Winter Olympics: Day-by-day guide to key events and British medal hopes

The Winter Olympics is nearly upon us and here's your day-by-day guide to all the action in Beijing.

The sporting programme includes a record 109 events over 15 disciplines in seven sports.

Team GB, consisting of 50 athletes, will participate in 11 of the disciplines.

All times are GMT and events are subject to change.

Medal events: None

Highlights

As ever, there are so many sports to pack into an Olympics that events start well before Friday's opening ceremony. There's only one sport in action on Wednesday: curling's mixed doubles begins its round-robin phase.

Brit watch

Team GB are in action from the very first moment in Beijing. Jen Dodds andBruce Mouat are the reigning mixed doubles world champions and begin their attempt to convert that into Olympic gold against Sweden(12:05). Sweden's Oskar Eriksson and Almida de Val are the world bronze medallists — Eriksson already has two Olympic medals to his name — so they'll be a strong early test.

World watch

There will be pressure on China's mixed doubles team — which had yet to be confirmed as of mid-January — as they are the first athletes in action for the host nation. China, who only just missed the semi-finals in 2018, play Switzerland's Jenny Perret andMartin Rios, who are mixed doubles specialists returning to the Olympics after taking silver four years ago.

Expert knowledge

Mixed doubles curling is appearing at the Olympics for only the second time. In 2018, nobody from Team GB was involved in the event, which was won by Canada ahead of the Swiss. In mixed doubles, each team has one male and one female thrower. One person throws rocks one and five, while the other throws rocks two, three and four. The Beijing 2022 curling venue is the Ice Cube, which, yes, is the renamed Water