Hey from Milan and Cortina, the place we’re heading towards the homestretch of those Winter Video games. At the moment within the quarterfinals of the boys’s hockey match, three of the 4 video games went into additional time. Within the day’s closing recreation, Quinn Hughes ripped the game-winning objective that gave Staff USA a 2-1 win over Sweden.
Our correspondents have all of it coated under and at NBC Information. Catch all of it streaming on Peacock.
Stay from Milan Cortina
The quarterfinal spherical of the Olympic males’s hockey match right now couldn’t have been nearer. After Slovakia blasted Germany 6-2, the subsequent three video games went to additional time.
First, Staff Canada barely survived in opposition to Czechia, as Jordan Binnington, the customarily criticized Canadian goalie, made just a few key saves down the stretch in a 4-3 win. Then Finland, the reigning Olympic champs, mounted a late comeback to topple Switzerland 3-2 in additional time.
However the nightcap was simply as thrilling. The Individuals had been holding onto a one-goal lead for a lot of the sport, till Sweden’s Mika Zibanejad scored with lower than two minutes left in regulation. By then, hockey followers had been aware of the additional time guidelines: a sudden-death, 10-minute interval, performed 3-on-3.
A couple of minutes into additional time, Quinn Hughes discovered a gap and unleashed a depraved shot that hit the submit and banked into the online. The remainder of Staff USA mobbed him in celebration.
Now the USA will play Slovakia within the semifinals on Friday, and Canada will play Finland for a visit to the gold medal recreation.
Earlier within the day, Mikaela Shiffrin had authored her personal triumphant second. For all of her dominance throughout Alpine snowboarding, lately Shiffrin had faltered on the game’s greatest stage.
She missed out on medals in her final eight Olympic occasions: six on the 2022 Beijing Video games and two on the Milan Cortina Video games. Her final likelihood to medal in Italy got here right now within the slalom, her strongest occasion.
Shiffrin proved to be up for the problem. She raced to first place and a mixed time of 1:39.1 — 1.5 seconds forward of silver, and 1.71 seconds forward of bronze.
It was the biggest margin of victory in any Olympic Alpine snowboarding occasion since 1998.
“The snowboarding is what I cared about and naturally, medal and (win) gold, I imply, that’s a dream come true,” Shiffrin advised NBC. “However in some unspecified time in the future this week, I simply mentioned, like, ‘Cease dreaming, simply ski.’ … And I’m so blissful to have the ability to do the fitting factor in the fitting second.” (For extra on Shiffrin, learn Tim Layden’s dispatch for NBC Olympics and these eight stats on how she made historical past.)
Medal depend
Norway has taken a commanding lead within the medal race, due to athletes like Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, the Norwegian cross-country skier who gained one other gold medal right now within the males’s group dash. He has now gained 5 gold medals at these Video games and has joined American swimmer Michael Phelps as the one Olympians ever to have gained 10 or extra gold medals.
Klæbo may win a sixth gold medal, within the 50-kilometer mass begin on Saturday.
Athlete highlight
Forward of tomorrow’s U.S.A.-Canada gold medal hockey recreation, Hilary Knight proposed to her longtime girlfriend, American speedskater and fellow Olympian Brittany Bowe.
Knight and Bowe had gotten to know one another on the 2022 Beijing Video games, which nonetheless had heavy pandemic restrictions. “To have that human connection, even strolling exterior at a distance, it was actually cool,” Knight advised Olympics.com.
On an Instagram submit asserting the engagement, Knight wrote, “Olympics introduced us collectively. This one made us without end.”
Tomorrow, Knight and Staff USA will face Canada for the fifth consecutive time within the gold medal recreation. Within the earlier 4 Olympic finals, the Individuals solely gained as soon as, in 2018.
What’s skimo?
A brand new Olympic sport will make its debut tomorrow — a brutal, high-altitude sport that’s referred to as ski mountaineering. Or skimo, for brief.
In skimo, skiers scamper uphill carrying carpet-like skins on their skis or simply their stiff boots, then barrel again down an ungroomed course.
Three skimo occasions will likely be held in Bormio, Italy: males’s dash, ladies’s dash, and a blended relay with a competitor of every gender.
The USA will compete within the relay, which begins with a piece of skinning — basically racing uphill with a free heel and climbing skins glued to the skis. Then the athletes rip off the skins and ski a brief downhill portion earlier than returning to climbing, this time with a mixture of skinning and bootpacking (dashing uphill of their ski boots, with skis secured to a backpack). Lastly, they descend to the bottom of the hill.
When to observe?
Should you had been planning to name out of labor sick to observe the Olympics, Thursday is the day to take action. Now we have curling semifinal motion, finals in each ladies’s and males’s skimo, the bronze and gold medal video games in ladies’s hockey, and Jordan Stolz going for one more gold in speedskating.
On high of all that? The ultimate determine skating medal of the Olympics will likely be given within the ladies’s single occasion, with American Alysa Liu in competition for a medal.
All occasions are in Jap, and an asterisk signifies a medal occasion:
Thursday, Feb. 19
- 3:05 a.m.: Curling, males’s spherical robin (Sweden vs. Czechia, Italy vs. Switzerland, China vs. Germany, Norway vs. Canada)
- 3:10 a.m.: Nordic mixed, group dash trial spherical
- 3:50 a.m.: Ski mountaineering, ladies’s dash heats
- 4 a.m.: Nordic mixed, group dash competitors spherical
- 4:30 a.m.: Freestyle snowboarding, males’s freeski halfpipe qualifying run 1
- 4:30 a.m.: Ski mountaineering, males’s dash heats
- 5:27 a.m.: Freestyle snowboarding, males’s freeski halfpipe qualifying run 2
- 6:55 a.m.: Ski mountaineering, ladies’s dash semifinals
- 7:25 a.m.: Ski mountaineering, males’s dash semifinals
- 7:55 a.m.: Ski mountaineering, ladies’s dash finals*
- 8 a.m.: Nordic mixed, group dash cross-country*
- 8:05 a.m.: Curling, ladies’s spherical robin (Switzerland vs. USA, Canada vs. Korea, Japan vs. China, Nice Britain vs. Italy)
- 8:15 a.m.: Ski mountaineering, males’s dash finals*
- 8:40 a.m.: Girls’s hockey, bronze medal recreation, Switzerland vs. Sweden*
- 10:30 a.m.: Speedskating, males’s 1,500-meter*
- 1 p.m.: Determine skating, ladies’s singles, free skate*
- 1:05 p.m.: Curling, males’s semifinals
- 1:05 p.m.: Curling, males’s semifinals
- 1:10 p.m.: Girls’s hockey, gold medal recreation, USA vs. Canada*
- 1:30 p.m.: Freestyle snowboarding, ladies’s freeski halfpipe
That’s it for now! We’ll be again tomorrow.
