Winter Olympic sports season produced pain, farewells, stories to track for 2022

By OlympicTalkMar 31, 2020, 2:24 PM EDT

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With the Winter Olympic sports season ending prematurely, a sport-by-sport look at what we learned to take into the 2020-21 season, the last full season before the next Winter Games. Figure skating will be covered in a forthcoming piece …

Mikaela Shiffrin endured an athlete’s gamut
Shiffrin finished her most challenging season yet by achieving an otherwise simple goal: making a few good turns on her skis. That was three weeks ago in training in Are, Sweden, about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

“It was probably the biggest, most successful day that I’ve had so far, maybe in my career,” Shiffrin said, according to The New York Times.

Shiffrin’s father, Jeff, died suddenly on Feb. 2. She took a month-plus break from the World Cup circuit. Shiffrin decided in early March to return for what would be the revised final races of the season in Sweden. After landing and practicing, those races were called off.

Shiffrin entered the season looking to become the second woman to win four straight World Cup overall titles, joining 1970s Austrian legend Annemarie Moser-Pröll. She was on track through January, scattering six race victories among struggles with confidence, choking up in at least one Austrian TV interview. During her break, she went from leading the standings by 370 points to trailing Italian Federica Brignone by 153 points.

Next season, Shiffrin will pass recently retired Austrian Marcel Hirscher for third on the all-time wins list with a pair of victories. If she continues her recent winning percentage, she will near Lindsey Vonn‘s female record of 82 around the 2022 Olympics. She will also be racing, for the first time next season and for the rest of her career, with the memory of her dad.

“It has been therapeutic to be on the mountain, maybe even healing,” she said earlier this month. “I’ve found training to be a place where I can feel closer to my dad, yet it provides enough of a distraction so that feeling of closeness can be separated from the pain.”

Men’s Alpine Skiing: Surprise successor to Hirscher
The first season post-Hirscher, who bagged the previous eight overall titles. The primary thoughts at the outset were 1) It’s time for France’s Alexis Pinturault, second the previous season, to ascend with his talent spanning slalom to super-G. 2) It’s time for Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen, Hirscher’s fiercest rival in slalom and giant slalom, to benefit the most from Hirscher’s absence and win his first title. 3) It’s time for the renaissance of the downhill racer, perhaps Italian Dominik Paris, to take hold of the overall.

All three of those men showed early flashes. But Pinturault lacked consistency. Kristoffersen ceded points to emerging rivals in slalom. Paris suffered a season-ending ACL tear in a January training crash.

Enter Norwegian Aleksander Aamodt Kilde. Kilde, 27, came into the season with a previous best finish of seventh in the overall. He left it as the champion, passing Pinturault in what turned out to be the final race on March 7. Kilde, from a Norwegian village west of Oslo that world chess champion Magnus Carlsen once called home, claimed the overall despite recording just one race victory. But he also had five runners-up and finished in the top 10 of all but three of his starts from Dec. 1 through the end of the season.

Kilde’s results were inconsistent over the previous seasons. He has no Olympic or senior world championships medals. The next winter, with a world championships, will be key to pinning down his Olympic chances.

On the American front, giant slalom specialist Tommy Ford ended a near-three-year U.S. men’s victory drought, its longest in two decades. Another giant slalom star, 35-year-old, two-time Olympic champion Ted Ligety, has not publicly said if he will continue racing after he finished 12th in the GS standings with a top result of fifth in the season opener.

Biathlon: A legend retires; an American surprises
Frenchman Martin Fourcade was the biggest name to retire from winter sports this season. His surprise announcement came on the eve of the final race of the season. Fourcade, a 31-year-old with seven Olympic medals, was a force for nearly a decade: seven straight World Cup overall titles from 2012-18, 28 world championships medals, including 13 golds, and five gold medals between the last two Olympics.

His absence clears the way for Norwegian Johannes Thingnes Bø, who began emerging as a 20-year-old in 2013 and repeated as World Cup overall champion this year. At 26, he may be en route to a Fourcade-like career.

The top two female biathletes at the PyeongChang Olympics — German Laura Dahlmeier and Slovakian Anastasiya Kuzmina — retired before the start of the season. That helped open the door for American veteran Susan Dunklee to earn a second career surprise silver medal at the world championships. She is the only American woman to earn an individual world medal. The U.S. has never won an Olympic medal in biathlon for either gender. Dunklee, 34, was one of four biathletes in the field of 101 to shoot clean over 10 attempts on a windy day in Italy.

Overall, the new leading woman is Italian Dorothea Wierer, who has her own clothing line in addition to the last two World Cup overall crowns. The 29-year-old’s best individual Olympic finish between 2014 and 2018 was sixth. An female biathlete has never won an individual Olympic medal, though Karin Oberhofer is in line to be upgraded to bronze in a 2014 event due to a Russian’s doping.

Bobsled/Luge/Skeleton: A pregnancy, nationality switch and the U.S.’ one world title
Women’s bobsled brought the biggest U.S. news among the sliding sports. Two months before the season, triple Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor announced her pregnancy.

Nine days later, Canada’s two-time Olympic champion Kaillie Humphries was released to start competing for the U.S. after a harassment complaint against a coach. Humphries, married to a former U.S. bobsledder, went on to capture her third world title in what ended up being the only world championship for any U.S. athlete in the abbreviated winter sports season. There are no skiing world championships in even years, and figure skating worlds were canceled due to the coronavirus.

Germany and Russia combined to win the rest of the bobsled, luge and skeleton world titles. Most notably, Francesco Friedrich won a sixth straight two-man bobsled world title. After two-time Olympic champion Natalie Geisenberger announced she would miss the season due to pregnancy, Germany failed to win an individual men’s or women’s event at luge worlds for the first time since 1993.

Freestyle Skiing: Gus Kenworthy’s switch; moguls perfection
Perhaps the biggest news of the season came off the mountain: Kenworthy, the two-time U.S. Olympian and silver medalist, announced a switch to his birth nation of Great Britain for a 2022 Olympic run. Kenworthy cited honoring his mom, who is British, and taking “a path of less resistance” to qualifying rather than enduring a series of U.S. qualifiers in slopestyle and halfpipe as he went through in 2014 and 2018. Kenworthy has noted a goal of winning his first X Games title. He should get another three chances in Aspen next January as big air is added to the Olympic program in 2022.

Elsewhere in freestyle skiing, nobody had a better season than French mogulist Perrine Laffont. Laffont, who in PyeongChang became the youngest Olympic freestyle skiing champion ever at 19, swept all six World Cups (excluding dual moguls) to nearly double her career total. She has a ways to go to match the excellence of Canadian moguls star Mikaël Kingsbury, who earned his ninth straight World Cup overall title.

Nordic Skiing: Therese Johaug dominates after missing Olympics over lip cream
The Norwegian Johaug notched 20 World Cup victories this season, 17 more than anybody else. Johaug, 31, was banned from the PyeongChang Olympics after testing positive for a steroid found in a cream given to her by a team doctor to treat sunburned lips. Johaug won two overall titles before the ban, and now she is dominating like never before and since the retirement of all-time Olympic medal leader and countrywoman Marit Bjørgen. Johaug is at 73 career World Cup wins, trailing only Bjørgen (114) on the career list for either gender.

Early in the season, Sadie Maubet Bjornsen became the first U.S. woman to wear the World Cup leader’s yellow bib, extending a recent run of milestones for the program that included its first Olympic title in the PyeongChang team sprint. Four different U.S. women made individual podiums, but none won for the first time since 2015.

Norway also scored big in ski jumping — Olympic champion Maren Lundby, 25, earned her third straight World Cup title — and Nordic combined — Jarl Magnus Riiber, 22, repeated as World Cup champion by extending his run to 23 wins in his last 27 World Cup starts in all events. Before Riiber, Norway, the all-time Winter Olympic medals leader, had not produced a Nordic combined World Cup champion in 20 years.

Snowboarding: U.S. shut out of X Games halfpipe medals in stars’ absence
Shaun White and Chloe Kim both took the season off. That made it less of a surprise when no U.S. man or woman earned a halfpipe medal at the X Games in Aspen, Colo., the first time that happened for either gender. Both White and Kim have said they plan to return — White, after ditching an Olympic skateboarding bid, at some point for a 2022 Olympic run and Kim, after freshman classes at Princeton, next season.

Two-time Olympic champion Jamie Anderson came back from a hard fall at the 2019 X Games to notch her sixth slopestyle title. Red Gerard, the surprise PyeongChang slopestyle champ, made his first X Games podium with a third-place finish.

Speed Skating: Big-name retirements, Dutch extend reign
The long-track speed skating season was bookended by retirements from decorated Americans Shani Davis and Heather Bergsma, neither of whom had competed since the PyeongChang Olympics. The U.S. hosted worlds at the 2002 Olympic oval in Utah, where Joey Mantia‘s 1500m bronze on the final day kept the U.S. streak alive of a medal at every worlds this millennium. The powerful Dutch were vulnerable to start the championships but finished with a flurry to top the standings again.

Short track worlds were canceled due to the coronavirus. In the World Cup season, Dutchwoman Suzanne Schulting and Korean Park Ji-Won topped the overall rankings. Schulting, 22, did so for a second straight year to back up her PyeongChang Olympic 1000m title. Park, 23, continued his ascension in the deep Korean program after ranking third overall behind two countrymen a year ago and not competing on the World Cup the two seasons before that.

MORE: U.S. athletes qualified for Tokyo Olympics

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Britton Wilson doubles like nobody else in track and field

By Nick ZaccardiJun 8, 2023, 6:49 AM EDT

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Sprinter Britton Wilson regularly updates a vision board in her apartment living room. As of last week, there were two numbers on it among a collage of pictures: 48 and 52.

The 48 is for the 400m. Wilson’s short-term goal is to become the third U.S. woman to break 49 seconds in the one-lap event after Olympic gold medalists Sanya Richards-Ross and Valerie Brisco-Hooks.

The 52 is for the 400m hurdles. She wants to become the 10th U.S. woman to break 53 seconds in that event.

They are not far-fetched ambitions. Wilson, a University of Arkansas junior, has already run 49.13 in the flat 400m and 53.08 in the 400m hurdles. She is the only woman to rank among the 25 fastest in history in both events. She is the fourth-fastest American all-time in the flat 400m, passing Allyson Felix last month.

At this week’s NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Austin, Texas, Wilson will bid to become the first person to win Division I titles in the same year in both the 400m and the 400m hurdles.

On Thursday night, she will race the 400m semifinals just after 9 p.m. local time. A half-hour later, she will race the 400m hurdles semifinals. If she advances, she will race the two finals Saturday with a scheduled 24 minutes in between.

In most cases, a runner would only race twice in that short of a turnaround for the 100m or 200m. Wilson is not only attempting a rarity, but she is also the clear top seed in both events.

Last year, Wilson won both at the SEC Championships with about an hour in between the finals, then entered only the hurdles at the NCAA Championships. She won all of those races. This year, Wilson again won both at SECs. Afterward, she met with coach Chris Johnson, who asked what she wanted to do at NCAAs. Wilson chose both.

“I wanted to see how much I can challenge myself and how far I can push myself,” she said.

Ask those who know Wilson best, and they will tell you that her plan, while unprecedented, is not audacious for her.

Her high school coach will tell you that Wilson ran a nation-leading 300m hurdles time on a Friday night in Richmond, Virginia. She got home around 11. The next morning, she went to another meet and ran the fastest flat 400m in Virginia high school history.

Her mom, who nicknamed her “baby giraffe” in middle school for her early running form, will tell you about the 2018 state championships. Wilson stopped en route to the meet at a CVS to pick up medication for a stomach virus. Once they arrived, nobody could find her. Wilson was in a portable bathroom. When she got out, she looked so out of sorts that adults told her not to race. She checked herself in anyway, then won the 400m and the 200m.

Wilson herself will tell you about the 2017 state championships race the family has come to call by the first two words of its YouTube title.

“So I run track, and if you’re wondering if I’m good or not, here’s one of my highlights,” she said, setting up the story in a TikTok video.

Wilson, then a sophomore, was desperately trying to catch a senior in the adjacent lane in the home stretch of the 400m final. Feet from the finish line, Wilson fell. She scraped her knee (above her tall, pink Victoria’s Secret socks), shoulder (there’s still a scar) and head. For a moment, her legs flung above her body. Wilson then crawled across the finish line to secure second place.

Mom LeYuani rushed from behind a fence to find her daughter under a tent. Nearly as quickly, the finish was already spreading on social media.

LeYuani watched the video in sight of her daughter, but didn’t tell her about it. Determined, Wilson said she was staying in the meet to race the 200m later that day. She did. She won in a personal-best time.

LeYuani remembers Wilson moaning in the backseat of the car on the two-hour drive home. Tylenol lessened the suffering, but didn’t eliminate it.

Wilson has athletic genes. Her mom, a second-grade teacher who has worked in classrooms for 26 years, was a long jumper in school. She taught her kids that event by sprinting from the dining room, through the kitchen, into the family room and then launching nearly into the fireplace.

Her dad, Vince, started at point guard for Virginia Commonwealth, then was the first American to play in the top Russian professional basketball league, according to a contact with the current iteration of the league. Wilson, while on an international exchange program in Russia, said he was asked to play for Spartak Leningrad in 1990 by its head coach, Vladimir Kondrashin. Kondrashin was also the head coach of the 1972 Soviet Olympic team that beat the U.S. in that infamous final.

Wilson, whom the family calls by her middle name, “Rose,” was all-state in track and all-county in chorus and taught herself how to play the guitar.

She first matriculated at the University of Tennessee in 2019. Her freshman year coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which wiped out the outdoor season. In her down time, she auditioned virtually for “American Idol” and made it as far as seeing Ryan Seacrest on a screen.

As a sophomore, she was running slower than she was in high school. Looking for solutions, Wilson stopped eating.

“A lot of things contributed to my mental health not being the best,” she said on a University of Arkansas athletics podcast. “I had a lot of physical issues. I was in and out of doctors.”

She confided in her parents and decided to transfer. She said that if it wasn’t for Arkansas, the first and only school that she visited, she probably would have quit the sport.

“You have athletes that compete at a very high level, but you also have those athletes that are so mentally strong, they can overcome a lot of things,” Vince said.

Wilson has thrived under coach Chris Johnson, whose older brother, Boogie, coaches 2016 Olympic 400m hurdles champion Dalilah Muhammad.

“[Johnson] is always listening to how we feel, and he hears us instead of just dismissing it,” Wilson said. “He knows he’s a great coach, and he knows his training works, but he’s also going to hear me out if something doesn’t feel right.”

Last year, Wilson’s first in Fayetteville, she chopped two seconds off her 400m personal best and three seconds off her 400m hurdles personal best. She capped a full NCAA indoor and outdoor slate by winning the NCAA 400m hurdles title. She then went eight tenths faster at the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships, which is normally where collegians run slower after exhausting seasons. Wilson placed second to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone to make the world championships team.

Then at worlds, Wilson was fifth in the 400m hurdles. Two days later, Wilson was thrilled to be picked for the women’s 4x400m relay the day of the final. She handed the baton to McLaughlin-Levrone — whom she raced once in high school, when Wilson was a sophomore and McLaughlin-Levrone was a senior — and won a gold medal.

“She admired and adored Sydney,” said Gene Scott, her high school coach. “You remember the old commercial, ‘Be Like Mike?’ She wanted to be like Sydney.”

After this week’s NCAAs come the USATF Outdoor Championships in early July. There, the 400m final and 400m hurdles semifinals are 15 minutes apart. Told of that schedule, Wilson said running both is “doable,” but she’d probably race just one event this year. Her coach said they’ll decide after NCAAs.

Wilson is ranked second in the world in 2023 in both events.

At NCAAs, USAs and worlds (if she makes the team), Wilson will get into the blocks and look down. If she peeks inside her right hand, she will see a tattoo on the inside of one finger reading “24K.” Wilson and her mom both got that tattoo — the first for each — to commemorate the world championships relay gold medal.

After worlds, Wilson spent about two months in a boot and on crutches to alleviate stress reactions in both shins, pain that she raced through last summer. She had messed up her kidneys and stomach by taking four ibuprofen a day. She swam, biked and tread carefully on a treadmill while unable to run last fall.

This spring, she got another tattoo — the word “Baby” in memory of her half Pekingese, half poodle that died last summer. She got it on her left hand, “so when my hands are in the blocks, if somebody takes a picture of me, you’ll see it,” she said.

On Saturday, Wilson plans to put her hands on the track twice in a span of 25 minutes. Many will watch.

“She wants to accomplish something that’s never been done before,” Johnson said.

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2023 French Open men’s singles draw

By OlympicTalkJun 7, 2023, 5:18 PM EDT

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The French Open men’s singles draw is missing injured 14-time champion Rafael Nadal for the first time since 2004, leaving the Coupe des Mousquetaires ripe for the taking.

The tournament airs live on NBC Sports, Peacock and Tennis Channel through championship points in Paris.

Novak Djokovic is not only bidding for a third crown at Roland Garros, but also to lift a 23rd Grand Slam singles trophy to break his tie with Nadal for the most in men’s history.

FRENCH OPEN: Broadcast Schedule | Women’s Draw

But the No. 1 seed is Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, who won last year’s U.S. Open to become, at 19, the youngest man to win a major since Nadal’s first French Open title in 2005.

Now Alcaraz looks to become the second-youngest man to win at Roland Garros since 1989, after Nadal of course.

Alcaraz missed the Australian Open in January due to a right leg injury, but since went 30-3 with four titles. Notably, he has not faced Djokovic this year. They meet in Friday’s semifinals.

Russian Daniil Medvedev, the No. 2 seed, was upset in the first round by 172nd-ranked Brazilian qualifier Thiago Seyboth Wild. It marked the first time a men’s top-two seed lost in the first round of any major since 2003 Wimbledon (Ivo Karlovic d. Lleyton Hewitt).

All of the American men lost before the fourth round. The last U.S. man to make the French Open quarterfinals was Andre Agassi in 2003.

MORE: All you need to know for 2023 French Open

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2023 French Open Men’s Singles Draw

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