After being left out of the podium on the first day of competition at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Team USA fared much better on the second.
Two Americans each won silver medals in their respective competitions on Sunday: Julia Marino in women’s snowboard slopestyle and Jaelin Kauf in women’s moguls. Elsewhere, the women’s hockey team dominated Switzerland and will now finish group play against fierce rivals Canada.
The Americans will have plenty more medal attempts, and one of their brightest stars will make her Beijing 2022 Games debut on Monday as reigning Olympic giant slalom champion Mikaela Shiffrin competes in the event.
TV PROGRAM: How and what to watch each day of the Beijing Olympics
EXCLUSIVE OLYMPIC UPDATES: Sign up for text messages to get the latest news and behind-the-scenes coverage from Beijing.
OLYMPIC NEWSLETTER:The best Olympic stories straight to your inbox
2022 WINTER OLYMPIC GAMES: Answering 10 major questions for the Beijing Games
Opinion: Are Olympic uniforms soiled by forced labour?
BEIJING — Everywhere you turn during these Olympics, the friendly staff and volunteers are impeccably dressed in uniforms depicting white snow peaks and blue Chinese skies. As the competitions start strong, we will see hundreds of technical officials wearing equally attractive gray and white garments with red accents on their sleeves.
But it’s the logo on the right breast that should catch your eye.
The nondescript symbol, which vaguely resembles the silhouette of an impala’s head or possibly a pickaxe, represents Anta Sports, a Chinese sporting goods giant that backs several NBA players, including Klay Thompson and Gordon Hayward. It is also the parent company of a subsidiary that owns American legacy brands like Wilson and Louisville Slugger. Lululemon’s founder, Canadian billionaire Chip Wilson, is heavily invested in the company.
In China, the world’s second largest economy, Anta is a very big problem. It’s also at the center of the biggest political controversy surrounding these Olympics involving alleged genocide and human rights abuses in China’s northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
—Dan Wolken
The Unlikely Pipeline at the Heart of the USA Speed Skating Team
Ocala, Florida is a city of approximately 60,000 people located between Gainesville and Orlando. Palm trees dot the city center. Temperatures last week reached 80 degrees.
It’s not the kind of place you’d expect to see Winter Olympians.
But in a weird twist — and with the almost unwitting help of a Florida grandmother — that’s exactly what happened.
Three of America’s top speed skaters at the 2022 Winter Olympics — Brittany Bowe, Erin Jackson and Joey Mantia — all hail from Ocala, which doesn’t even have a year-round rink. All three are legitimate medal contenders. And all three started out as inline skaters on a team now called Ocala Speed, coached by the same woman, Renee Hildebrand.
—Tom Schad
Opinion: US figure skaters waver on jumps, but still guarantee Winter Olympics medal
BEIJING — After the first day of Olympic team figure skating competition, American athletes talked about skating with intensity and building momentum for an unlikely gold-medal race against the Russians.
On day 2, the conversation took an abrupt turn. Momentum thoughts have been replaced by worries about “taking each other on”. The slaps and punches were gone. Hugs and kind words appeared in their place.
Indeed, given the chance to seize the opportunity, Karen Chen and Vincent Zhou put in flat and lackluster performances, leaving the United States likely settling for the team silver medal and wondering what could have happened. pass if Chen and Zhou had been able to skate. properly – or how things would have been different if the American figure skating officials had chosen other skaters instead of them.
—Christine Brenan
