Winter Olympics live updates: Scotty James, Belle Brockhoff, Emily Arthur all in action on massive day for Australia

A number of Australian medal hopefuls will get their Winter Olympics underway on a big day of action in Beijing.

Follow all the action in our live blog.

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By Andrew Mcgarry

(All times AEDT):

By Andrew Mcgarry

While we have some time on our hands, let's take a quick look back at one part of yesterday's events, the men's figure skating.

Australia's Brendan Kerry, who carried the flag at the opening ceremony with aerialist Laura Peel, was in action as things kicked off with the short program.

Kerry — skating to «Leave a light on» by Tom Walker — put in a big performance, scoring 84.79 to qualify comfortably for Thursday's free skate in 17th spot.

Up at the pointy end of things, the expectation was for a big battle between two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan and American Nathan Chen.

But while Chen put in a stellar routine, landing a string of high-scoring quad jumps to break Hanyu's world record score for the short program with 113.97, the big talking point was the beginning of the Japanese superstar's program.

Hanyu had only been going for 30 or so seconds when he went for his first jump, a quadruple salchow. Unfortunately, his blade got caught in the ice and he could only do one full spin instead of four — it was a missed element, so he scored nothing for the first of his jumps.

Hanyu recovered to land the rest of his jumps and record a score of 95.15 — but that left him in eighth place, trailing Chen by nearly 19 points, a huge margin in figure skating.

He will go all out in tomorrow's free skate to try and make up the margin, including an attempt to land a quad axel, the only quad jump that has never been landed in competition. The free skate will