Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games

I won't spoil the skating. I didn't watch the main skaters, just the two (!) Koreans who finished in the top ten, and the two Japanese skaters. My favorite was Ye Lim Kim, who had a surprising amount of grace and poise. She finished 9th. The 6th place finisher was You Young, who tried a triple axel, something even Yuna never did. She under-rotated, but stayed on her feet. She finished ahead of all the Americans, while Kim beat all but one of them.


You Young (L) and Ye Lim Kim (R)

Nice to see that Korea didn't completely fall out of the sport after Queen Yuna retired!

Gu Gu g'joob! Aileen Gu bagged another gold at the ski half pipe event. I kinda wonder who would win if she and Chloe Kim swapped gear and competed against each other on the half pipe?



This one wasn't even close. Like with Chloe, it was blatantly obvious even to my untrained eye that she was much, much better than any of the other women. She had the biggest height and the most flips and stuff. Two other women could hit close to her height, but did mostly fairly easy looking moves. The ones who did harder looking stuff were lucky to get 5 feet up. Both her first two runs were better than anyone else in the field managed. On her third she just did a victory lap, cause, why not?

Great Britain is heavily favored to win the Women's Curling gold medal match vs. Japan (CNBC 8PM ET). They demolished Japan in the round robin competition 10-4.

SBS Sports is showing the women's curling final LIVE ... after two ends, GBR leads Japan 2-1.  Surprised Japan got this far .... the two times I saw them before were in round-robin losses to ROK and the Swiss, and they looked lousy in both.  The Japan players are all little .,.. is that a disadvantage if you have less weight and strength sweeping the ice?

The Korean men managed their only multi-medal event today, getting the silver and bronze in the men's mass Skating. This is a long track event where like 15 skaters all race at once, and it definitely has aspects of short track. You can't really tell who is going to win until the last few laps, where the pace picks up. It was a huge scramble at the end, with the gold going to a Belgian (!) named Bart Swings (!!). Mr. Swings managed to touch out the two Koreans and an American, who naturally spent three minutes on TV afterwards bitching about how he was screwed by one of the Koreans (well, he came in 4th by 1/1000 of a second, so I can understand why he'd be a little peeved).

Swings' gold was the first Winter Olympics gold for Belgium since 1948 (!).

Silver medalist Chung Jae-Won



Chung and Bronze medalist Lee Seung Hoon, who won the gold in this event in 2018



The women also competed in this event. There was one Sister in the final, Bo Reum Kim, who won the silver in Pyeonchang (IIRC, she was a bit controversial there, because she tried to throw one of her teammates under the bus after Korea lost the team pursuit and was massively hated for it on the Korean interwebs). Anyways, no medal for Kim this time. Like with the men, it turned into a scramble at the end, but Kim finished 5th.





Here's an article about Kim's checkered past and results today