Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics daily briefing: real snow causes chaos

Today in a nutshell: Actual real snow arrived suddenly in Beijing and disrupted events

Next up: There is still some curling and ice hockey to come today. Tomorrow we will get the rescheduled freeski slopestyle qualification with Eileen Gu, and the medals in the ice dance competition

One of the criticism’s of hosting the Winter Olympics in Beijing has been the negative environmental impact of the Games’ reliance on artificial snow. Well, not today at the men’s 4x10km cross-country relay, where the real-thing hampered the athletes – and the spectators – as the Russian Olympics Committee (ROC) team won a pretty slow race in difficult conditions. To put it into context, a winning time of 1:54:50 was over 20 minutes slower than the equivalent race at Pyeongchang in 2018. Norway were second, France third, on a gruelling course that includes 400m of climbing in the 10km. Rather them than me.

The snow also disrupted events elsewhere, with Eileen Gu’s much anticipated qualifying run in the freeski slopestyle postponed. Organisers said the storm had left too much loose snow on the freestyle course and that in order to ensure the safety of athletes, they decided to postpone the events.

The second training session for the women’s downhill race was cancelled, but the men’s alpine skiing giant slalom went ahead with delays. “Definitely, the light is more than skiable, it just makes it difficult. I like it,” Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen said after his first run. Jamaica’s Benjamin Alexander put it more succinctly at the end of one of his runs, as he was caught on camera saying “Frickin’ hell, that was hard!”

The gold eventually went to Switzerland’s Marco Odermatt who finished with a combined time of 2:09:35, putting him 0.19 seconds