Olympics Updates: First Medals Set to Be Awarded at Beijing Games

So that’s it for the warm-up: the pyrotechnics and the puffer jackets, the calls for unity and the power politics, the Italians in their tricolor Armani capes and the American Samoan in, well, not much of anything.

Hours after host China opened its first Winter Olympics with an opening ceremony that was so meticulously choreographed that no one saw coming its selection of an athlete with a Uyghur name to help light the cauldron, it is, at long last, time for some medals.

What’s your pleasure? Skiing? Shooting? Skating? Sliding? The Olympics spring to life on Saturday with competition in nearly every sport.

The first gold medal will be handed out at about 4 a.m. Eastern in the women’s skiathlon, a cross-country race skied half in the “classical” up-and-down skiing style and half in the more freewheeling “skating” style. Jessie Diggins, a hero of the 2018 Games for the United States after her dramatic closing leg in the women’s team sprint — “They’ve given it everything on the Klaebo bakken!” — could be one of the medalists.

Biathlon begins with the mixed relay, part of an ongoing trend to add mixed-gender events — with teams comprising men and women — to both the Summer and Winter Games. Short-track speedskating will award its first medal in a mixed relay on Saturday as well, and mixed doubles curling, which started a few days ago, is also on the program. (Still to come are mixed team freestyle aerials, mixed team ski jumping and mixed team snowboard cross.)

The women’s ice hockey teams from Canada and the United States will continue on their collision course for a finals meeting. Their expected victims on Saturday: Finland (for Canada) and Russia (for the U.S.).

Freestyle skiers will zip down a course that’s intentionally extremely bumpy in the moguls event, women’s long-track speedskaters will go for their first gold medal on a smooth sheet of ice in the 3,000 meters.

At the ski jump, the women’s normal hill competition suddenly becomes wide open. Katharina Althaus of Germany, the defending silver medalist, and Sara Takanashi of Japan, the defending bronze medalist, are the elder stateswomen at age 25 in this young person’s game, but Marita Kramer of Austria is out because of a Covid-positive test.

There will no doubt be more of those as the weekend hits full speed. But for now, just sit back and pace yourself. Friday was Day 1. There are 16 more to go.

The U.S. broadcast coverage of the 2022 Winter Games continues on Friday with figure skating, snowboarding and hockey. All times are Eastern.

FIGURE SKATING USA Network will rebroadcast the men’s short program from the team competition at 4 p.m., featuring the world champion Nathan Chen of the United States. A replay of the rhythm dance component of the team competition, featuring the Americans Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue, starts at 5:15 p.m. At 6:30 p.m., USA Network will rebroadcast the pairs short program, which includes Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier of the United States.

OPENING CEREMONY NBC will air a package version of the opening ceremony held in the National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, at 8 p.m. President Xi Jinping of China attended the event, which included the lighting of the cauldron and the parade of nations.

CURLING The event’s competition continues with a mixed doubles game between Australia and Norway streaming at 8:05 p.m. on Peacock, and another between Switzerland and Sweden airing at 8:05 p.m. on Peacock and USA Network.

SNOWBOARDING The women’s slopestyle qualification begins at 9:45 p.m. on Peacock and live at 10 p.m. on USA Network. The venue, Genting Snow Park, is about 150 miles from Beijing and features a replica of the Great Wall of China. Jamie Anderson, who won the gold medal in the inaugural women’s slopestyle event at the 2014 Games in Sochi, will compete.

HOCKEY Canada and Finland’s women’s teams meet in a preliminary match at 11:10 p.m. Eastern on Peacock and 11:50 p.m. on USA Network.

In a climactic moment to end the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, China chose two athletes — including one it said was of Uyghur heritage — to deliver the flame to the Olympic cauldron and officially start the Games.

The moment was tinged with layers of symbolism — a man and a woman working together, a nod to China’s Olympic history — but it was the choice of Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier who the Chinese said has Uyghur roots, that confronted head-on one of the biggest criticisms of the country’s role as host.

The Chinese Communist Party state has conducted a mass detention and re-education campaign targeting Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang that the United States has declared as genocidal. It was among the reasons that several countries, including the United States, took part in a diplomatic boycott of the Games.

Lighting the Olympic cauldron is a central ritual for each opening ceremony, as hosts invent ever more spectacular ways to ignite the flame that stays alight during the sporting festival. The chief director of this year’s ceremony, Zhang Yimou, had promised a novel showstopper.

In the final act of the curtain-raising event, a group of six former Chinese athletes representing previous decades completed a relay that circled the stadium with torches, passing the flame on to the next. In the final handoff, it was delivered to Yilamujiang and Zhao Jiawen, a men’s Nordic combined athlete.

Walking together, they placed it in the center of a giant snowflake — another recurring symbol of the ceremony — that was raised in the center of the stadium.

Last year, NBC Sports executives called the Tokyo Olympics their most challenging undertaking ever. Now, that experience is starting to look like a cakewalk.

For Beijing, NBC confronts an even trickier mix of challenges, threatening to diminish one of the network’s signature products and one of the last major draws for broadcast television.

The list of headaches is long: an event nearly free of spectators, which drains excitement from the arena and the ski slopes; the threat that star athletes will test positive for the coronavirus, potentially dashing their Olympic dreams; and the fact that a vast majority of the network’s announcers, including Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski, are offering color commentary from a company compound in Stamford, Conn., instead of from China.

The rising political tensions between the United States and China, including those related to claims of human rights abuses by China, add a troubling cloud to what is typically a feel-good spectacle.

“My friends and colleagues at NBC have been dealt the worst hand imaginable,” said Bob Costas, who served as the network’s prime-time Olympics host for more than two decades.

The success of the Games is critical to NBC. Even as streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ have lured millions of people from broadcast networks, sports have remained a reliable moneymaker for the traditional outlets. The company has exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032, at a cost of $7.75 billion.

Ratings for the Games have dipped in recent years — and fell sharply during last year’s Summer Olympics. NBC has told advertisers to expect the ratings to be lower than the 2018 Winter Games, according to three people familiar with the network’s ratings estimates.