Winter Olympics day 16: GB in women’s curling final; men’s ice hockey – live!

Curling: GB has the hammer (last shot). Japan opts to put its first rock in the house instead of putting up a guard. GB’s Hailey Duff easily removes that one. Japan plays its own takeout, and GB decides to ignore that one to play the conventional shot for a team with hammer, a corner guard, behind which they deposit rocks that will be difficult to remove.

NBC then does its traditional lengthy commercial interruption during the middle of an end, but we have ways of seeing what happened Basically, it’s a constellation of rocks in front of the house, which is kind of bad for GB, especially given the red Japanese rock sitting in the back of the house

Curling: Here we go!

After taking bronze in 2014 and fourth in 2018, Eve Muirhead is back again representing the birthplace of the game, Scotland, which specializes in inventing sports that torture the rest of the world. She’s also the 2013 world champion.

Alpine team event: It’s minus-3 degrees. Fahrenheit. And windy, though not enough to postpone it again — which is good, because there’s not another day to which it may be postponed.

The format: Skiers race head-to-head on parallel courses. Each team has two men and two women. Most wins … um … wins. If they’re tied, the combined time of the fastest man and fastest woman determines the winner.

The courses are short giant slalom-ish layouts.

Medal count check: Looks like Norway won’t match its record medal haul of 39 unless it sweeps the cross-country event and reaches the podium in Alpine. They may just have to settle for the record for gold medals — 15.

Canada (25 medals) is virtually assured of finishing ahead of the USA (24) in total medals, but the USA leads in gold medals 8-4 (pending the figure skating team event).

Ready for February Madness? That’s the Alpine team event, which uses a bracket system for head-to-head matchups. It’s a bit shorter than the Big Basketball Tournament in March.

As we bid farewell to these most unusual Olympics, please share your favorite and least favorite moments. Or just some offbeat thought. Or some sport you’d like to see added. Email me with your thoughts or tweet @duresport

For one last time (for these Olympics), hello from me (Beau Dure) to you (the other billions of people on the planet).

We’ll soon have the Alpine team event, which was rescheduled and moved to this date and time. It’ll be Mikaela Shiffrin’s last chance at a medal here, but it’s a slim one.

In four-man bobsleigh, Canada’s Justin Kripps is currently interrupting a German sweep, while Team GB’s Brad Hall sits sixth and has an outside chance of getting on the podium. A little later, we’ll have the traditional finales of a cross-country long-distance race and the men’s hockey final.

But you’re all here for curling. As you should be, and I’m not just saying that because I spent nine hours in a curling club today. (First two shots were like Niklas Edin. The rest were like Homer Simpson.)

Can Eve Muirhead get Team GB its first and surely only gold of these Olympics? Or will Japan’s Satsuki Fujisawa, the bronze medalist in 2018, spring another surprise?

Coming up today

Times are all in local Beijing time. For Sydney it is +3 hours, for London it is -8 hours, for New York it is -13 hours and San Francisco is -16 hours.

• 9.00am Alpine skiing – the team event🥇
• 9.05am Curling – the women’s gold medal match: Great Britain v Japan 🥇
• 9.30am and 11.20am Bobsleigh – the final two runs of the four-man competition 🥇
• 12.10pm Ice hockey – the men’s gold-medal match, Finland v almost defending champions Russian Olympic Committee. In 2018 the competition was won by the ‘Olympic Athletes from Russia’ team, as the Russian Olympic Committee was suspended at that point due to doping violations. 🤔
• 2.30pm Cross-country skiing– women’s 30km mass free start 🥇
• 8pm Closing ceremony – Oh, that’s it. Done.