Winter Olympics: Chloe Kim settles for silver in snowboard halfpipe – as it happened

You can read a full report from Thursday’s halfpipe final here:90.25 Choi Gaon (South Korea) 88.00 Chloe Kim (USA) 85.00 Mitsuki Ono (Japan) --- 84.00 Sara Shimuzu (Japan) 81

Chloe Kim thwarted in bid for Olympic halfpipe three-peat by South Korea’s Choi Gaon

The snowfall coming down on Livigno Snow Park on Thursday night helped produce one of the bigger Olympic upsets in snowboard history, as Chloe Kim’s bid to become the first rider to win three consecutive Olympic halfpipe gold medals fell just short.Kim finished with a best score of 88.00 from her opening run, settling for silver behind surprise winner Choi Gaon of South Korea, whose heroic third run after an early fall earned 90.25 and rewrote the Olympic record books. Japan’s Mitsuki Ono took bronze with 85

The scandals clouding ‘sinister’ French ice dancers who beat Chock and Bates for gold

The American duo of Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the reigning three-time world champions contentiously missed out on Olympic ice dance gold on Wednesday despite a flawless skate. But the controversy surrounding the event is not merely a debate over artistic and technical merits.Gold went by a narrow margin to the French duo of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. It was a stunning achievement for a partnership that is less than a year old. But the union was forged after the fallout from sexual assault allegations levelled at Fournier Beaudry’s boyfriend and former ice dance partner, while Cizeron is the subject of allegations of abusive conduct from his erstwhile skating partner

Gregor Townsend warns England not to underestimate wounded Scotland

Gregor Townsend has warned England against underestimating his Scotland team and believes the hosts can maintain their fine recent Calcutta Cup record in Edinburgh on Saturday. The visitors have only won two of the last eight fixtures between the two countries and Townsend wants his players to feed off the feelgood memories of previous English losses.While last weekend’s deeply disappointing loss to Italy in Rome has generated plenty of external criticism, England have won only once at Murrayfield since 2017. Townsend is expecting his players to bounce back from their Italian setback and says they will be inspired by past successes. “I would hope they don’t fade into irrelevance because our players have evidence that they’ve won in this fixture,” stressed the head coach

Heraskevych’s ‘helmet of memory’ forces IOC on to PR back foot at Winter Olympics | Sean Ingle

Skeleton racer sacrificed his dream of winning a medal and succeeded in putting the horrors of the war in Ukraine back on the agendaTo be an Olympic-class skeleton racer requires extraordinary guts and impeccable nerve, as the corners loom and then whoosh past at frightening speed. So did anybody really believe that Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych would lose his when the world’s eyes were upon him?Not the International Olympic Committee, who flipped between threats of expulsion and sweet talk over the past fortnight, without coming close to changing his mind. And certainly not those of us who have spoken and messaged Heraskevych, and found a man utterly prepared to sacrifice his dream of winning a Winter Olympic medal for a higher purpose.In public and private his message was the same: he would not back down. And if the IOC barred from competing in his “helmet of memory”, which commemorates some of the 600 Ukrainian athletes and coaches killed by Russian bombs and bullets since 2022, he would accept his fate

‘It’s emptiness’: banned Ukrainian athlete accuses IOC of fuelling Russia’s propaganda

Vladyslav Heraskevych has accused the International Olympic Committee of doing Russia’s propaganda for them after he was barred from racing in the Winter Games because he wanted to wear a “helmet of memory” in honour of Ukraine’s war dead.In one of the most controversial decisions in recent Olympic history, the Ukrainian skeleton racer was informed only minutes before he was due to compete that his accreditation had been rescinded.It followed a last-ditch meeting in Cortina on Thursday morning with the IOC’s president, Kirsty Coventry, who left in tears after she failed to persuade Heraskevych to change his mind.The IOC has maintained all week that the helmet, which shows the images of 24 athletes and children that died from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, violates its athletes’ charter because the field of play must be free from political expression.However Heraskevych, who had a genuine chance of winning Ukraine’s first medal at these Winter Olympics, has insisted that the helmet is an act of remembrance for the friends he has lost and that it would be a “betrayal” to back down