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Olympic premiere of the aerials mixed team competition
Photo: Maja Hitij / Getty Images
The sixth day of competition at the Olympic Games in Beijing brought the sixth German gold medal.
Two athletes have already achieved their second success in China.
And the men's figure skating competition brought great sport and fatal falls.
The German
lugers
finished the winter games in China with a perfect gold balance
by
triumphing in the team relay .
The single-seater Olympic champions
Natalie Geisenberger
and Johannes Ludwig drove to victory together with the doubles-seaters Tobias Wendl and Tobias Arlt ahead of Austria and Latvia.
Geisenberger and Wendl/Arlt each won their sixth Olympic gold medal and replaced speed skater Claudia Pechstein as the leader in the list of the most successful German winter Olympic athletes.
At the top is now Geisenberger, who, in addition to her gold medals, also has a bronze medal in Vancouver 2010.
An event like the Olympic Games lives from the touching stories, the improbable triumphs.
The Austrian
Johannes Strolz
did one in the
Alpine combination
.
At the beginning of the season, the skier was still without a place in the squad and had to prepare his equipment himself.
He got his place at the Olympics with a sensational victory in Adelboden, and now he crowned this extraordinary winter with victory in Beijing.
At the moment of success he had to think of his father Hubert - who had also won gold in Calgary in 1988 in the alpine combined.
Drama in
men's figure skating
: Double Olympic champion
Yuzuru Hanyu
failed at the world premiere of the quadruple Axel, also botched another attempt and had to settle for fourth place in the end.
Gold went to
Nathan Chen
, the American started with a world record score in the short program and then showed a freestyle peppered with numerous quadruple jumps.
Despite the disappointment about Hanyu, Japan did not go without medals: Yuma Kagiyama and Shoma Uno took silver and bronze.
No medal, but
Katharina Hennig
got the best placing by a German cross-country skier since 2006 .
When Norwegian
Therese Johaug triumphed
again over the 10-kilometer distance, Hennig missed a medal by 11.9 seconds in the classic technique.
Better than Hennig was Claudia Nystad, who won silver in the sprint 16 years ago.
For Johaug, who missed the 2018 Olympics due to a doping ban, it was the third gold medal of her career.
The 33-year-old is the second double Olympic champion in Beijing.
Before her, the Slovenian ski jumper Ursa Bogataj had won gold in singles and mixed.
Irene Schouten
from the Netherlands
won the
speed skating race over 5000 meters
in 6:43.51 minutes.
The 29-year-old won her second gold medal in China after the 3000 meters.
In addition, the 3000-meter European champion beat the 20-year-old Olympic record of 49-year-old Pechstein by 3.4 seconds.
The ski freestylers from the
USA
have won the Olympic premiere of the
aerials mixed team
competition.
In Zhangjiakou's Genting Snow Park, Ashley Caldwell, Christopher Lillis and Justin Schoenefeld flew to gold with 338.34 points ahead of China (324.22) and Canada (290.98).
China was clearly leading after the first round, but second starter Jia Zongyang rolled over after landing.
The World Cup third USA took advantage of the mistake, passed and won.
The
German
men's ice hockey team started the Olympic tournament with a bitter defeat.
The team lost 5-1 to Canada (0-3, 1-1, 0-1).
After just under ten minutes, the Germans were 0:3 behind.
Germany will play their next game against China on Saturday (9.40 a.m.) before playing the USA on Sunday (2.10 p.m.).
You can find the schedule here.
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