SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It has been half a century since an American man won an Olympic medal in cross-country skiing. That drought ended today. But with the highs come lows, U.S. skiing superstar Mikaela Shiffrin missed the podium in a brand-new Olympic event, even as her teammates won a medal in the same contest. NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan joins us from Cortina with news of the women's Alpine team, and NPR's Brian Mann is in Milan to tell us about the men's cross-country team. Thanks for staying up late, guys.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Yeah. Happy to be here.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Becky, let's start with you on the Alpine side. What happened today, and what is this new event?
SULLIVAN: Yeah. This is called the team combined event. Basically, you have two skiers. One of them skis the downhill. One of them skis the slalom, and then you add their times together. The shortest combined time wins. So it replaces the individual version of this event that had sort of gone obsolete as skiers, like, really had just started to specialize in either one or the other.
So anyway, headed into the event, I think everybody who was watching had their eye on this American pair, Breezy Johnson, who just won the gold medal in the downhill on Sunday, just the other day. And then Mikaela Shiffrin, who, of course, is the world's best slalom skier. But this pair finished fourth place, actually, and it was another American team that won, as you said. That was Jackie Wiles and Paula Moltzan. And it was really an emotional day for Wiles especially because on Sunday, she had finished in fourth place in the downhill. The fourth place finish in the Olympics is brutal. You're just...
DETROW: Oh, yeah.
SULLIVAN: ...So close to that medal. She was very tearful talking to us reporters after that race. And apparently, just later that day, Moltzan was key in helping sort of make her feel better, turn her attention to the future. Here's what she said about that.
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JACKIE WILES: I think it was a really hard day on Sunday. It's - this sport is incredible. There's a lot of emotions on both sides, when you have good days and bad days. And I was lucky Paula said some really nice words to help pick me up.
SULLIVAN: So it was really just nice to see them both, you know, getting to jump for joy, show off that bronze medal after this.
DETROW: Let's talk about today's fourth place finisher, though - Mikaela Shiffrin, winningest Alpine ski racer of all time. She wins all the time. It seems automatic at times but not the case today.
SULLIVAN: Yeah. I think, honestly, this one's a little bit of a puzzle for Shiffrin. She has been transcendent just on slalom all season long. Literally, the worst she has done, Scott, in a World Cup race this winter was second place, and that was in one race. She has won literally every single other one. And so the expectations were really high for her.
And then they got even higher still after her teammate Breezy Johnson skied the first leg, the downhill leg of the race. Johnson had another great race. She had the fastest time on the downhill leg. So essentially, Shiffrin even kind of had a head start, but her slalom time was, frankly, slow. She was 15th out of the 18 skiers who finished that slalom run. And it adds to what is, you know, it was hopefully really not a pattern for her, but it is the seventh consecutive Olympic race in which Mikaela Shiffrin did not medal. That dates back to the 2022 games in Beijing, where she left empty-handed.
And skiing is a volatile sport. Anything can happen on any day. It's very hard to just consistently win. But Shiffrin is, as you say, arguably the best of all time. And so I think it is a little surprising. She does still have two individual events left to come next week, including that individual slalom race. She says she's going to spend the next five days focused on watching that tape, focusing on training, trying to figure out what went wrong today and how to fix it.
DETROW: All right. We're going to swap skis here from downhill to cross-country skiing. Brian Mann, you have been following the U.S. cross-country ski team, and it was a pretty big day for the men.
MANN: This was a history-making day for Ben Ogden from Vermont. The 25-year-old, Scott, grabbed a silver medal in the classic sprint race. He's the first U.S. male cross-country skier since 1976 to podium at the Olympics. Ogden's this super outgoing guy. He wears a mustache and, today, a huge grin. And Ogden was so happy that after he was given his medal, he did a backflip.
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BEN OGDEN: I promised my 15-year-old self that I would do that if I ever was on an Olympic podium. I got up there, and I was like, well, now is the moment.
MANN: Yeah. Ogden battled through what he described as slushy snow today. He finished just under a second behind Norway's legendary cross-country skier Johannes Klaebo.
DETROW: Glad that he was looking out for his teenage self there. The last...
MANN: Yeah.
DETROW: ...U.S. male cross-country skier to medal in an Olympics, Bill Koch, also a Vermonter. I mean, that was 50 years ago, but I'm curious. Do these two skiers know each other?
MANN: You know, this is so cool. They did. Bill Koch was kind of an icon of cross country-skiing after he won that silver at the Innsbruck Games in '76. So when Ben Ogden was growing up in Vermont, he actually skied with Bill Koch's son.
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OGDEN: I'll never forget when I was young, going over to the Koch's and skiing the trails that Bill made in the backyard and skiing off the jumps that he made. And I've been thinking about Bill a lot ever since the finish.
MANN: And Ogden says he now hopes this win will inspire another generation of athletes to get into this sport.
DETROW: Why do you think it's been so hard for U.S. men to win at cross-country skiing in the Olympics?
MANN: You know, this is a really good question. It's a complicated sport. You have to do this almost impossible chemistry of endurance and being able to sprint fast. And there's this complicated team role to the sport. You have these technicians who apply special waxes to the skis that help these athletes both climb hills and go really fast on the downhills. All that alchemy came together today. And what's cool is that it's still early in these Winter Games. We could see Ben Ogden back on the podium.
DETROW: And then I want to talk, Becky, about another cross-country star, Jessie Diggins. She raced in cross-country skis today. How'd she do?
SULLIVAN: You know, this one is a question for Brian. I'm going to have to hand it off to him.
DETROW: Brian, Jessie Diggins. Go.
MANN: This was a fun race to watch, but Diggins fell short of advancing. One of her teammates, Julia Kern, did move forward. Diggins didn't advance to the finals. What's great here, though, is that she still has more events to come through this. She's going to move from classic skiing, which was what she was on today - not her strength. Later in the week, she'll do the skate, also known as the freestyle type of cross-country skiing - looks a little bit like ice skating. And that may be her best shot to grab another medal in what she says is going to be her last Olympics.
DETROW: That is NPR's Becky Sullivan in Cortina and Brian Mann in Milan combining - just like those downhill and slalom skiers in the Olympics - to cover the Games for us. Thank you so much to both of you.
SULLIVAN: You're welcome, Scott.
MANN: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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