Winter Olympics day seven: skeleton, ice hockey, curling and more – as it happened

LIVE – Updated at 15:31

Ayumu Hirano won snowboard halfpipe gold, Suzanne Schulting defended her 1,000m short track title and Christopher Grotheer won the skeleton.

This time Ayumu Hirano would not be denied. Not by the judges. Not even by the greatest snowboarder in history. Instead, amid the most intense pressure and anger, the 23-year-old from Japan found the halfpipe equivalent of the holy grail.

And as Hirano stood on the podium with his gold medal there was a sense of something else too. That a torch was being passed from one generation to the next, as if by osmosis, from Shaun White to Hirano: from the goat to the new breed of bucks pushing at the boundaries like the American once did.

Related: Farewell to the Flying Tomato: how Shaun White left an Olympic legacy

Grotheer begins his final run. He has 0.8sec to play with.

Grotheer as expected closes out the gold medal, and a glorious one-two for Germany. Axel Yungk second for silver, Yan Wengang of China finishes third for bronze ... that’s a full podium of history, as neither nation had won an Olympic skeleton medal before: and China had never before won a sliding medal of any sort.

Canada go 11-0 up against Sweden in the final period in the women’s ice hockey! That’s Canada beating Sweden 11-0.

That match is definitely over (although they have seven minutes to play) and so is today’s blog ... See you tomorrow more much, much more.

With Canada crushing Sweden 9-0 in the women’s ice hockey, and Latvia and Finland seemingly inseparable at 1-1 in the men’s, we’re going to call it a day for the live blog.

Barney Ronay on two tales which demonstrate the darker side of these Winter Olympics:

Related: Kamila Valieva and Zhu Yi are victims in Winter Olympics’ puppet