Bob Sledding 2026
- Feb 9
- 5 min read
I should note at the beginning that there are a few spoilers here with results from early in the day that will likely be re-broadcast on the NBC Primetime show.
The Cross-Country Sprint competition is very different from what we think of as cross-country skiing. The later is like a marathon, about 20 miles, while the former is only about a mile (which to cross-country is a sprint). The wonderful Jessie Diggins – who in 2018 became the first American, with teammate Kikkan Randall – not only became the first Americans to win a medal in cross-country skiing, but win a Gold Medal, with her famous finishing dash. (Popularized by the great call by Chad Salmela, “Here comes Diggins!!! Here comes Diggins!!!!!!!”) She’s won three Olympic medals, three World Cup overall titles, and seven World Championship medals – and is currently ranked #1 in the world. Unfortunately, she was injured by a fall during the 20km Skiathlon quarterfinal on Sunday, bruising her ribs. And in the qualifying round for the Sprint, she was not able to qualify in the top 30. She still has other events upcoming – and the question is whether she’ll be recovered enough by then, or if the longer distances will be too impactful.
But we can’t leave her on that. So, here is the final 40 seconds of that Gold Medal race in 2018 -- and with the NBC call by Salmela, who’d known Diggins since she started out as a kid. It was recorded off the TV screen, so the sound is a little muddled, but it's all clear enough and utterly joyful. And so, you'll get to see what I've been talking about.
At the very, very start of the video, Jessie Diggins quickly slides from third into second place, and that's where you'll see her for most of this -- and see how solidly behind she is. That is, until it counts. And that's when you'll hear how I wasn't exaggerating about Chad Salmela going all-crazed with his cry of "HERE COMES DIGGINS!!!!! HERE COMES DIGGINS!!!!!"
On the other hand, in the Men’s Cross-Country Sprint – an event for which no American male has gotten a medal in 50 years, since Bill Koch won the Silver in 1976, the first medal ever for a U.S. male – that streak was broken. It came when Ben Ogden took the Silver Medal, and now the second ever for the U.S. You can watch the 4-minute Finals here.
(By the way, the race was won by Johannes Klaebo of Norway, who I mentioned the other day. This is his second Gold Medal of the Games, and his seventh Olympic Gold overall – just two shy now of tying the all-time Olympic record for Gold. I believe he has four more races these Olympics.)
The Men’s Figure Skating short program began today. And I learned something I never knew: there are 29 skaters competing in the short program, but only the top 24 qualify for the long program. I’d always thought that when you’re in the competition, you’re in for it all. Obviously not. I wonder if this is related at all to a big change that figure skating made several decades ago. There used to be three parts to the competition – the freestyle and short programs, but also the “figures” discipline. That was where figure skaters had to had to literally skate figures, trying to carefully duplicate figures on the ice, like a figure 8. It was painstaking, meticulous and slow, highly technical, and not great television, so it was rarely covered. But I always thought it very important – after all, it was the “figure” part of figure skating. And if it was bad television, so what? Just don’t cover it, which they usually didn’t. Though also at issue was that a lot of skaters didn’t like it, preferring to the far more artistic openness of the long and freestyle programs. Perhaps the rules before also eliminated bottom-scoring skaters after the “figures,” and this elimination after the short program is a carryover from that. Or not.
As for the competition, even without actually knowing what judges are looking for that makes a good program, as good as all the skaters looked, the top four really seemed to stand out as seriously impressive, on another level. And great fun to watch – though it’s always nerve-wracking with the risk of falling, especially when making quad jumps. The Japanese skater Yuma Kagiyama (who had won the short program in the Team competition), Adam Siao Him Fa of France, Daniel Grassl from Italy, and “quad god” Ilya Malinin of the U.S. A single, slight slip by Kagiyama on his landing of a triple axel kept him five points behind Malinin, who goes into the free skate (his specialty) with the lead. (The other expected Japanese contender, Shun Sato, had a stumble and finished ninth)
In the Women’s Combined Downhill/Slalom, one of the U.S. pairs was favored -- not surprising because skiing the downhill leg was Gold Medal winner Breezy Johnson, and doing the slalom was Mikaela Shiffrin, who has the most World Cup Alpine wins of any skier in history. And they’re the defending World Cup championship in the event. Johnson had a very good run, finishing first – but unfortunately, Shiffrin (who has an inexplicable history in the Olympics of not living up to her World Cup legend – this year alone she has won seven World Cup races and been second in the other) had a bizarrely poor run, in fact her worst-placing ever in a race she finished, came in third from last, and the team not only didn’t win, but missed a medal by .06 seconds. That said, I like Shiffrin a lot, and one of the things I admire greatly about her, beyond her skill, is that she always makes herself available after a run, even when she’s done poorly, and doesn’t make excuses, but owns what she did wrong, as she did here. Back to the race itself and its results, the good news for Team USA is that one if the other three American pairs of Paula Moltzan and Jacqueline Wiles did win the Bronze Medal.
In Women’s hockey, most of the Gold Medal games have come down to the U.S. against Canada. The U.S. has won twice, though their bitter rival Canada has more often come out ahead, including in their regularly Olympic contests. They played today in an elimination round game – and the U.S. crushed their opponent, 5-0. But they’ll most likely play again the medal round. Perhaps even in the Gold Medal game. Of note, this is the first time in 41 games that the Canadian women’s hockey team has been shutout.
More to come...
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