2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang

Winter ice sports depend on this one fact: Ice is slippery.

The low friction of ice is why speedskaters can reach 35 mph, why figure skaters can twirl in dizzying circles, and why a 40-pound curling stone can glide and accomplish whatever the heck the point of curling is.

The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, have come to a close, and only four athletes were busted for doping.

Yay?

Editor’s note, February 6, 2025: This story originally ran during the 2018 Winter Olympics and is being reshared as part of coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Ever wondered how biathlon came to be? Although it’s a popular sport in Europe, the combination of ski racing and rifle shooting strikes many Americans as odd and unfamiliar. But, it turns out, biathlon isn’t a Frankenstein sport that came out of nowhere. In fact, it has a long military history that stretches back several centuries.

After years of threatening to kill millions of Americans with nuclear weapons, North Korea now says it wants to chat with US leaders as way to lower tensions due to its improving nuclear weapons program.

That’s big: Washington and Pyongyang only hold diplomatic talks about very specific issues, like releasing US hostages from North Korea. But they rarely discuss a way toward ending the years of animosity between the two countries.

Was it just me, or was NBC’s coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang a lot better than it’s been in the past?

Some of this might be how low a bar the network had to clear. Its 2016 coverage of the Summer Games (at least in its primetime program) was such a mess that it really had nowhere to go but up. Some of it was that NBC is almost always better at covering the Winter Games, where the US tends to be less dominant than at the Summer Games, meaning NBC has to cast about for interesting stories about people from other countries, rather than running nonstop human interest stories about American athletes. And some of it was that many of the storylines at these Olympics, especially in the heavily watched sport of figure skating, were unusually compelling.

Russian military spies hacked hundreds of computers at the 2018 Olympic Games in South Korea — and tried to make it look like North Korea was the culprit, according to a new report. It is likely retaliation against the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for banning Russia from the Olympics because of a widespread doping scheme it used to cheat in previous competitions.

The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported on Saturday evening that the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, accessed as many as 300 Olympics-related computers earlier this month, according to two US officials. To cover their tracks, and to pin any suspicions on North Korea, the hackers used North Korean IP addresses, among other tactics.

At the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, many viewers were puzzled when a group of plainly dressed athletes in drab gray coats and blue jeans competing for the country “OAR” marched in.

Which country’s colors are gray and denim? Which country is OAR???

Two weeks of patriotism, jaw-dropping athleticism, and countless figure skating heartbreaks later, the 2018 Winter Olympics are almost over for good.

This year’s games will officially end with the closing ceremonies, which will be held on February 25. Since Pyeongchang is 14 hours ahead of the United States’s East Coast, you’ll have to get up at the crack of dawn if you want to watch the ceremonies live, which will be streaming at 6 am Eastern/3 am Pacific on NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app without commentary.

Bobsledder Nadezhda Sergeeva is now the second Russian athlete facing doping allegations in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games. But the International Olympic Committee may not hold it against Russia.

The latest positive test for a banned substance comes a day before the IOC is scheduled to decide whether Russian athletes will be allowed attend Sunday’s closing ceremonies under their national flag rather than the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” one that they’ve been using so far.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

I had to remind myself of that sentiment in the early hours of Friday morning as I watched Russian figure skater Alina Zagitova clinch the gold medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics ahead of the K-pop loving, goth jock of my cold, black heart, Evgenia Medvedeva, who won silver. Zagitova’s combined score from the women’s free skate and short program was 239.57, which beat Medvedeva’s combined 238.26 by 1.31 points — a small margin that was basically determined by the short program earlier this week.

Pyeongchang, South Korea, built a brand new Olympic stadium to host the Winter Games this year. The 35,000-seat stadium cost $109 million to build. And it will be used just four times before it’s demolished.

The cost of the stadium will come out to an astonishing $10 million per hour of use, according to Judith Grant-Long, a scholar of sports at the University of Michigan.

In the women’s figure skating competition at the 2018 Olympic Games, there’s been a saying that there are three types of scores: bad, good, and Russian. During the women’s short program, which aired Tuesday night in the US, the two gold medal favorites heading into the games — Russian skaters (a.k.a. “OARs”) Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva — showed the world what that means.

Zagitova finished the event with a score of 82.92 points, putting her in first place going into the women’s free skate; Medvedeva came in right behind her with a score of 81.61. The current third-place skater, Kaetlyn Osmond of Canada, earned a score of a 78.87, failing to break into the 80-point Russian stratosphere.

In case you thought the millions of people who watch the Winter Olympics every four years were tuning in only for the sports, the fan response to this week’s ice dancing event proves that notion wrong.

The international cavalcade of skaters whose on-ice chemistry has fueled speculation about their real-life relationships is led by Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who have retained their off-the-ice title of “Canada’s sweethearts” ever since their gold medal performance in Vancouver in 2010.

Watch the end of a long race, and you’ll notice a strange pattern: The athletes speed up. This happens to 5K runners, Olympic cross-country skiers, and ultramarathoners, who all suddenly find enough gas in the tank to sprint in the home stretch.

What was holding them back the rest of the race?

Vice President Mike Pence was set to hold a secret meeting with top North Korean officials who were in South Korea for the Olympics, only to see the North Koreans abruptly back out of what would have been landmark talks between the two adversaries.

Pence was scheduled to talk to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong and to Kim Yong Nam, North Korea’s ceremonial head of state, on February 10. Instead, the North Korean officials canceled just two hours before the talks were set to start. The State Department confirmed the previously secret diplomatic wrangling, which was first reported by the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker.

Aleksandr Krushelnitckii, an Olympic curler from Russia, left the Pyeongchang Winter Games on Sunday after a positive preliminary test for the banned substance meldonium.

Krushelnitckii (also spelled Alexander Krushelnitsky) won a bronze medal last week with his wife and teammate Anastasia Bryzgalova in mixed-doubles curling, an event that made its debut this year in Pyeongchang. The medal was also Russia’s first in curling.

So far the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics have been going well. The skiers and snowboarders have been swooping and whirling to perfection. The competitors tested for drugs have all come out clean, bar a couple of isolated exceptions. And the cheerful inclusion of North Korea has greatly eased security concerns. (Back in 1987 the North Koreans blew a passenger Boeing 707 out of the sky, in pique at being denied a share of the 1988 Seoul Summer Games.)

Yet no Olympics is entirely free from underlying geopolitical tensions. The United States still aren’t sure they want to talk to North Korea — leaving us with the frightening risk of a nuclear exchange — and the Russians certainly aren’t happy about their national doping ban.

In the days before winning the women’s halfpipe gold medal at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, American snowboarder Chloe Kim was tweeting about ... food. Ice cream and churros, to be exact.

With every Olympic Games come tales of athletes’ favorite junk foods: the ice cream, Chinese food, and burgers they reportedly indulge in to relieve some of the stress of training. The implication is that with all the exercise these athletes do, they can eat whatever they want.

Figure skating is a sport that exists in small margins. Skaters spend around seven minutes on the ice over two nights of events. The difference between silver and gold can come down to decimal points. When they jump, they cram three to four revolutions into less than two-thirds of a second.

It’s in these small spaces that American skater Nathan Chen has blown up the sport over the past couple of years.

On Thursday night, in about the time it takes to reheat a slice of leftover pizza, American figure skater Nathan Chen, the gold medal frontrunner heading into the 2018 Winter Olympics, skated his way — barring some unforeseen magic or heaps of mistakes from his competitors during the upcoming men’s free skate — out of contention for a spot on the Olympic podium.

Chen, who has become extremely dominant in the sport of figure skating over the last year or so, came out of the men’s short programs in 17th place. That puts him around 30 points behind the current leader, reigning Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, going into the free skate. In skating, where the most skilled competitors’ scores are often separated by only a fraction of a point, that kind of gap is insurmountable.

Every four years, a giant swath of the American population fixates on a worldwide competition that fuses turgid nationalism with the hypnotic chaos of humans flinging themselves into the air and landing on tiny metal slivers atop a slick, glassy surface.

The air is cold, the ice is crisp, and it’s once again time for Olympic figure skating.

When Shaun White won his third Olympic gold medal at the Pyeongchang Games on February 13 after completing a gravity-defying performance on the halfpipe, the NBC announcers were ready.

“The return of the king in the men’s halfpipe!” one crowed, as an ecstatic White pumped his fists in triumph. “White is the new gold!”

The only predictable thing about figure skating is that the sport is unpredictable. Every time a skater steps onto the ice, there’s always a sense that something could go splendidly right or disastrously wrong — and we, as viewers, never know what we’re going to get.

But it’s not just skaters’ performances that can leave our jaws on the floor; sometimes it’s the judges’ decisions too.

Bobsledder Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian suddenly found herself fighting back tears during a press conference on Saturday.

The New Jersey native representing her father’s home country Jamaica at the Olympic games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was asked about the representation of black athletes at the games. “It’s important to me,” she answered, “that little girls and little boys see someone that looks like them, talks like them, has the same culture as them, has crazy, curly hair and wears it natural, has brown skin, included in different things in this world. When you grow up and you don’t see that, you feel that you can’t do it. And that is not right.”

Norovirus has popped up in Pyeongchang, South Korea, threatening to wreak havoc on the Winter Olympics. Things could get ugly fast for one simple reason: The dreaded stomach virus is very contagious.

Also known as the “winter vomiting bug,” norovirus is spread — prepare yourself — through the “fecal-oral route,” which means that a person gets infected by ingesting the stool or vomit of an infected person, often through food or touching contaminated surfaces.