Not going to lie, the chances of me not falling asleep are ridiculously low. Just throwing that out now. And I know I missed all of yesterday primetime coverage, I’ll catch up on the good stuff eventually.

2 Man Bobsled

Is anyone else thinking how can a huge bobsled go down the same course as the luge/skeleton? They could barely stay away from the walls, how are they going to do it in a bobsled?

Not a great start for the USA. Hopefully, they can fix those mistakes they made in the first turn by the next run.

Not much changed from the first run to the second run. Justin Olsen and Evan Weinstock are sitting in 12th and the only team that could potentially be in the mix for the medals but that would also take a small miracle. If anything, this is more practice runs for the drivers to prep for 4 man.

Oh, and the team in first place crashed at the finish line:

Women’s Speedskating 500

Erin Jackson just casually picking up speed skating and going to the Olympics. NBD. I would fall so quickly if I tried to do this sprint.

And why do the uniforms have a different color patch in the upper thighs? I understand that might be a different fabric for chaffing or cooling purposes but don’t make it a different color. It’s just weird.

I really wanted the Korean skater to win to see that stadium erupt but Japan earned that win.

Heather Bergsma and Brittany Bowe tried to end the medal drought in short track but came up a little short.

 

 

Snowboard Big Air

I know there is some strategy going on to get a safety first score but is anyone else a little underwhelmed by their jumps? I feel like this is more medium air.

Ok, it ramped up a bit. I think I’m more shocked by how little space they have to actually stop by the bottom of the hill.

Anna Gasser is sitting in first and 3 Americans including Jamie Anderson qualified.

Ice Dancing Short Program

I definitely didn’t stay up for this so quick summary: Tess Virtue and Scott Moir crushed it, world record, basically have the gold medal in their back pocket already.

US has 3 teams in the top 7 meaning they are all conceivably in the medals game right now. It’s going to be a great final.

 

 

Shortly after I wrote about how we needed to collectively step it up, John-Henry Krueger did! He broke the speed skating drought with a silver medal in the short track 1,000 meters. It was a crazy race as three of the five crashed in the second to last lap leaving it wide open for Krueger to take the silver behind Canadien Samuel Girard.

 

We’ve got USA v. OAR. First hockey game I’m watching these games. Let’s do this.

So this is the last game before elimination begins. It’s part of the group play to determine seeding moving forward. We are currently sitting first in the group with 1 win and 1 overtime loss for 4 points. Slovakia and OAR are sitting second with 3 points and Slovenia is last with 2 points. A win would guarantee a direct spot in the quarterfinals, otherwise it gets a little tricky but means we would most likely have to play an extra game in the elimination qualifiers so let’s just make this easy and get a clear win!

13 minutes left in the first period and not much to report so far. It’s definitely getting a little heated between the players as they probably discuss lingering effects of the cold war and if vodka or whiskey is better.

0-1. Russia strikes first. A little bit of sloppy defense lead to an opportunity for Russia that they took advantage of. It’s ok though. Still a lot of hockey left to play.

Our inability to do anything with that powerplay is not the best sign for how we are playing tonight.

Random but interesting facts about our players: Defensemen Noah Welch is a local from Brighton, MA. He is donating his brain to concussion research after his death.

Quote of the game so far: “he doesn’t look like he’s left the cheesburger phase of being a teenager yet”

Finished the first period 0-1 and OAR will get a power play to start the 2nd period. Things could be better….

But we did just win a silver medal in men’s short track 1,000, thanks John-Henry Krueger. Someone please tell the boys in the locker room to give them a little boost!

Just saw some of the cheering sections. Strong game by Russia with some traditional facepainting:

But oh shit, who is that cheering for the USA? Is that George Washington and Ruth Bader Ginsburg waving a flag. Game’s over. You can’t beat that.

0-2. They must have left momentarily to get a snack because Russia just scored again (they are actually heavily favored to win the gold, not giving excuses just stating some facts).

If you want to read something instead of watching the US blow another power play opportunity here is a fun article about Chris Borque who is part of the only father-son hockey Olympians to play for different countries.

0-3 with .2 seconds left in the 2nd period. That’s not going to be easy to come back from mentally.

0-4 to start the 3rd period. Ilya Kovulchuk (I don’t know if that is spelled correctly and I don’t care) is the new enemy number 1 for US hockey.

Not our best showing and now we wait for the Slovenia/Slovakia overtime to end to figure out our next step.

(because I think that is actually their largest land animal, or maybe some cattle, it’s not an easy answer to find)

I woke up this morning after falling asleep watching ice skating (sorry Adam Rippon, have to watch you on replay) to check the medal count and this is what I saw:

Something seems to be missing right? I had to scroll a bit to find it.

We haven’t won a medal for a couple days and are currently sitting in 8th. The positive side is that we’ve got 5 golds (4th highest count there). And everyone was saying that Germany and Norway were going to be able to add the most medals to their overall count because of the Russian ban and it would most likely be the US and Canada battling it out for third.

But I think we’ve overall taken a bit of a turn and are in a bit of trouble. We’ve seen some big names not medal in the past two days that many people thought were given. There have also been some events in speed skating, skeleton and skiing where a US athlete has done well at international competitions this year and there was hope they could pull off a miracle. But none of these things have been happening.

Looking at the events over the next two days I’m not exactly sure what our chances of turning things around a bit are but let’s all throw some good vibes over to Pyeongchang and see if we can’t move back higher up the medal count. And also push all the little ones in our life to get really good at cross country skiing and speed skating. You might think that football or basketball is the sport to find the fame, money and booty but have you heard about the skiathlon?

 

I’m sitting on my couch eating a corn dog because I feel like that is super American and I’m trying to do my part to actually win some medals today since yesterday was not great.

Freestyle Skiing: Women’s Aerials

I’m not going to lie, I did not remember this was an actual sport but I’m enjoying it so far. These are some rough crashes though. But ok Hanna Huskova bringing home Belarus’s first medal of these games. And it’s a gold!

 

 

Freestyle Skiing: Women’s Slopestyle

How are they going off all these ramps backwards and also landing jumps backwards? They are half my age and I can’t even recite the alphabet backwards.

Darian Stevens maybe shouldn’t have french fried on the rail but question, do you have to grind a rail (is that the right terminology? I haven’t played Tony Hawk for a decade)? Can you still get a good score while avoiding the rails?

Women’s Downhill

It might be the glass of wine but that Lindsey Vonn clip….keep it together Royer. But she didn’t medal. And it’s really sad to wake up to articles talking about the hate tweets she is getting. I’m not going to dive into politics but will just try to make sure I keep this blog far away from the unfortunate online trolling trend that has become the norm.

Men’s Free Skate

Nathan Chen, forget all the other performances and do it for your country.

2 jumps in and so far, so good. Third wasn’t great but four and five were spectacular. He’s going for 6. And he did it. It took a little while but he got into his groove at the games and this was fantastic. Absolutely destroyed the competition with 215 points. He’s young, he should be back for another games. And hopefully he comes back with a vengeance. Imagine that free skate combined with a good short program.

 

 

Not going to lie, I didn’t watch anything from last night because I was too busy winning gold of my own!!

After a disappointing silver medal finish in the Rio Olympics, team Netherlands came back strong for a gold medal performance in PyeongChang (aka second floor of The Point). For the prelims we excelled in the rubber ducky hockey challenge but not in the Olympic Rings ring toss. And by sheer luck we were able to tie for first in the Ice Ice Trivia (who the F* knows what channel Vanilla Ice’s reality show was on or his first daughter’s name? I wasn’t even sure he was still around). But in the gold medal final of curling with fans it took a few turns but we were able to figure out our sweeping technique and bring home the gold. Damn, does it feel good.

But Instagram told me this morning that many US athletes walked away yesterday with the same feelings….so here are some reactions:

Mikaela Shiffrin not medaling

Adam Rippoon in general

Nathan Chen not having a great Olympics

Men’s Hockey getting a win

John Daly not finishing top 10 in the Skeleton

Shirtless Tongan not finishing last in his event!

That’s all I got right now…I’ll be back up and running either tonight or tomorrow morning.

I’m all in on luge right now and it’s the final event for the sport these games. It’s exciting because the the women, men and doubles (which has grown on me) go one after another and have to hit a physical target with their hand to send their teammate down the track. And if you miss the target you are disqualified from competition. And these are their spiked gloves so this is not a casual high-five situation. They made a very individualized sport a team competition and added some flare to it.

U.S. team had a rocky start with Britcher Summer not having her best run. Chris Mazdzer brought it back but it was really Matt Mortensen and Jayson Terdimen that pulled out something amazing on the last couple turns to get ahead of Italy with only a couple more teams to follow. We got a couple minutes of being on top and having a track record.

But next came Canada besting our time.

Austria next.

And finally Germany pushing the U.S. to the hardest place to finish, in fourth. We finished in 6th at the Sochi games so we’ve made an improvement as a team. Here’s to looking to Beijing in 4 years for getting on that podium. And now they get beer. Lots of beer.

 

I’ll be honest, work has gotten a bit in the way for constant Olympic watching. I’ll attempt to stay awake for all the coverage tonight and get caught up to speed. I know the chances of that happening are similar to that of a U.S. speedskater bringing home a gold medal this games (more to come on that in a special blog) but I’ll do my best and try not to fail like the 2018 Olympics putting on downhill skiing as scheduled (did you get those jokes? you are becoming a pro).

Let’s go!

Women’s Downhill Skiing

-How do they straight french fry the whole way and never have to pizza?

-I think we are all so excited to Mikaela Shiffrin. So much hype and so far, most of the mega-hyped athletes at this games have done nothing but perform. Solid first run for her, probably not hyped about it but oh shit, she could have just done what the Swiss skier did and attempt to take out half the photographers.

-Anyone else just hear those awkward comments from the commentator about how getting married makes it hard to be a successful skier? Not sure where that came from. Is there proof to those claims or he is just bitter that she’s married and he’s sitting alone on Valentine’s day in a commentator booth? UPDATE: He just apologized, is he reading this right now? I’m sure not but he probably got torn about on twitter. “Spouses are great”. 

-Mikaela Shiffrin taking home the gold…it begins!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfNYtGKF83c/?taken-by=teamusa

Women’s 1,000 Speedskating

-I did not know that Heather Bergsma married a dutch speedskater. Not the happiest about that since they are kinda the enemy in this sport but love is love. How are their future children going to pick what country to skate for?

-No surprise here, a Dutch skater won. Shocker.

Men’s Skeleton (things I did once)

-I think there should be extra points for helmet design, just saying. Ironman is a great one for the overwhelming favorite from the home country.

-Matt Antoine won bronze in Sochi. John Daly regularly puts him in his social media. Not an amazing first run for him but I’m confident he can come back strong.

-Ruh-roh, John Daly also didn’t have a great first run. Luckily there are 3 more runs to start making up on that time difference. Where is Steve Langton. I’m 99% sure that if John can just do one more trust fall on Steve between his runs he’ll come away with a medal. Or maybe whoever slid into his DM’sslid into his DM’s should slide him a message of encouragement right now about sliding down the track a bit faster.

-Just need to do a quick shout-out to this Canadien skeleton helmet as an ode to where my Olympic blogging began:

-Matt did a little bit better in his second run while John stayed steady. Let’s get some top ten finishes tomorrow night boys.

Another Happy Valentine’s Day message courtesy of Norway’s curling team:

[I fell asleep, it’s no longer live, just an FYI]

Pair’s Free Skate

-Ok China throwing some Star Wars in the mix but Johnny has declared it a disaster. I think some of that music was from Phantom Menace right before Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan faced Darth Maul and we know how that ended so maybe that was just bad music selection.

I think this screenshot below summarizes everything pretty well:

-Eric Radford and Meagan Duhamel became the first pairs to do a clean quadruple throw jump in the Olympic games and took home bronze. They are hugging in excitement to the left. Heard someone mention their chemisty is sometimes off…probably because he’s not skating with his hot fiance ice dancer Luis Fenero.

-Wenjing Sui and Cong Han of China put in a solid skate with total points of 235.47. They were favorites to win gold and clearly wanted it because that face means….

-Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot won gold with 235.90. They were only fourth after the short program but did a record scoring free skate and sneaked into first with a flawless performance. This is her fifth Olympic performance and after bronze in Vancouver and Sochi she wanted that gold and she got it. She and Bruno are completely overcome with emotion in the center crying for joy.

I’m not going to pretend I have anything new to say about Shaun White’s amazing feat. He deserves to have the honor of being the USA’s 100th gold winter Olympic medal. And be part of this amazing fact:

And if there was ever a time to cry to your mom about something, this would probably be it.

 

Alexa and Chris Knierim finished their short program with an adorable kiss. They’ve been through a lot together and are just so happy to be at the Olympics and will celebrate a bit of Valentine’s Day romance when they can, aka at the end of their finals qualifying routine. Go get em.