Olympics Live Updates: Chloe Kim Looks to Claim Another Olympic Snowboarding Victory

The last time Chloe Kim competed at the Winter Olympics, she was 17 and unbeatable.

Her first run in the women’s snowboard halfpipe was one of the best in history. Her last run did not matter, because she had already clinched the gold medal, but she did it anyway and did it better. She arrived into the embrace of a warm South Korean crowd, a loving family and instant stardom.

It all seemed so easy.

The 2022 Olympic halfpipe final may feel less like a coronation for Kim, now 21, than a personal comeback of sorts. The attention from her last Olympic victory — and some of the nastiness, even within snowboarding circles — nearly chased her from the sport. She went to college at Princeton, bought a house and didn’t strap on a board for 22 months. She grew up into someone more complicated than America’s snowboarding sweetheart.

She is still the best in the world, though her rivals have closed in over the past four years. All of it will make for a compelling final on Thursday (Wednesday evening in the United States) at Genting Snow Park, where Kim faces a world of competition, especially from a pair of veteran Chinese riders: Cai Xuetong, 27 and affectionately nicknamed Tong Tong, and Liu Jiayu, 28, who was the distant silver medalist four years ago.

There is also the intriguing sister combination of Sena and Ruki Tomita of Japan. Either of them, or both of them, could find the podium. So might their teammate Mitsuki Ono, who finished second to Kim in the Olympic qualification round.

The men’s final will come a day later, on Friday in China (Thursday evening in the United States).

Nathan Chen, the favorite yet again to win the Olympic gold medal in men’s figure skating, is caught between wanting to forget the 2018 Games and needing to remember them.

Before the figure skating competition started in Beijing, he stood before reporters and was asked if he had regrets from his Olympic debut, when he uncharacteristically faltered.

“I have a pretty terrible memory,” he said, making it clear that he didn’t want to talk about it with his second Olympics just days away.

Chen, 22, was more willing to be introspective about a week before he left for the Games. In an hourlong video interview, he described how finishing 17th in the short program in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was the worst moment in his young life. But also, in many ways, the best.

It’s nearly impossible to go to the Olympics as a gold medal favorite without letting that gold medal become all-consuming, and Chen found that out the hard way, when his obsession with winning became what he called his “demise.” But after going into Pyeongchang feeling “uptight all the time,” with a sense of dread that he wouldn’t live up to expectations, this time he is trying to appreciate the experience — win or lose.

Evan Lysacek, the 2010 Olympic champion who sometimes skates where Chen trains near Los Angeles, helped him find a new approach, he said. Chen appreciated the advice because he knew Lysacek could empathize with him: Lysacek finished fourth at the 2006 Olympics before winning the gold medal four years later.

“He said, win or lose, you’re going to go home and you’re going to continue the life that you had,” Chen said. “And that’s honestly very reassuring because I think that oftentimes you kind of dramatize things and are like, ‘Oh, man, it’s the end of the world if things don’t go well.’ But really, no, the world continues to turn and things will go back to normal.”

Gaining that perspective, Chen said, helped make him the competitor he is today.

For the past three years, he has been the world’s most dominant skater, including in the short program, in which he landed two quadruple jumps on Tuesday — one of them in a quadruple, triple-jump combination — to score 113.97 points, a world record. The free skate is on Thursday (Wednesday night in the United States).

“Sometime between the short program and the free program four years ago, it allowed me to sort of switch perspectives on what was really important,” he said.

The U.S. broadcast coverage of the 2022 Winter Games continues on Wednesday with men’s free skate, women’s snowboarding halfpipe final and curling. All times are Eastern.

FIGURE SKATING Nathan Chen, the three-time world champion and a 2018 Olympian, headlines the men’s figure skating free skate event in pursuit of an individual gold medal. The event airs live in prime time on NBC, USA Network and Peacock. Coverage on USA Network and Peacock will begin live at 8:30 p.m. Skating action from Groups 3 and 4, which include Chen and the two-time Olympian Jason Brown, will air live beginning at 10:40 p.m. on NBC and Peacock.

SNOWBOARDING The women’s cross final will air live at 8 p.m. on NBC. Afterward, Chloe Kim, a 2018 Olympic gold medalist, will try to defend her title when the women’s snowboarding halfpipe final airs live at 8:30 p.m. on NBC. Coverage of the qualification round of the men’s snowboard cross event will air live at 10:50 p.m. on USA Network.

ALPINE SKIING The Alpine skiing men’s combined competition gets underway with the downhill phase, airing on Peacock and the NBC Olympic channel at 9:30 p.m. The slalom phase will air at 1:15 a.m.

CURLING The U.S. women’s curling team, including Tabitha Peterson, faces the Russian Olympic Committee in its opening round-robin matchup, airing live at 8:05 p.m. on CNBC.

You know Eileen Gu is a hot topic in China when even the transportation ministry joins in the celebration of her gold medal.

In an article posted on its official account on the social media platform WeChat, the ministry gleefully noted that Gu’s grandmother, Feng Guozhen, had worked for the ministry as a senior engineer. The article credited her for instilling in her granddaughter a “profound feeling” for China.

“Everyone is proud of her!” it said.

The ministry’s statement was part of an extraordinary outpouring of adulation for Gu, the 18-year-old Californian who has become a star of the Winter Olympics.

So intense was the reaction online to her victory in the freeski big air competition on Tuesday that traffic briefly overwhelmed the servers of Weibo, the popular Twitter-like platform, according to an article by iFeng, a site owned by Phoenix New Media.

Various stories about her were among the hottest topics on the platform, including seven of the top 10. The hashtag #EileenGugoldmedal had been viewed more than two billion times by Wednesday afternoon.

For Gu’s fans, no detail about her life was too obscure.

There were posts about her attending a summer math camp in Beijing and getting 10 hours of sleep a day, prompting debates among users about whether that was too much or too little. A video interview on China’s state television in which she said she ate pork and leek dumplings after winning the gold drew 2.5 million viewers.

Even before the gold, Gu was a phenomenon. As an athlete and a model, her image is everywhere in China — on television, billboards, apps and video platforms. According to Chinese media reports, she has partnered with more than 20 brands, including Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Company, far more than other A-list celebrities in China.

Not everyone was positive. Like other athletes from abroad who are competing under China’s flag, she has faced questions of whether she had changed citizenship to compete for China rather than the United States, where she grew up.

“Why doesn’t she dare to answer the question directly?” one comment said after the news conference where she was asked repeatedly. “It’s not hard to say that she has given up her American citizenship, and now she only has Chinese nationality, right?”

Doubters, for now, are definitely in the minority online. “This is the positive energy idol that young people should pursue today, an all-around lady, practically flawless!” read a far more typical post.

The celebration is not over. Gu has two more events: slopestyle on Sunday and Monday, and halfpipe on Feb. 17 and 18.

Claire Fu contributed research.

Members of the United States figure skating team will have to wait an unknown period of time — maybe even a day or more — before getting their hands on the medals they won in the team event at the Beijing Games.

The ceremony was abruptly postponed shortly before it was to begin on Tuesday night, according to an official from U.S. Figure Skating who said the athletes had been given no reason for the delay. The U.S. figure skaters and ice dancers had been dressed in their team gear and were just about to leave for the ceremony when they were told to turn back, the official said.

A spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, Mark Adams, called the delay an “emerging issue” at a news conference on Wednesday. He said Olympic officials were consulting with lawyers and the International Skating Union, the sport’s global governing body, to resolve the matter.

“A situation arose today at short notice which requires legal consultation with the I.S.U.,” Adams said. He added that the I.O.C. would provide an update later Wednesday and that the issue “will become clearer.”

The team event is a mixed-gender competition that made its debut at the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia. A Russian team won that year and also claimed the silver medal (behind Canada) four years later in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The United States won the bronze medal in both previous editions of the event.

This year, the American team, led by the three-time world champion Nathan Chen, finished second behind the Russian team when the event concluded on Monday. The Russian team dominated the competition, led by its newest star, 15-year-old Kamila Valieva. Japan finished third.

It was the best finish ever in the team event for the United States, which won bronze at the past two Olympics.

The team event is contested over several days. In it, each country is represented by men’s and women’s singles skaters, a pairs team and a set of ice dancers. The athletes compete in several rounds of performances, and the scores are combined to crown a winner.

The event can showcase the breadth of a team’s skating talent, but team events also come with risks. Germany and Ukraine failed to score points in portions of this year’s competition after losing athletes to positive coronavirus tests, ending their slim medal hopes.

But the disqualification of any athlete from a medal-winning team — a regular occurrence in other Olympic sports — means the loss of that athlete’s points. That could alter the final standings.

As snowboarders turn themselves into human pendulums in the halfpipe event at the Winter Olympics, they will be flying high and long.

The Olympic standards require a 600-foot-long run at an 18-degree pitch and U-shaped walls that are 22 feet high and 64 feet apart from lip to lip.

Some snowboarders can soar more than 20 feet beyond the edge of the pipe, sliding up the wall and into the air to the height of a two- to four-story building. Imagine dunking on a basketball hoop that is twice, three times or even four times regulation height. Now add spinning and flipping in midair to the equation.

And that’s only the height. Snowboarders are barreling down a chute as long as the Space Needle in Seattle is high.

All of which is to say that coming down can be brutal. The halfpipe is made of snow, but it is not plush — falling, especially from a 22-foot jump, can feel like landing on a block of ice.

There are only a handful of Olympic-size super pipes in the world, in locations including Calgary, Alberta; Laax, Switzerland; Mammoth Lakes, Calif.; and Copper Mountain in Frisco, Colo. Snowboarders will travel around the world to train at those resorts in preparation for competitions.

It was a heartbreaking end, Mikaela Shiffrin’s second early exit from an Olympic race in three days. But Shiffrin was not ready to move on. Not just yet.

Frustrated and bewildered by a Beijing Olympics dream going wrong in real time, Shiffrin sat down in the snow next to the slalom course on Wednesday morning and buried her head between her bent knees. She remained there for more than 20 minutes as some of her rivals whizzed past, lost in her thoughts and her disappointment and trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

When she finally came down the hill, Shiffrin didn’t have answers.

“I had the intention to do my best skiing and my quickest turns,” Shiffrin told reporters, fighting back tears. “But in order to do that, I had to push the line, the tactics. And it is really on the limit then. And things happen so fast that there was really not space to slip up, even a little bit.”

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Nothing in Shiffrin’s professional career portended the series of quick, complete disappointments she is enduring this week on her sport’s biggest stage. Slalom is ski racing’s most dauntingly precise discipline, but for Shiffrin, a two-time Olympic champion and the most decorated slalom skier in history, to last only five seconds in her best event was almost unfathomable.

As Shiffrin wiped away tears on live television, friends and strangers rallied to her side. Her boyfriend, the Norwegian skiing star Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, posted a supportive message on Instagram alongside an image of Shiffrin sitting alone in the snow.

“When you look at this picture you can make up so many statements, meanings and thoughts,” he wrote. “Most of you probably look at it saying: ‘she has lost it,’ ‘she can’t handle the pressure’ or ‘what happened?’… Which makes me frustrated, because all I see is a top athlete doing what a top athlete does! It’s a part of the game and it happens.”

The gymnast Simone Biles, who withdrew from several events in last summer’s Tokyo Games because of a mental block that prevented her from competing safely, offered three white hearts on Twitter.

Shiffrin has three Olympic races left if she chooses to enter them, something that no longer seems a certainty.

“I will try to reset again and maybe try to reset better this time,” she said. “But I also don’t know how to do it better, because I just don’t. I’ve never been in this position before, and I don’t know how to handle it.

“If I am going to ski out on the fifth gate, well, what’s the point?”

As she spoke, the slalom went on without her. Petra Vlhova, who has had a pitched rivalry with Shiffrin this season, came back after an erratic first run to win the gold, becoming the first Alpine Olympic medalist from Slovakia. Katharina Liensberger of Austria was in second place, eight hundredths of a second behind, just barely faster than Wendy Holdener of Switzerland, who won the bronze.

Shiffrin, who was expected to contend for multiple gold medals at these Games, had trouble in Wednesday’s run almost from the beginning, with her feet and arms not in sync, her balance teetering and the gates seeming to come at her faster than she could react. She nearly fell rounding the fourth gate, and her usually composed bearing was harried. As she passed the fifth gate, she was heading for the side of the trail and knew her race was over. She was disqualified before the sixth gate.

In an interview, she explained what she had been thinking about while she sat on the side of the trail. She said she was overcome by a feeling of having let herself and others down.

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“I was trying to look back and think back on the last days,” she said, “and think what I have been trying to do and what I have been doing with my skiing that would suggest that on the fifth gate I would push myself a little bit too hard to actually not be able to stay on the course.”

Shiffrin, 26, won the 2014 Olympic Games slalom and has dominated the event ever since, winning more World Cup slalom races, 47, than any other racer, male or female. She rarely makes mistakes; when she failed to finish a slalom last month, it was the first time that had happened in nearly four years.

Shiffrin has spent the past weeks talking about external obstacles. She tested positive for the coronavirus in December and was dreading the logistical issues involved with getting to China.

In her first days at the Games, she often discussed the wind and the randomness of what could transpire on a gusty mountain. But none of those factors have come into play, and on Wednesday she tried to brush them aside.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Shiffrin said, trying to laugh at herself — or perhaps trying to convince herself. “And it’s so stupid to care this much. But I feel that I have to question a lot now.”

Shiffrin has won three medals in two previous Olympics, but these are the first since her father, Jeff Shiffrin, died two years ago. That did not escape her mind as she prepared to leave the race area.

“Right now, I would really like to call him,” Shiffrin said.