The Beijing Winter Olympics are history. Life will return to whatever passes for normal in the Chinese capital. Skiers and snowboarders will flock to those snow-covered slopes we saw through the lenses of NBC.
Sure.
As in every Olympics, every qualifier is a winner. You have to be among the best to play in the games. But, there are still winners and losers once the competition begin. Here’s a look at a few.
WINNERS
NORWAY. The Norwegians love winter, snow and ice. They build tiny cabins in the woods called hyttes. A perfect winter day includes a brisk 25-kilometer ski through the forest. Fun!
Norwegian kids ski before they walk. Then they learn to jump so they can compete in the Nordic combined. And shoot so they can win medals in the biathlon.
Seriously, Norwegian athletes won more gold medals than any nation, a record haul of 16. They returned home with 37 overall, first among the 29 nations that boasted at least one medal recipient. Biathlete Johannes Thingnes Bon was a one-man medal machine with four gold and one bronze. Marta Olsbu Roeisland, also a biathlete, won three gold medals and added two bronze to her collection.
CANADA. The Canadian Women’s Hockey Team, to be exact. They continued to raise the level of play in women’s ice hockey by winning their fifth gold medal in seven Olympic tournaments and by beating the U.S. women for the fourth time. Team Canada finished fourth in the overall medal count with 26.
FINLAND. The men’s hockey team beat the Russians, 2-1, for their first gold medal in Olympic hockey history. A toast to the champions! Finlandia vodka, of course.
CHINA. The organizers pulled off these games without a COVID-19 outbreak, thanks to unprecedented security measures imposed on anybody inside the Olympic bubble. High winds produced the only delay. Chinese athletes took home 15 medals, 9 gold.
LINDSEY JACOBELLIS. Sixteen years after falling just before the finish at the Torino Games and blowing a gold medal, the American snowboarder, 36 now, won two gold, in snowboard cross and mixed team snowboard cross. Her stirring run in the latter earned a gold for her 40-year-old teammate, Nick Baumgartner.
JESSIE DIGGINS. Do you remember her dramatic gold-medal sprint to the finish at PyeongChang four years ago? “HERE COMES DIGGINS! HERE COMES DIGGINS!” This time, last Saturday, she earned a silver medal in the women’s 30-kilometer —that’s 18.6 miles, folks — cross-country race 24 hours after suffering food poisoning. The most decorated American cross-country skier also picked up a bronze in the individual sprint.
BRITTANY BOWE. The American speed skater took the bronze medal in the 1,000 meters, but the real story occurred when she gave her 500 meter spot to teammate ERIN JACKSON, who had slipped at the U.S. trials. Jackson rewarded Bowe’s generosity by winning gold and becoming the first Black female gold medalist in Winter Olympics history.
RYAN COCHRAN-SIEGLE. The speed skier from Richmond, Vt., finished four one-hundredths of a second behind gold medalist Matthias Mayer of Austria, 13 months after suffering a broken neck in a crash at Kitzbuehel, Austria. His mother is Barbara Ann Cochran, slalom gold medalist at the Sapporo Winter Olympics in 1972 and one of the famous Skiing Cochrans from the family’s tiny ski area in Vermont.
MIKAELA SHIFFRIN. One of the greatest ski racers of all time left Beijing without a medal in six tries. She skied off course in three events. She failed. Miserably. But the way she handled failure, answering every media question thoughtfully, keeping it all in perspective, made her a winner.
SHAWN WHITE. The red-headed snowboard icon for two decades fell on his final run in the halfpipe, crossed the finish line with helmet raised and head held high, and pronounced himself satisfied with his legacy of raising the tricks bar for the young medalists winning today. A classy exit, for sure.
LOSERS
RUSSIA I. Still banned because of a doping scandal before the 2014 Sochi Olympics, the Russian flag and anthem stayed home.
RUSSIA II. 15-year-old figure-skating prodigy Kamila Valieva tested positive in December for a banned substance, competed in the team event, was suspended after the test result became became available six weeks late, was re-instated after an appeal but then fell apart in the women’s long program. Her Russian handlers abandoned her as she wept openly all alone.
CHINA. A repressive, authoritarian regime. A pre-Olympics meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. A menacing eye toward Taiwan. Naval aggression in the South China Sea. A state run media that projected a rosy picture of the Beijing Games. And they got to run the Olympics?
IOC. The International Olympic Committee awarded the 2022 Winter Game to Beijing because the only other bidder was Almaty, Kazakhstan. The IOC could have been tougher on Russia. Russian athletes were allowed to compete under the Olympic flag and anthem. They left with 32 medals, second only to Norway. Some ban.
RUSSIAN HOCKEY. The hockey team lost the gold-medal game to Finland, which had never won Olympic gold.
NBC. Television ratings dropped 40 percent from the 2018 Olympics with an average viewership of 11.4 million versus the previous record low of 19.8 million four years ago.
The Winter Olympics as we have known them are in trouble. The IOC hierarchy has four years to get things back on track. Short track, long track, it doesn’t make any difference. The 2026 Games will be in Milan and Cortina D’Ampezzo, host of the 1956 Olympics. A return to a true mountain setting should help.