Winter Olympics 2022 day five: Shiffrin goes for gold in slalom; snowboard cross final – live!

OK, let’s take a calming breath.

Phew. Feel better?

The purpose of that mini-meditation is to cleanse your thoughts of the 300 thinkpieces you’ve read today about Eileen Gu, a majestic freestyle skiing star who may win multiple golds in Beijing and is somehow simultaneously, according to the punditocracy, both a brilliant and savvy young woman who has parlayed her multicultural heritage into a dual-country financial and athletic empire AND an unwitting, naive tool of the Chinese government, the IOC and the judges who ranked her ahead of the unfortunate Tess Ledeux.

Granted, the latter is my fault. And Sean Ingle has written well about Gu’s adeptness at the first of the portrayals I’ve listed here.

But let’s take a moment to consider two underreported stories from yesterday …

First, Jessie Diggins is a badass. She and Kikkan Randall won gold in the 2018 Olympic team sprint while NBC’s Chad Salmela memorably yelled “HERE COMES DIGGINS! HERE COMES DIGGINS!” Yesterday, she became the first US woman to win a cross-country individual medal.

And most of all, let’s all marvel at how Nathan Chen set a world record in the figure skating short program while being harassed by a cat.

Coming up today

Times are all in local Beijing time. For Melbourne it is +3 hours, for London it is -8 hours, for New York it is -13 hours and Los Angeles is -16 hours.

• 9.30am – 3.45pm Snowboard – there is a lot of action on Wednesday, including women’s and men’s halfpipe qualification. The women’s cross final is the session finale 🥇
• 10.15am and 1.45pm – the women’s slalom is contested over two runs 🥇
• 11am Freestyle skiing – it is the freeski big air day for men 🥇
• 3pm, 4pm and 7pm Nordic combined – this should be great, as the ski jumping trial round and competition round are followed in the early evening with the 10km cross-country 🥇
• 4.40pm and 9.10pm Ice hockey – the men’s competition begins with two group B match-ups: ROC v Switzerland followed by Czech Republic v Denmark 🏒
• 7pm – 9.20pm Short track speed skating – for women there are 1,000m heats and the 3,000m semi-finals, for men the 1500m goes from quarter-finals all the way to the final 🥇
• 8.05pm Curling – the round-robin stage gets under way in the men’s competition 🥌
• 8.20pm Luge – two runs at the Yanqing National Sliding Centre will decide the doubles medals 🥇

Full Winter Olympics schedule | Results, sport by sport | Medal table