Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Medals from unexpected places.

The US jumps up the medal standings, but not from where you thought they would.

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• We start with… cross-country skiing? Well, that's odd. Something must be happening, right? That's the only reason NBC would have this on. American Ben Ogden from Vermont is trying for the first American medal in men's cross-country skiing in 50 years. FIFTY YEARS? That's a long time. I don't know if you've watched any cross-country skiing in the Olympics, but the leaderboard usually looks like this: Norway, Sweden, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Norway, Norway, Sweden, Finland. So maybe it's not so surprising no American has a medal in the last 50 years. This race is the Men's Sprint. When the show opened, NBC was showing us the qualifying race. In that one, Ogden got beat out in a photo finish and was in third place, but his time was good enough to make the final. So now we're on the final, and NBC has a picture-in-picture of everyone watching from Ben's living room in Vermont. This race only takes about three minutes, so we get to see the whole thing. Norwegian Johannes Klaebo literally sprinted up a hill to pull away from the pack. Sprinted. In skis! It was unreal. But BEN! Ben pulls away from his Norwegian competitor to finish an uncontested second and gets silver, the first American men's medal in cross-country since 1976. His living room crowd goes crazy. Way to go, Ben! And just so you know, the leaderboard finished like this: Norway, USA, Norway, Finland, Czech, and Norway.
• Off to a different mountain for Men's Slopestyle skiing. The athletes ski down the mountain, riding rails and doing acrobatic jumps. I do like watching it, but I always feel like the analysts are doing everything they can to keep from screaming "Duuuuuuuuuude" when they talk. Trivia time! Switch-triple-16. 1440. Goofy kick back. Slide 630. Three of those are real moves and one I just made up. Do you know which one? I'll tell you later.
• American Alex Hall is in second place on his final run. Can he get to gold? Eek. No. He falls off the first rail, so his current score will be his best one. Will it be enough? Yes! No one else beats his score, so he gets silver.
• Around the Games! US Women's hockey shut out Canada 5-0. Take that, Canada! In mixed doubles curling, the US takes silver. At the women's luge, Ashley Farquharson from Park City, Utah gets bronze. It would be nice to see more than just 10 seconds of each of these things. I guess I need to start taking off work so I can watch TV in the afternoon.
• It's time for more crazy people, so we head up the mountain for the downhill portion of the Women's Team Combined. It's cloudier today, so the mountain isn't as photogenic as it is when it's sunny, but there's still a section of the downhill run that passes between two giant columns of rock that is just spectacular.
• Breezy Johnson and Mikaela Shiffrin have been skiing teammates since they were 12 years old. Today they're teammates in the Team Combined. Breezy goes first and finishes… first place! It's bad news for everyone else if Mikaela Shiffrin has a head start on them. Along with them, the US has another pair in the top four, Jacqueline Wiles and Paula Moltzan, who will also try to get the US a medal.
• Oftentimes NBC's Olympic fluff tries to make mountains out of molehills ("Billy had a hangnail at an inconvenient time…"). But tonight's story is a legitimate tragedy. American skater Maxim Naumov's parents were among those killed in the helicopter/plane accident in Washington, D.C. last year. They were both figure skaters for Russia back in the '90s and made it to two Olympics (Albertville and Lillehammer). After moving to the United States, they opened a figure skating school near Boston, where Max still teaches. After the crash, Max says he can still feel their presence when he skates. Is someone chopping onions in here? Let's get to the skating.
• Max is the first skater up on NBC's "Event of the Night," the Men's Short Program figure skating. It's obviously a very emotional moment for him and the crowd, since everyone knows about his parents. As he waits for his score, he holds up a photo of him as a child with his parents. His score puts him in second place for now, but that probably won't last long. But I’ll bet his parents would still be proud.
• Stanley Tucci is back in Milan eating raw fish. He only does it for 30 seconds. This is really how fluff should be: short enough that it leaves me wanting more, not so long that I wonder why it's still on.
• Breaking news! There's a person being detained for the abduction of Savannah Guthrie's mother, Nancy. I don't have any information I can share with the FBI, so I'm just going to fast-forward through this story back to Olympic action.
• Max gets bumped off the leaderboard pretty quickly and a few more skaters have their turn on the ice before it's time for the main event, the Quad God, Ilia Malinin. He's back in his Road Warrior outfit and flying through the air like no one else can, including performing a back flip, which Johnny says is a move that was recently legalized. Ha! I knew it used be against the rules. It wasn't just the Mandela Effect. Speaking of… I'm 100 percent in the camp that says Fruit in the Loom used to have a cornucopia in it, and you can't convince me otherwise. In the meantime, Ilia has the highest score tonight, so he'll be the leader going into Friday's final.
• Slalom time! The second part of of the Women's Team Combined is up next with the US trying for two medals. The first American on the slope is Paula Moltzan. If she can finish first here, she and Wiles would have a really good chance to medal since there would only be three skiers left to beat the team of her and Wiles. Ahhhh! She finishes second. That' s still good, but there are three skiers remaining with better downhill times. They'll need two of those three to be slow.
• Mikaela fluff! She watches home videos of herself as a kid and tells an unseen producer what she's thinking in those moments. She won gold in Sochi and didn't know how to react, then in Beijing she was ready to win gold, but didn't. The mystery producer wants to know what she'd tell her younger self. "Keep going!" That's what I'm doing. I keep going past the fluff.
• Next up, Italy's Martina Peterlini, whose teammate put them in third after the downhill. OH! She misses a gate. Now only one skier has to be slower for Wiles and Moltzan to medal. Austria's Katharina Huber is next and OH NO! Gets into first place. Now the only way Wiles and Moltzan can medal is if Shiffrin finishes slow. OH NO! Shiffrin does indeed finish slow, which is bad for her and Breezy, but results in a bronze medal for Wiles and Moltzan. They're both excited. Good for them!
• Short-track speed skating! The Mixed Team Relay final is up, with Italy, China, Germany, and Belgium competing with two women and two men on each team. The Americans? Crashed in the semifinals, so they have no one in this race. Italy wins by a big margin and the crowd goes nuts.
• Snooping Around Italy. Grandpa Snoop has been hanging out with people behind the scenes. He showed the people drying off the ski jump with leaf blowers, the guy who sprays water on the curling sheet, the coaches in the trees of the downhill, and some guy playing a saxophone at the downhill run. Snoop called it a trumpet, but he's a rapper, so I'll cut him some slack. You know, if more fluff was stuff like this, Snoop looking at what's happening behind the scenes, I could get behind it.
• Three silver and two bronze medals for the US today. Nice! No golds, but we do get to watch Norwegian Johannes Klaebo get his gold for his cross-country win with Ben Ogden standing right next to him. After Norway's anthem is over, Ben Ogden shows off by doing a backflip off the podium. FOR SECOND PLACE! Now THAT is someone who is excited to be there.
• Trivia answer time! The Switch-triple-16, 1440, and Slide 630 are all real moves in Slopestyle skiing, but there's no such thing as a goofy kick back. At least, not yet. If anyone on Team USA is reading this and wants to invent one, let me know so I can write about it.

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Don't you love seeing happy people win medals? Ben Ogden was excited. Wiles and Moltzan were excited. Alex Hall was excited. It's just too bad that none of them won gold and had a chance to show off their excitement by singing. But who knows? Maybe someone will tomorrow. Let's all check back then!                  

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