Mikaela Shiffrin’s final chance for a medal in Beijing is in the rescheduled Alpine skiing team event. The decorated bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor will carry the American flag in the closing ceremony.
Feb.20,7:55 a.m. Mikaela Shiffrin’s final chance for a medal in Beijing is in the rescheduled Alpine skiing team event. The decorated bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor will carry the American flag in the closing ceremony. What’s left? Five final golds, and then the closing ceremony. With a bobsled bronze, Elana Meyers Taylor is the most decorated Black Winter Olympian in history. An arbitration panel rejects a request by U.S. figure skaters seeking their medals in the team event. U.S. prime-time broadcast coverage includes Alpine skiing, figure skating and hockey. A Chinese pair’s gold completes a tumultuous two weeks for figure skating. The bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor will get to be a flag-bearer for the U.S. after all. The Olympic gender gap is closing, but work remains. See some of the best photos from the Olympics. The final day of the Winter Olympics on Sunday will have an abbreviated schedule, with only five medal events, all taking place during the evening hours on Saturday in the United States. Mikaela Shiffrin has a last chance for a medal in the Alpine skiing team event, which was delayed a day because of high winds. But the coed U.S. team faces strong competition from the deep squads of Austria, Switzerland and Norway. The men’s hockey final matches the defending champion, Russia, a pre-Games favorite in a tournament without N.H.L. players, against Finland, which has been surprisingly solid throughout the tournament and is looking for its first gold medal in the sport. There is also a final in women’s curling, as the veteran Scottish skip Eve Muirhead goes for her first gold medal. Britain’s opponent, Japan, has already assured itself of its first curling silver medal. It will try to go one better and turn that into its first gold. In the four-man bobsled, the leaders and heavy favorites are, of course, the Germans, who have won almost every gold medal in sliding sports at these Games. And in the cross-country mass start for women, the skier Therese Johaug of Norway should get gold No.3 — and extend her country’s record for the most gold medals in a single Games. As of Friday, Norway — a country of about 5 million people — had won 15 golds. At 7 a.m. Eastern time, the closing ceremony will wrap up the Games. — Victor Mather Elana Meyers Taylor of the United States became the most decorated Black athlete in Winter Olympics history on Saturday by winning the bronze medal in the two-woman bobsled event at the Beijing Games. The bronze was her fifth Olympic medal, one more than the American speedskater Shani Davis won in his Olympic career, and marked her fourth straight podium finish in the two-woman event. “That is overwhelming,” Meyers Taylor said. “It’s so crazy to hear that stat and to know that I’m part of a legacy that’s bigger than me.” Meyers Taylor’s bronze joined her three previous medals in the event — silvers in Pyeongchang in 2018 and Sochi in 2014, and a bronze from Vancouver in 2010 — and the silver medal she won in the inaugural monobob competition last week. Laura Nolte and Deborah Levi of Germany took the gold in the two-woman event, with their countrywomen Mariama Jamanka and Alexandra Burghardt right behind. Gold L. Nolte / D. Levi Silver M. Jamanka / A. Burghardt Bronze E. Meyers Taylor / S. Hoffman Germany’s win was hardly a surprise: The country won eight of the nine golds awarded in luge, skeleton and bobsled, and 14 of the 27 sliding medals overall. But just as unsurprising was the presence of Meyers Taylor among the leaders. At age 37, she is among the most decorated women in bobsled history. But she is also the latest in the line of Black women on the U.S. team who have created a legacy of success stretching back two decades, and redefined what a Winter Olympian can look like, and where they can be found. Meyers Taylor, for example, attended college on a softball scholarship and once harbored dreams of a career in the Summer Games. Now, instead of being an outlier, she and her sporting past are representative of her team. Seven of the eight members of the current U.S. women’s World Cup bobsled team are Black, as are four of the five women who competed at the Beijing Games. They include not only Meyers Taylor, who sought out the sport after watching Vonetta Flowers become the first Black athlete to win a Winter Games gold in 2002, but also Meyers Taylor’s brakewoman, Sylvia Hoffman, a former college basketball player who once trained to be an Olympic weight lifter. “She’s the reason why I’m in bobsled,” Meyers Taylor said of Flowers in an interview before the Games. “Looking at her and seeing someone who looks like me, it showed that it was possible. Without her, there’s no way I would have thought winter sport was for people who looked like us.” On Saturday, her own achievement was the one she hoped would resonate. “Hopefully it just encourages more and more Black athletes to come out to winter sports,” Meyers Taylor said, before adding that her message of inclusion and participation was not directed only at Black athletes. “We want everybody to come out regardless of the color of your skin,” she said. “We want winter sports to be for everybody, regardless of race, regardless of socioeconomic class. I think the more diversity we have, the stronger our sport can be. So hopefully this is just the start of more and more people coming out and trying winter sports.” With two medals in her pocket, Meyers Taylor has one more task at the Games: She was chosen as the U.S. flag-bearer for the closing ceremony on Sunday. It is the second time she has had the honor bestowed on her by her teammates in a month. When she was selected to carry the flag at the opening ceremony, she had to decline: Meyers Taylor had tested positive for the coronavirus only days after arriving in Beijing. That night, she watched the ceremony from her room in an isolation hotel. On Sunday, she said, she will soak in the moment. “That is so humbling and such a huge honor, and I am so excited for it,” Meyers Taylor said. “There’s so many great athletes they could have chosen, and the fact that they recognized what a big deal it was to be chosen at the opening ceremony and gave me the opportunity to walk anyway in closing — I can’t even put into words what that means to me, and I can’t wait to get out there on the floor and experience it.
