Team USA's glorious day: Gold for Chloe Kim, Nathan Chen, aerials team
BEIJING – The journey between the Capital Indoor Stadium here and Genting Snow Park would take at least a couple hours, but they felt closely connected Thursday in the vast footprint of the 2022 Beijing Games.
For snowboarder Chloe Kim and figure skater Nathan Chen – two first-generation Asian-Americans, two brilliant young performers, two Ivy League students – it was a day to celebrate Team USA’s strength and star power. During an Olympics that has already shown us how difficult it can be to conjure a winning performance under immense pressure, a pair of American stalwarts rose to the occasion and blew away the competition to win gold medals.
"I never really felt I'd be able to make it this far in my career,” said Chen, who plans to resume his studies at Yale this fall. “I'd always of course dream about making the Olympics and winning the Olympics, but I (thought), 'That's hard, I don't know if I can make that happen.' "
Chen, whose parents immigrated from China in the late 1980s, made it happen in a big way, erasing the disappointment of his 17th place finish four years ago.
Kim faced a different kind of pressure. In 2018, she was a fresh-faced teenager who dazzled in the women’s halfpipe in South Korea, the country her parents left nearly 20 years earlier to settle in Southern California. It was both a wonderful story, and yet the kind of breakthrough that can change someone’s life overnight – and not always for the better.
The following year, Kim made a refreshingly honest video talking about how much she loved snowboarding and how she planned to get ready for the 2022 Olympics but that she needed a break from competition to be a “normal kid for once” and discover a life outside of snowboarding that she had never gotten the opportunity to experience.
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Part of that included enrolling at Princeton, and yet still it wasn’t easy for Kim to find normality. She even told the TODAY Show that her face hurt from fake smiling because of how people expected her to be “on” all the time.
“I got really bad anxiety like maybe I can’t do that again because I don’t know if I can handle it,” she said.
But even the weight of living up to the standard she set in Pyeongchang and some doubt created by her lackluster pre-competition practices, Kim took care of business Tuesday, putting down a first run that showed she is still at a different level than the rest of women’s snowboarding.
“I was just so proud of myself,” she said.
Three gold medals in a single day
Thanks to Chen and Kim, Team USA suddenly has a lot more to be proud of after a bit of a disappointing start. In fact, when the Americans’ freestyle skiing aerials mixed team won a bit of a surprise gold medal Thursday night, it was just the third time in history that the U.S. won three gold medals in a day at the Winter Olympics.
Including Lindsey Jacobellis’ win in snowboardcross, the U.S. now has four golds, making up for a slow start to these Olympics including the early stumbles by Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, who didn’t finish her first two events.
Right now, nobody is running away with the medal table. The Americans have 10 total medals, not too far behind Norway, Austria and Canada, which each have 12.
This will be a crucial few days for the U.S. team, which has had a declining medal performance at each Olympics since winning 37 at the Vancouver Games in 2010. With more good opportunities for gold to come including snowboarder Shaun White, the U.S. women’s hockey team and bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor, the U.S. has a chance to reach double-digit gold medals for the first time at a Winter Olympics since Salt Lake City in 2002.
In the end, it may hinge on whether the Russians ultimately get disqualified from the team figure skating competition, which – as of now – has the U.S. with the silver medal behind Russia. But the confusion over whether the result will stand continued another day and may not be resolved for months or longer.
Multiple reports, including from Russian newspaper RBC, have pointed to 15-year-old star Kamila Valieva testing positive for a banned substance as the reason no medal ceremony has taken place. Yes, Russia’s history of doping its athletes, which led to a four-year ban in international competition that really isn’t much of a ban, returns front and center as a flashpoint in these Games.
Controversy on ice
Neither the IOC nor the International Skating Union are saying much, citing a legal issue. But Russia’s systematic, state-sponsored program to illegally enhance its athletes' performances at the 2014 Games in Sochi will once again bring a suspicious eye to every victory here by the so-called “Russian Olympic Committee” team.
But a good Olympics needs more than one controversy. And we’ve got it, sort of, with a bizarre Northern European skirmish in speedskating.
Here are the basics: A sports scientist who works for the powerhouse Dutch team discussed in a publication in the Netherlands how he measures the temperature of the ice at the venue and makes it known to the person in charge of the surface that their team wants the coldest, hardest conditions possible.
Nils van der Poel, a Swede who won the gold medal in the 5,000 meters here, called this “corruption” in a news conference Wednesday and said it was just as serious as doping.
“This is the biggest scandal in our sport,” he said.
Maurits Hendriks, the technical director for the Dutch team, tried to de-escalate the situation, saying that measuring ice temperature and communicating with the ice master has been going on for decades.
“There is only one party that decides on the ice quality, on the temperature and that is the (International Skating Union),” he said. “There's nobody else who can influence that. The same goes for the Dutch.”
With apologies to van der Poel, lobbying for more favorable ice quality doesn’t quite measure up to the great Olympic scandals of the past. Or maybe for us Americans, the bar is a little too high.
Either way, hopefully the verbal barbs between the Netherlands and Sweden will keep going because these Olympics could use a little more competitive spice.
Follow Paste BN Sports columnist Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken