Winter Olympics 2022 Live Updates: Latest Medal Count, News And Results – The New York Times

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Mikaela Shiffrin was looking for a comeback in her sixth and final event at the Winter Olympics on Sunday, just hours before the closing ceremony.

On her last chance to win a medal before leaving Beijing, she found another disappointment when she and the United States team fell short of winning a medal in the mixed-gender team event.

She and her U.S. teammates were defeated by Norway in the bronze medal matchup. Austria won the gold, and Germany took silver.

Shiffrin was hoping the team competition would help put the struggles of the past two weeks behind her. In her other five races, all individual events, she failed to finish three runs and placed ninth and 18th in two others.

The mixed team event, taking place for the second time at an Olympics, is more a celebration of skiing than an intense individual battle for medals. The race resembles parallel slalom, where skiers go head-to-head on identical courses. Two women and two men from each country compete, each racing an opponent of the same gender. A team advances to the next round if it wins three of these races; if the teams tie, 2-2, the winner is the team with the best combined time.

On Thursday, after her third disqualification in an individual race, Shiffrin was already reflecting on how her Olympics had gone so wrong.

“Right now,” Shiffrin said, “I just feel like a joke.”

Shiffrin arrived in Beijing favored to win multiple medals in a career that already had produced two golds and a silver, the next step in her quest to become the most decorated skier ever to compete on the international stage. Instead, her journey became a superstar’s staredown with an abyss: two DNFs (did not finish) in giant slalom and slalom, followed by ninth- and 18th-place finishes in super-G and downhill, and then one last DNF in combined Thursday.

On Twitter, Shiffrin shared some angry messages she had received after her disappointing performances. But in a video posted to the site, she said she just ignored those who tried to shake her confidence.

“You can choose to take them, and dwell on them, and let them make you want to retire, let them make you want to disappear and just never be seen again,” she said. “Or you can just say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great sense of humor, and I’ve got a lot more to give to this world, so back off and let me do my thing.’ And I think a lot of you out there who might be experiencing these hate messages, I think a lot of you have that fire in you, so you just go for it.”

In Beijing, curling has been one event where Britain has been able to shine in an otherwise disappointing Games for the country.

On Sunday, the women’s team delivered the country’s only gold medal at the Games, defeating Japan, 10-3. That followed the men’s team’s winning silver on Saturday, after losing to Sweden, 5-4, giving Britain its first medal in the Games.

The women’s game was a rematch of the bronze medal game from the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. In that contest, the Japanese beat the British, 5-3.

The British team had advanced to the gold medal game after beating Sweden by a single point in the semifinal game on Friday. (Sweden went on to win the bronze.)

The British women’s team won silver at the 2014 Sochi Games and gold at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Japan had won six out of 10 matches in Beijing, clinching an 8-6 victory over Switzerland on Friday to advance to the gold medal game.

Japan’s strong showing reflects growing interest in and development of the sport in East Asia.

In Japan, curlers are celebrities and their cries of “sodanee,” or “OK,” across the curling rink have become a buzzword. Their snacking habits were once national news.

In South Korea, the number of viewers watching curling on television has soared and the “Garlic Girls” became fixtures at the last two Games. They were knocked out of the round-robin session of the Olympic tournament on Thursday by Sweden.

And in China, the government has hired a three-time world champion to coach its curling teams. In parts of the country, amateur curlers are pushing high-pressure cooking pots and woks on outdoor ice, sweeping do-it-yourself rocks with regular brooms.

A Russian team is seeking to repeat as the Olympic champion in men’s hockey as it meets Finland in Sunday’s gold medal game, the final competition of the Beijing Games.

The Russian squad advanced to Sunday’s finale when it beat Sweden in an exhausting semifinal on Friday that included a 17-shot shootout. Finland, now assured of at least matching its best showing in Olympic history, beat Slovakia, 2-0.

The women’s hockey tournament ended on Thursday, when Canada beat the United States.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport on Saturday rejected an effort by nine American figure skaters who were seeking to receive their silver medals from the ill-fated team competition at the Beijing Olympics before they left China.

The skaters — Evan Bates, Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Madison Chock, Zachary Donohue, Brandon Frazier, Madison Hubbell, Alexa Knierim and Vincent Zhou — asked the court to order the International Olympic Committee to award medals in the team event, the results of which have been in doubt for nearly two weeks since a Russian skater, Kamila Valieva, was found to have tested positive for a banned drug.

A separate CAS panel on Monday had allowed Valieva, 15, to continue competing in the Games despite her positive test, saying the uncertainty about the eventual outcome of her doping case — which might lead to only a reprimand given her age — meant she would face “irreparable harm” if she were to be barred from competing.

The American skaters had sought a ruling that would overturn, at least for them, the I.O.C.’s decision to not award any medals in any event in which Valieva placed in the top three. That decision applied only to the team competition in the end; Valieva, cleared to skate, went on to finish fourth in the women’s singles event, crumbling in the long program amid a swirl of accusations, innuendo and pressure.

The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee was not a party to the application, the court said in dismissing it with a single sentence.

“The decision of the I.O.C. Executive Board of 14 February 2022 not to hold the medal ceremony for the figure skating team event during the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 stands,” the court’s panel of three arbitrators wrote.

The court said the panel would publish a fuller explanation of its decision in the coming days, presumably well after the closing ceremony on Sunday. By then, the Americans — and the rest of the Olympians — will be on their way home.

The U.S. broadcast coverage of the Winter Games continues on Saturday with Alpine skiing, pairs figure skating and the gold medal game in men’s hockey. All times are Eastern.

ALPINE SKIING After being postponed a day because of high winds, the mixed team event — in which men and women compete together — will broadcast live at 8 p.m. on USA Network. This is the final opportunity for the American skier Mikaela Shiffrin to win a medal in Beijing.

BOBSLED Kaillie Humphries and Elana Meyers Taylor have combined to win eight Olympic medals. Each will try to pick up another one in the two-woman bobsled, re-airing at 8 p.m. on NBC. Humphries is competing with Kaysha Love, and Meyers Taylor with Sylvia Hoffman. In the men’s division, catch the live broadcast of the third heat of the four-man event, featuring Jamaica’s first Olympic bobsledding team since 1998, at 8:30 p.m. on the NBC Olympic Channel. The fourth and final run will air at 10:20 p.m. NBC also airs the four-man event at 9 p.m. and 10:40 p.m.

FIGURE SKATING Medals are on the line in the pairs event, which will conclude with the free skate, re-airing at 8:30 p.m. on NBC, with additional coverage beginning at 9:30 p.m. The United States will be represented by the pairs Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier, and Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc.

CURLING CNBC will carry the women’s gold medal game between Britain and Japan at 8:05 p.m.

CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING The women’s 30-kilometer mass start, featuring four athletes from the United States, will air live at 10 p.m. on the NBC Olympic Channel.

SPEEDSKATING Olympic speedskating competition concludes with the men’s and women’s mass start finals, which will re-air at 10 p.m. on USA Network. For the men’s team, Joey Mantia and Ian Quinn are representing the United States, while Mia Manganello Kilburg and Giorgia Birkeland are competing for the United States in the women’s event.

HOCKEY Finland takes on Russia in the men’s gold medal game. Pregame coverage begins at 10:45 p.m. on USA Network, followed by the game at 11:10 p.m.

— The New York Times

Sui Wenjing and Han Cong of China won the gold medal in pairs figure skating on Saturday at Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing, capping two scandal-tinged, mistake-marred, tear-stained weeks for a signature Olympic sport with a nearly flawless performance.

Sui and Han, who had finished first in the short program on Friday, held off three Russian pairs in the free skate on Saturday. They had arrived at the Games eager for redemption: They had victory within their grasp at the 2018 Olympics, only to lose the gold medal by a mere 0.43 points.

They faced tough competition on Saturday from three Russian pairs. Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov had been second after the short program, trailing Sui and Han by a fraction of a point but ranking just ahead of Anastasia Mishina and Aleksandr Galliamov, the reigning world champions. Aleksandra Boikova and Dmitrii Kozlovskii entered the free skate in fourth place.

Performing one after another to close the night’s program, the three Russian pairs took turns posting the high score. Each time a pair took the lead, though, the next pair took the ice and leapfrogged them with a better score. Tarasova and Morozov were the last to pull the trick, their score in the free skate just five-hundredths of a point better than the one posted by Mishina and Galliamov.

Sui and Han, though, promptly came out and beat them all, setting a world record with a total of 239.88 points to edge Tarasova and Morozov by a razor-thin margin, 63-hundredths of a point. Performing to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Sui and Han glided effortlessly from one end of the rink to the other, executing a series of throws, jumps and lifts that delighted the small crowd of Chinese fans allowed into the arena.

When their scores were posted, Sui and Han both burst into tears as they were engulfed by a team of coaches and staff members waving a large Chinese flag.

China’s gold was its ninth of the Games, nearly doubling the country’s previous Winter Games high of five.

The bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor, a three-time Olympic medalist and one of the most decorated U.S. bobsledders, will get to carry the American flag in an Olympic ceremony after all.

Two weeks after she missed out on the chance to carry the United States flag in the opening ceremony because she was in isolation after testing positive for the coronavirus, Meyers Taylor, 37, was chosen by her U.S. teammates for the same honor in the closing ceremony on Sunday in Beijing.

“I was so honored to be named the opening ceremony flag-bearer, but after not being able to carry the flag, it’s even more humbling to lead the United States at the closing ceremony,” Meyers Taylor said in a statement released by American Olympic officials.

Meyers Taylor was chosen along with the curler John Shuster to carry the flag during the opening ceremony but had to decline after she revealed in an Instagram post that she had tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after arriving in China.

She was replaced by the speedskater Brittany Bowe, a three-time Olympian chosen as an alternate by a vote among her teammates.

Meyers Taylor, 37, recovered in time to compete, and this week she won the silver medal in the inaugural monobob competition. She now has a medal from four straight Olympics, adding to silvers in Pyeongchang in 2018 and Sochi in 2014, and a bronze in Vancouver in 2010. She will compete again on Saturday in the two-woman bobsled, where she was in third place after the first two of four heats.

— Traci Carl

Some of the biggest companies in the world are caught in an uncomfortable situation as they seek to straddle a widening political gulf between the United States and China: What is good for business in one country is increasingly a liability in the other.

China is the world’s biggest consumer market, and for decades, Chinese and American business interests have described their economic cooperation as a “win-win relationship.” But gradually, as China’s economic and military might have grown, Washington has taken the view that a win for China is a loss for the United States.

The decision to hold the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing has turned sponsorship, typically one of the marketing industry’s most prestigious opportunities, into a minefield.

Companies that have sponsored the Olympics have attracted censure from politicians and human rights groups, who say such contracts imply tacit support of atrocities by the Chinese Communist Party, including human rights violations in Xinjiang, censorship of the media and mass surveillance of dissidents.

“One thing our businesses, universities and sports leagues don’t seem to fully understand is that, to eat at the C.C.P.’s trough, you will have to turn into a pig,” Yaxue Cao, editor of ChinaChange.org, a website that covers civil society and human rights, told Congress this month.

Eileen Gu made history this week when she became the first freestyle skier to win three medals at a single Olympics, capping a stunning performance in Beijing with a gold in the women’s halfpipe on Thursday.

Gu, an 18-year-old Californian who is competing for China, won her first gold of the Games in the inaugural women’s freestyle skiing big air competition, introduced as part of the International Olympic Committee’s efforts to achieve gender parity at the Games. She also won a silver medal in the slopestyle event this week.

The Beijing Games, which wrap up on Sunday, have been described by the I.O.C. as the most “gender-balanced” Winter Games in history, with women accounting for a record 45 percent of the athletes. That’s up from 41 percent at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games — and 4.3 percent at the 1924 Games in Chamonix, France.

The women’s big air event is one of seven competitions that were added to the Olympic program in Beijing. The addition of the mixed team format — in which men and women compete together — to events in short-track speedskating, ski jumping, aerials and snowboard cross is another part of the I.O.C.’s effort to promote gender equality. The inaugural monobob competition was contested solely by women.

Nicole M. LaVoi, the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, said that in some ways, efforts to achieve gender parity were headed in the right direction.

“Being able to showcase their talent alongside their male peers is a good move,” LaVoi said of female Olympians.

But the number of women competing in the Games is not the only metric by which equality can be measured, and women are still “competing in a system where they do not feel safe, valued or supported,” she said.

The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, barred women from competing in the inaugural 1896 Games. In 1900, 22 women were welcomed in five events — croquet among them — while 975 men competed in everything from track and field to rowing.

The number of women participating in the Olympics has gradually crept up since then, but it was not until 2014 that the I.O.C.’s planning agenda included a recommendation that the committee work “to achieve 50 percent female participation in the Olympic Games.”

While the gap is closing, there are still areas where women have little or no access by comparison with men.

Nordic combined, a sport fusing cross-country skiing and ski jumping that has been on the Olympic docket since 1924, is the only winter sport in which women do not participate. (Women are expected to be able to compete soon, perhaps by 2026.)

Even if a sport is available to both men and women, there are often far fewer competition spots allocated to women than to men. This week, the bobsledder and skeleton athlete Simidele Adeagbo, who in 2018 became the first Black woman to compete in skeleton at the Olympics, sent a letter to the governing body for her sports claiming that gender discrimination had blocked her from competing in this year’s Games. In the letter, which was reported earlier by Reuters, lawyers for Adeagbo said she had been excluded from the monobob event in Beijing because of “an insidious and willful gender disparity in the number of sled spots made available for men and women.”

Men hold the advantage in terms of slots: There are 28 sled spots reserved for men in the four-man bobsled event and 30 spots reserved for the two-man competition. Women are allotted 20 spots in the monobob and 20 in the two-woman bobsled.

There are disparities in other sports at the Winter Olympics. Cross-country skiing, Alpine skiing, biathlon and long-track speedskating all have men’s events that cover greater distances than the women’s events do. If men are competing in events that are seen as “bigger” than women’s, that overshadows women’s events, which may be “seen as secondary or less than,” LaVoi said.

Ski jumping, which added a women’s division in 2014, also comes up short. Though a mixed team event was added to the Olympic agenda in Beijing, giving women another opportunity to win medals, men still have more chances to make the podium. Anna Hoffman of the United States, who made her Olympic debut in Beijing, posted a video on TikTok highlighting the fact that the ski jumping event featuring the large hill, which stands at about 450 feet, excludes women at the Olympics, even though women can now compete on the large hills at other international events, including the World Championships.

Hoffman said that the competition on the large hill in the women’s game was exceptional, yet despite the achievements of recent years, “we are still being told to be patient and wait” when it comes to Olympic programming.

“We shouldn’t have to be fighting for this,” she said, adding later that the issue wasn’t to ensure equal outcomes for men and women in various sports.

“It is about opportunity, and that is what we are asking for,” Hoffman said.

Do you watch Alpine skiing and say, “Big deal — they take a ski lift up the mountain”? If so, ski mountaineering is for you. And in four years, you’ll be able to watch it in the Olympics.

Ski mountaineering, or skimo to its devotees, is coming to the Winter Games in 2026 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. It’s sort of like Alpine skiing, except the athletes start the race by climbing to the top of the mountain under their own power.

The climb understandably takes up the bulk of the race and includes sections of cross-country skiing and hiking when the snow gets deeper and rougher.

After that punishing workout, it might seem like a treat to ski downhill. Not always in skimo, though. The downhill sections can be rougher and less manicured than the well-groomed courses of Alpine skiing. The result is more like off-piste skiing, almost like breaking new trails in the backcountry. After all, a typical slalom course doesn’t have rocks and boulders to maneuver around, or varying depths of snow.

As in triathlon, transitions are important in skimo. Athletes hurriedly remove, replace or adjust their skis several times in a race.

The 2026 Olympics will host five ski mountaineering events. In the sprint, skiers dash up a mountain and then down again, perhaps only 100 meters each way, and the race is over in minutes.

The individual race is the event you will want to see, a grueling hour and a half that includes at least three ascents and three descents.

The fifth event will be the Olympics’ new favorite: a mixed-gender relay.

Why is ski mountaineering is being added to an Italian Olympics? Most likely because Italy is probably the best in the world at it. The Swiss and French could also contend for medals.

China may be a relative newcomer to skiing, and winter sports more generally. But the tradition of skiing stretches back generations in one mountain community in the country’s northwest, which some Chinese historians believe is the birthplace of the sport.

As evidence, researchers have pointed to cave paintings in the community, which sits in the lowlands of the Altai Mountains. The paintings depict hunters on skis, and Chinese archaeologists have said they date back more than 10,000 years.

Other historians have raised questions about the claim, citing the difficulty of dating rock art.

Still, there is no doubt that skiing has long been a way of life in the Altai Mountains in northern Xinjiang, a nub of territory where China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Russia intersect.

For thousands of years, the people of the Altai — who include ethnic Kazakhs, Mongolians and Tuwas — have been making wooden skis by hand and using them for transport and hunting. The traditional skis are wider and covered on the bottom with horsehide. Instead of plastic and metal bindings, they are loosely tied on with leather string. Altai skiers also use a single wooden staff for balance.

Nils Larsen, a documentary filmmaker who researches ancient ski history, has visited the region many times. Recalling one particular ski outing, Larsen said that the traditional skis were much better suited than his modern skis to the deep, soft snow in the area.

“We couldn’t keep up with them,” Larsen said. “They are crazy skiers.”

In recent years, the local ski tradition in the Altai has faded with the encroachment of modernity and the Chinese government’s promotion of modern winter sports. At the same time, the authorities in China have sought to use the area’s ski tradition as a selling point for tourists, part of a larger government-backed plan to transform Xinjiang into an international ski destination.

In the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, Chinese state media released a flurry of videos about the local ski culture in Xinjiang and the many ski resorts that have been built around the region. During the opening ceremony this month, organizers displayed footage of ethnic minorities in traditional dress skiing in the Altai region.

Chinese officials have said that the development of winter sports will help bring economic prosperity to the region. But critics have accused the government of using Xinjiang’s ski history to whitewash its harsh repression of ethnic minorities, a crackdown that the United States and other governments have labeled genocide.

“I find it insulting and stomach-turning that the Chinese Communist Party uses the guise of sports to convert our homeland into a ski resort and bury its crimes against humanity and genocidal policies,” said Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur American activist whose sister, Gulshan, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in Xinjiang.