louder every lap if Ghiotto runs away with it.

The Ilia Malinin Show. He’s got a 5-point lead headed into the free skate, and his free skate is better than his short program.

Malinin’s free program is just breathtaking in case you haven’t seen it yet. It’s got a higher concentration of massive jumps than the short program from the other day.

You know how good Ilia Malinin is? We don’t give him crap for recording his own spoken-word poetry and then skating to it. You’ve gotta be the GOAT for that. If you’re finishing fifth after that I’m pointing and laughing at the screen.

Great Britain’s Matt Weston has won two of the last three World Championships, and has a lead after the first two runs. He should hold on for gold, which would be Team GB’s first of the Olympics.

I’m really trying to find an athlete I can’t jinx in these previews.

The favorite here is Australia’s Scotty James, the 8-time X Games gold medalist and 4-time World Champiion. if he wins, it’ll be Australia’s first two-gold games ever.