The main news is gold Russian skiers, which they won in the hardest ski relay race of 4 to 5 kilometers. President Putin has already congratulated them on this. And the continuation of the intrigue around the doping test of Kamila Valieva. For the first time, her coach spoke.
The new gold of the Olympics – as they say – for a clear advantage: Yuliya Stupak opens the race for ours and immediately leaves the peloton for 11 seconds. By the end of the stage, there are already two leaders: only the Germans managed to impose a fight. And then – solid nerves. Natalya Nepryaeva and Tatyana Sorina go through their stages with rivals from Germany, replacing each other in the forefront. As a result, finisher Veronika Stepanova gets a five-second delay. And his youngest member of the quartet turns it into a gap, with which it was possible to take the flag at the finish line. But it is up to the last meters – in work for wear and tear.
Olympic gold in the women’s relay is the first for our team in 16 years. “We burst into tears. Emotions cannot be conveyed! This is real madness,” Russian athletes say.
Stepanova – now the youngest Olympic champion in the history of skiing – and Sorina have this first medal in their life. Nepryaeva and Stupak used to try on only silver and bronze. Here you can dance for joy. However, according to tradition, the awards themselves will be presented to them only tomorrow. In the meantime – the first step of the pedestal.
Five more sets of awards were played at the Olympics today, but almost all the attention of the press is on training. Figure skating for girls starts in three days. Ours are at the planned warm-up. Quite young participants of the hype do not seem to notice: the cascades of triple jumps are without blots.
Inflated as if specially for the competition, the scandal with the temporary suspension of Kamila Valieva for a dubious sample in December, according to the regulations, was supposed to be resolved today. But due to the late filing of documents, they did not meet the regulations, only appointing an arbitration panel: judges from the USA, Italy and Slovenia will decide the fate of our skater’s further performance in Beijing. The commission’s meeting will begin online late Sunday evening. And they promise a decision by Monday, that is, on the eve of the start of the women’s tournament.
“A very controversial and difficult situation has arisen. There are a lot of questions. And very few answers. I want to say that I am absolutely sure that Camila is innocent and pure. And for us this is not a theorem, but an axiom, it does not need to be proven. I understand that there is some protocol of actions that cannot be dispensed with. We did not abandon the athlete in any case, “Eteri Tutberidze, Kamila Valieva’s coach, assured.
“In my previous practice (believe me, I have a fairly large practice, both as an individual and as a leader, I have seen many cases where the results were processed for a long time) there has never been such a case when it took almost two months from the moment the sample was taken to the result. Therefore, this raises very fair questions for us, why this sample was published just after the victory of our skaters in the team competition, “said Stanislav Pozdnyakov, President of the ROC.
In the meantime, dance duets are sent for personal awards. Here we have three pairs at once. And good chances for a medal. Our dance leaders Sinitsina and Katsalapov will start here as current world and European champions. However, it is impossible to guess the favorite: on the ice are not only both American couples who beat ours in team skates, but also world record holders from France. With the latter face to face, ours at the main competitions meet for the first time in two years. But the competitors did not scare: Stepanova and Bukin are still fifth. Sinitsina and Katsalapov are the second. With a personal record and a minimum gap from the leaders before the free dance.
“We are very satisfied today, it was an excellent performance. Of course, I would like a higher rating, but nothing, the struggle is still ahead,” said Nikita Katsalapov.
And in the mountain cluster at that time another biathlon day was ending. The men tried to keep up the pace of our unarmed skiers. And Maxim Tsvetkov turned out to be the closest to the goal, stopping one and a half seconds from the medal.
De facto game training turned out for our hockey players. Minimal victories in the first matches of the group were enough to reach the quarterfinals ahead of schedule and not think about the result today. And yet the Czechs are always a principled rival. This is how the game came out. Before the tournament, our team didn’t have game practice for almost a month. So now every match on the way to the decisive ones is for the good.
Now the team has to wait for the opponent in the quarterfinals. While there is an extra day of rest, and then three more meetings to defend the title of Olympic champions.
All the key moments of the Olympics can be followed not only on the TV channel “Russia 1”, but also on the online platform “Looking”. They continue to publish daily diaries “We look in Beijing”: with the main results of each competitive day, live broadcasts and a detailed analysis of the brightest episodes. “We look in Beijing” – at a convenient time for you.