Olympic report
Ski jump The first gold medalist of the 2010 Winter Games is the guy who won two golds in Salt Lake City eight years ago. Simon Ammann, 28, of Switzerland, won the individual normal hill title Saturday for the honor of being the first of 86 champions to be crowned during the Vancouver Games.
Moguls American Hannah Kearney won first gold medal for the United States, winning the women’s moguls by defeating Canadian Jenn Heil. Kearney scored 26.63 points in the final to defeat Heil, the defending Olympic champion, by the wide margin of .94 points. American Shannon Bahrke took bronze to add to her silver medal from 2002. Kearney’s win came after a 22nd-place finish at the Turin Olympics – a bitter disappointment after she came in as a favorite.
Speedskating American Apolo Anton Ohno won the silver medal in the short-track 1,500-meter speedskating final, tying Bonnie Blair as the most decorated U.S. Winter Olympian. Lee Jung-su of South Korea won the gold medal. Ohno finished second after Korean teammates Sung Si-bak and Lee Ho-suk took each other out on the final turn. American J.R. Celski earned the bronze.
•Dutch speedskater Sven Kramer won the gold medal in the men’s 5,000 meters in a games record at the Olympic Oval in Richmond, B.C., finally claiming the one major title that had eluded him. The 23-year-old prerace favorite won in 6 minutes, 14.60, shaving six hundredths of a second off Jochem Uytdehaage’s Olympic record set at altitude in Salt Lake City in 2002. Lee Seung-hoon of South Korea was second in 6:16.95.
Biathlon Swedish favorite Helena Jonsson failed to even crack the top 10 despite a clean shoot, the big shocker of the first women’s biathlon race. Also surprising was the trio of less accomplished biathletes on the podium – Slovakia’s Anastazia Kuzmina, Germany’s Magdalena Neuner and France’s Marie Dorin. Kuzmina became the first Slovakian woman to win a gold medal at a Winter Olympics.
Snowboarding Olympic organizers at rainy Cypress Mountain have called off snowboardcross training in an attempt to preserve the course for races Monday and Tuesday. Steady rain pelted the course and the adjoining halfpipe, a few hundred feet up from the area where the women’s moguls were scheduled to begin later in the evening.
Skiing After postponing the first two Alpine events, the International Ski Federation revamped the schedule for the Vancouver Olympics to try to squeeze seven races into seven days. The plan came about after the competition-opening men’s downhill was postponed because of warm, wet weather that’s turned the slopes at Whistler to mush. The downhill was shifted to 10:30 a.m. Monday, originally an off day. The new lineup keeps the men’s super-combined on Tuesday and the women’s downhill – Lindsey Vonn’s signature event – on Wednesday. The already-postponed women’s super-combined moves from today to Thursday, another slot left open on the Olympic calendar.