See the Best Photos From the Olympics

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China’s first gold medal of the Games came by the slimmest of margins: a last-second lunge by Wu Dajing edged Pietro Sighel of Italy by .016 of a second, or about half a skate blade. The Chinese win in short-track speedskating’s mixed-gender event thrilled both the team, which had been the favorite entering the race, and its fans, who ignored an edict that barred cheering to roar in delight at the triumph. But it almost didn’t happen at all: China advanced to the final only after judges disqualified teams from Russia and the United States, which was called for blocking in the semifinal.

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Ursa Bogataj of Slovenia won the gold medal and her teammate (and roommate) Nika Kriznar grabbed the bronze in women’s ski jumping, which was held at the Games for only the third time. Bogataj’s win completed a remarkable comeback from 2018: At the Pyeongchang Games, she finished last. “It’s my dream,” she said. “I can’t believe what happened.”

Nothing, it seems, can stop Johannes Bo. Not the French team. Not the Russian Olympic Committee team. Not even the coronavirus. Bo, one of the stars of Norway’s mighty biathlon squad, had his Olympic plans jumbled this week after he was identified as a close contact of someone who had tested positive for the virus. Forced to train alone, he shrugged off the restrictions. At the medals ceremony, he stood apart from his teammates in the mixed relay — one of this year’s new events — as they collected their prizes. “I can train,” he told reporters, “and I can win gold for Norway.”

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Claudia Pechstein skated in the first pair of speedskating’s 3,000-meter race, which only seemed courteous since, after all, she had held the Olympic record in the event since 2002. Germany’s Pechstein is no longer much of a medal contender at age 49, the oldest female athlete in Olympic history. And now her record is gone, too: Irene Schouten of the Netherlands claimed it, and the gold medal, with a blazing last lap. It may not be Schouten’s last medal, or her last record, either: She could win as many as four in Beijing.

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The American Jessie Diggins calls it the “pain cave”: that deep, dark place that athletes enter as they empty the tank, giving their all in the hope that they calculate exertion and energy just right and exhaust both at the precise moment they cross the finish line. It’s why the end of a cross-country skiing race often yields a snowy area littered with bodies. Only the medalists, like Therese Johaug of Norway, who claimed the first gold medal of the Beijing Games in the women’s skiathlon, can summon a tiny bit more, to celebrate.

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