Beau will be here shortly, in the meantime here’s Martin Belam’s summary of a thrilling day one:
The first gold medal of the Games went to Norway’s Therese Johaug in the women’s 7.5km + 7.5km Skiathlon. She has won 10 world championship titles and it was the fourth Olympic medal of her career, but her first individual Olympic gold. She absolutely bossed it, finishing 30 seconds ahead of Russian Olympic Committee athlete Natalya Nepryayeva in second and Austria’s Teresa Stadlober in third after a gruelling race.
The wind played havoc with the shooting in an exciting Biathlon mixed relay race, gusting up to 5.6 metres per second at some points. A gripping three-man finish gave Norway their second gold, France recovered from a dreadful first leg to claim the silver, while the Russian team took bronze.
The wind was also buffeting the snowboarders. Great Britain’s Katie Ormerod – who missed out in Pyeongchang in 2018 due to a horrendous injury – failed to qualify for the finals of the women’s slopestyle. New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott leads the pack going into tomorrow’s final. Jamie Anderson and Julia Marino of the US, and Australia’s Tess Coady are all safely through. “It’s cold! It’s hard to keep your core temperature warm and then doing tricks feels a little bit more intimidating as you are just, like, stiff,” said two-time Olympic gold medalist Anderson.
The Dutch have been a dominant force at Olympic speed skating for years, and there was no let-up as Irene Schouten claimed the Netherlands’ first gold in the 3,000m speed skating. She broke Germany’s Claudia Pechstein’s Olympic record that had stood since 2002. Incredibly, aged 49, Pechstein herself also broke a record today – becoming the oldest woman to compete at a Winter Olympics.
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Shaun White, triple gold medallist and the oldest member of the US team in China has announced that the Beijing Games will be his final snowboarding event. He told a press conference that when he made the decision he was on a chairlift by himself. “I was watching the sun go down and it just hit me,” he said. “It was very sad and a surreal moment but really joyous as well.”
A total of 45 new positive Covid tests have been announced, with athletes and officials accounting for 25 of the cases. “In general we think the situation is under control. The cases within the closed loop have not spread and they do not affect the competition” said Huang Chun, the Games’ deputy director-general of the office of pandemic prevention and control.
Dutch journalist Sjoerd den Daas was dragged away by Chinese security officials in the middle of making a live broadcast for NOS last night. The IOC has rather blandly described it as “an unfortunate circumstance”. He was eventually able to continue broadcasting from the opening ceremony.