America held off a robust Japan workforce to win gold within the workforce determine skating occasion on the 2026 Winter Olympic Video games.
Ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates, pairs skaters Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea, and particular person skaters Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn and Ilia Malinin all delivered aggressive packages over the course of the three-day, four-discipline, eight-part occasion.
It is Group USA’s second straight gold within the occasion after taking house the highest prize in Beijing in 2022.
A detailed name
With Japan dominating pairs, the U.S. dominating ice dance and each nations on equal footing within the males’s and girls’s disciplines, the combat for gold was all the time going to be shut.
Nobody, although, anticipated it to be fairly this shut. The 2 nations entered the eighth aggressive rotation—the boys’s lengthy program—in a lifeless warmth with precisely 59 factors apiece. Japan’s Shun Sato and the U.S.’s Malinin took to the ice figuring out that their performances would make all of the distinction.
Sato and Malinin are wildly totally different skaters, they usually confirmed that over the course of their packages. Sato delivered a crisp, elegant, technically exact efficiency to Stravinsky’s Firebird, whereas Malinin delivered an athletic, brazen, boundary-pushing efficiency of his personal customized tune. Sato’s program supplied the next grade of execution, however Malinin’s supplied the next problem degree due to its abundance of quad jumps.
