BEIJING (AP) — A roundup of gold medals from Wednesday, Feb. 16, at the Beijing Games:
___
ALPINE SKIING
MEN'S SLALOM
French skier Clement Noel put down a blistering second run to win the slalom by a large margin.
Noel moved up from sixth following the first leg to beat first-run leader Johannes Strolz of Austria by 0.61 seconds after posting the fastest second run.
World champion Sebastian Foss-Solevaag of Norway held his position and picked up the bronze, finishing 0.70 behind.
___
BIATHLON
4x6KM RELAY
Elvira Oeberg anchored the Swedish team to Olympic gold in the four-person biathlon relay, skiing fast and shooting clean to win her third medal.
Oeberg, who also won silver in the sprint and pursuit races in her Olympic debut, put the Swedes across the line in 1 hour, 11 minutes, 3.9 seconds.
Russian biathlete Uliana Nigmatullina trailed Oeberg by about 24 seconds after the final shooting range and ended up finishing 12 seconds behind for silver. Denise Herrmann finished third to give Germany bronze, 37.4 seconds behind Oeberg. Herrmann also won gold in the individual race.
___
CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING
MEN'S TEAM SPRINT CLASSIC
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo completed a second straight cross-country double Wednesday by teaming with Erik Valnes to give Norway the gold medal in the team sprint race at the Beijing Games.
Klaebo won the individual sprint and has become the second man to win both the team and individual sprint twice. He did the same in 2018. Klaebo and teammate Erik Valnes skied to the win in 19 minutes, 22.99 seconds.
Joni Maki of Finland stayed ahead of Alexander Terentev of the Russian Olympic Committee to take silver, 2.46 seconds behind Norway. Terentev took the bronze 4.29 seconds back. Maki was partnered with Iivo Niskanen, who won gold in the 15-kilometer classic race. Terentev’s teammate was Alexander Bolshunov, who won gold in the skiathlon.
WOMEN'S TEAM SPRINT CLASSIC
Cross-country skiers Victoria Carl and Katharina Henning of Germany won gold in the women’s team sprint.
Their time was 22 minutes, 9.85 seconds. Carl outpaced Swedish sprint champion Jonna Sundling, who won silver with Maja Dhalqvist .17 seconds back.
Natalia Nepryaeva of Russia crossed the line just behind Sundling at .71 seconds. She and Yulia Stupak won the bronze medal.
___
FREESTYLE SKIING
MEN'S AERIALS
China’s Qi Guangpu finally flipped his way onto an Olympic podium in men’s aerials, winning a gold medal after near misses in Sochi and Pyeongchang.
Qi cleanly landed a quint-twisting triple back flip in the medal round Wednesday night, when five of his six competitors tried the same trick and only he did it clean. Qi earned 129 points, easily beating defending champion Oleksandr Abramenko of Ukraine at 116.5.
Ilia Burov of the ROC downgraded to a quad-twisting triple as the event’s last competitor, knowing that a clean back full-full-double full would be enough for the podium. He earned bronze at the second straight Olympics.
MEN'S SLOPESTYLE
Freestyler skier Alex Hall led a 1-2 American finish in the men’s Olympic slopestyle competition with a trick on his first run where he completely stopped his rotation mid-air and went the other direction.
Hall’s opening run earned a score of 90.01 and it stood up throughout the competition. His teammate Nick Goepper turned in a creative run on his second pass to earn silver. Jesper Tjader of Sweden took home bronze.
The Americans have now earned six of nine Olympic medals since the event made its debut in 2014. Goepper has three of them, including silver from the 2018 Pyeongchang Games and bronze from the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
___
ICE HOCKEY
WOMEN'S BRONZE MEDAL MATCH
Finland claimed its fourth Olympic women’s hockey bronze medal with a 4-0 win over Switzerland.
On Thursday, the defending Olympic champion United States and Canada meet in the gold-medal game for the sixth time in seven tournaments.
___
SHORT TRACK SPEEDSKATING
MEN'S 5,000-METER RELAY
Canada won the 5,000-meter relay in short track speedskating.
The team of Charles Hamelin, Steven Dubois, Jordan Pierre-Gilles and Pascal Dion skated cleanly Wednesday night to take their nation’s eighth gold medal in the 45-lap race with a time of 6 minutes, 41.257 seconds.
South Korea earned silver. Italy claimed bronze.
WOMEN'S 1,500 METERS
Choi Minjeong of South Korea successfully defended her Olympic title in 1,500-meter short track speedskating.
She won in 2 minutes, 17.789 seconds. Arianna Fontana of Italy took silver by two-thousandths of a second over Suzanne Schulting of the Netherlands.
___
More AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/winter-olympics and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
The Associated Press
