Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 4 (Milan)

February 10

From a medical point-of-view, it is easy to view large sporting events like the Olympics as a giant superspreader event. Have it happen during the winter when you've got COVID, Flu and RSV all circulating. Then you disrupt people's sleep schedules with long flights and again with alternating early and late events. The start times and, often, the poor venue food effects eating schedules as well. Then you cram everyone into metro trains and long queues to enter the venues, and it is easy to get everyone infected with something. Steve began feeling crummy on the 11th and Beth a day later. Steve was negative for COVID yesterday (February 12), but who knows for today. In any case, this has disrupted the rhythm of these blogs. Sorry for the delay!

Today (February 10th), we had tickets for short-track speed skating at the same arena where the figure skating is being held. As for any speed-skating event, the Dutch fans are here in big numbers:

We laugh when we find that we are sitting next to the same two Dutch women that we sat next to at long-track two days earlier. We are sitting in the next-to-top row of the stadium so the pictures aren't as good as Steve would like.

The first event is the preliminaries for the women's 500m. The US has two really strong skaters: Kristen Santos-Griswold and Corinne Stoddard. In the 500m, the strongest skater typically goes right to the front and tries to outlast the people behind her. Corinne is in the first heat:

Since Corinne is one of the fastest skaters on the world tour, she prefers to get to the front and avoid what the British call argy-bargy - the competition to keep your position or to move up. Surprisingly, the Chinese skater had the lead after the first lap and as Corinne passed her coming out of a turn, the lost her balance and slid across the ice on her butt into the crash barriers. We look at each other and say, "that's short-track". There is always some mayhem going on. Most of the other favorites including Santos-Griswold make it through to the semi-finals. Here are a couple of other pictures from the eight preliminary races:

Notice that the angle between the skaters and the ice are really low, especially in the corners. This is the only way that they can maintain the speed they are carrying into the turns.

During the ice resurfacing between the women's 500m and the men's 1000m races, we were wondering about these faint dots next to the small markers that mark the corners of the track:

During the 1000m, we figure it out. The skaters are often going as fast as 40mph in these corners on skate blades that would make steak knives seem dull. So, the ice takes a tremendous beating. Every race, they move all of the dots one way or the other so that the ice in the corners stays relatively fresh. In the 500m, they either move the dots toward the center or away from the center and then adjust the start line so that the race always ends at the same point. We learned something new!

The 1000m men's preliminaries were much more predictable with almost all of the favorites advancing to the quarterfinals although Brandon Kim of the US was penalized for a late pass (attempting to pass too close to the corner) which caused both he and a skater from Latvia to crash. Since the crash was judged to be the fault of the American and they were judged to be in a qualifying position at the time, the Latvian skater was advanced to the quarterfinals. Here are some of our pictures from these races:

The final event of the day are the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals of the 2000m mixed team event. In this one, teams, consisting of two men and two women who take turns skating, compete in 3 races with 4 teams per race. The "handoff" is usually made by the person coming onto the track being pushed up to race pace by the person completing their skate. In the middle of the ice, you have people who are coming up to speed and synchronizing their position for the handoff. With a possible 8 skaters in the handoff zone at any given time, getting into position and avoiding crashing into anyone else is a challenge:

In the first heat, the powerful Dutch team set an Olympic record and easily beat Italy, Poland and Hungary, but the Italians in the crowd were happy because the Italian team qualified for the semi-finals. In the second race, Corinne Stoddard crashed again in almost exactly the same way. Fortunately, Kristen Santos-Griswold was able to receive the handoff from Corinne as she was sliding on the ice. This still left the Americans quite far behind a qualifying spot. Fortunately for them, there was a crash between the Japanese and French right at the end of the race that allowed the US to advance to the next round. The Japanese were penalized and the French were also advanced to the semifinals along with the winning South Korean team. In the last race, the strong Canadian team won followed by the Chinese. This race was so fast that even though the Belgian team finished third, they were advanced to the semifinals as the fastest third place team.

In the first semifinal, Xandra Velzeboer from the Dutch team, and probably the world's best women's speed skater, crashed in the straightaway when their team was far out in front, shocking the Dutch fans. As a result, the Italians won the race and qualified for the finals ahead of the Chinese team. In the second semifinal, Corinne went three for three and crashed again. Like us, she looked like she couldn't figure out what was going on. We found out later that a number of the skaters had said that the ice surface was quite soft to begin with (maybe because of sharing the ice surface with the figure skaters??) and it got even worse with 10,000+ spectators in the building. The fact that it has been in the 50's (F) every day this week probably also did not help. It seems to affect the fastest skaters the most because they are creating the highest forces in the corners. When Corinne fell, she also took out a South Korean skater, so Canada won this race with Belgium finishing second. Since South Korea was not in a qualifying position at the time of the crash, they were not advanced. This meant that 3 of the top 5 ranked teams in the world would not be in the finals!

In the B final, the Dutch showed how good they are and set another Olympic record to win. Julie Letai, who subbed in for Corinne in the final, also fell so the Americans finished last. In the final, we expected the Canadians, who were the highest ranked team left, to win. But perhaps driven on by the fans, the Italians skated a completely clean race while the Canadians had a couple of near crashes and won the gold medal. The Canadians won the silver and the Belgians, who arguably should not have even made it past the first round, ended up with the bronze medal. They were almost as excited as the Italians at the end! Here are some pictures from the mixed team race:

Since it was close by, we decide to go see the Olympic torch. We came out of the metro at the closest stop and see this:

We have found the Olympic sponsor village! Since they are basically paying for most of the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee always gives the sponsors an opportunity to market their products, educate potential customers and sell some merchandise. The lines are really long, and we are not really interested anyway so we pass on Alibaba and the other sponsors and continue heading in the direction that Google maps tells us to go. Up ahead, we see the Castello Sforzesco (the Sforza Castle):

What the Medici family was to Florence is what the Sforzo family was to Milan beginning in the mid-15th century and ending in 1535. When the last member of the previous Visconti Duchy died, the Sforzo's took power mostly by military force. It is ironic that sforza means force or effort in Italian. That, their authoritarian tendencies and high rates of taxation made them quite unpopular rulers. This small picture does not give you much of an idea of how huge this building is. We'll come back to this and the Sforzo family on another day. For now, we know that we need to go around it to get to the Olympic flame.

The flame is housed in the Arco della Pace (Arch of Peace):

It is in roughly the same place as the Porta Sempione (Semplon gate) which was one of the exits from the walls around the Roman city that predated Milan. The Strada del Sempione on the other side of the gate is still in use and supposedly goes directly to Paris from Milan. The arch itself was begun in 1807 when Napoleon ruled northern Italy but was not completed until 1838 due to the capture of Milan, first by the Austrian empire and then again by Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II of Italy.

The flame itself was, at least to us, a little underwhelming:

Yes, it has a beautiful knot pattern that we understand was devised by Leonardo da Vinci, but the flame is so small that it just doesn't show up in the daytime. We've seen pictures of it at night and it is a completely different story. There is a light show that lights up the Arch in different colors with inspiring music playing. You can also see the lights on the cauldron around the flame pulse and the flame shows up much better. Unfortunately, our preferred sleep pattern is incompatible with this schedule so we have to make do with what we can see.

We have a nice walk through the large park around the Castello Sforzesco, get on the metro and head for our hotel. When we get back, we aren't particularly hungry, so we decide to have gelato for dinner and then go to bed.

Tomorrow, we have the first of three straight days of Men's Ice Hockey. The first game features Slovakia and Finland. Enjoy (as soon as we feel well enough to write another blog)!

Note: My proofreader is under the weather, so any illiteracies are solely due to yours truly.