Winter Olympics closing ceremony LIVE: Team GB women win first gold medal in curling as Beijing Games end

Off we go! But Davies gets dropped quickly after the first set of bumps, hanging slightly to lose speed.

He gets back into it though, but with his three rivals are all ahead.

Omelin leads Drury down the final jump and they stick their landing, so Davies is eliminated.

Full-time! And Slovakia’s dream run at the Winter Olympics is over after a 1-0 defeat to Finland in the semi-finals. Slovakia shocked the United States in the quarter-finals but were held off by a strong Finland team, who will play either Sweden or the ROC in the gold medal match.

Sweden and ROC meet later today in the other semi-final.

As Eileen Gu won gold for China, Team GB’s Zoe Atkin secured a top-ten finish on her Olympic debut.

Atkin qualified fourth for the final but lost a ski on her first two runs, which she says dented her confidence in difficult conditions.

“I planned a harder run than my qualification one and as soon as I landed my second trick, I was going into my third and I knew I didn’t have the speed - I only went a foot out of the halfpipe. I did the best I could with the speed I had.

“The wind died down towards the end but it was a little bit gusty and hit you at random times in the pipe and that can be a factor for speed.”

Davies is in a heat along with the ROC’s Igor Omelin, Canada’s Kevin Drury and Germany’s Florian Wilmsmann.

The 24-year-old reached the final of the World Championship last year and is up in the last heat of the 1/8th stage.

As the men’s hockey semi-final between Finland and the Czech Republic goes into the final stages, Team GB’s Ollie Davies is set to compete in the men’s ski cross eighth finals.

“It’s like letting out a deep breath,” said China’s “snow princess” Eileen Gu after she cruised to victory in the women’s freestyle skiing halfpipe final, clinching second gold at the Games.

Breaking down in tears afterwards, Gu told reporters her victory was the result of years of hard work where she juggled hours of daily training with her career as a model and student.

“I feel exhausted, from opening ceremony to today I’ve been skiing every day so I’m tired but I feel at peace, I feel grateful, I feel passionate and I feel proud,” she said.

Rocks and ice, meet mobile devices and big data.The 500-year-old sport of curling is sliding into the digital age at the Winter Olympics, with modern technology helping teams sift through game stats and performance data to maximize their chances at a medal.

Major pro sports like baseball and football are increasingly crunching numbers to identify undervalued players and better inform coaching decisions. Now the trend toward analytics is coming to curling, a sport more often thought of as a pastoral pastime played by amateurs with dad bods and day jobs.

“Data is king,” said Nigel Holl, executive performance director of the British curling team, an early adopter of curling tech.“The only advantage we can possibly have is: Can we learn quicker and move faster than the opposition and get an advantage in?” Holl said.

“And data is a key part of how you can move faster and be ahead of the game.”

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Ukrainian bobsledder Lidiia Hunko has tested positive for a prohibited substance during the Beijing 2022 Olympics Games, the International Testing Agency (ITA) said on Friday. Hunko, who finished 20th in the women’s monobob, is the third athlete to test positive during the Games.

The ITA said she tested positive on Feb. 14 in Yanqing where the competition took place and she has been suspended provisionally.

“The athlete also has the right to request the analysis of the B-sample,” the ITA, in charge of doping tests during the Olympics, said. Her team could not be immediately reached for a comment.

Iranian Alpine skier Hossein Saveh-Shemshaki and Ukrainian cross-country skier Valentyna Kaminska are the other doping cases during the Games that end on Sunday.

The judges who let Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva continue to compete at the Beijing Olympics blamed anti-doping officials for a “failure to function effectively.”

The Court of Arbitration for Sport explained its verdict in the case that has dominated Olympic headlines for more than a week in a 41-page document, citing the “untenable delay” at the testing laboratory in Sweden as a reason for letting the 15-year-old Valieva skate in the women’s competition.

Valieva’s positive test for a heart medication was only revealed during the Olympics despite her urine sample arriving at the Stockholm lab on Dec. 29. The lab’s staffing was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The full verdict was published early Friday, hours after the 15-year-old Valieva’s mistake-filled free skate dropped her from the lead to finish fourth in the women’s individual event at the Beijing Games.

Valieva was cleared to skate by an urgent CAS ruling Monday after an appeal hearing that started Sunday night and ended at around 3 a.m. Monday.

“Put simply, athletes should not be subject to the risk of serious harm occasioned by anti-doping authorities’ failure to function effectively at a high level of performance and in a manner designed to protect the integrity of the operation of the Games,” the verdict states.

For two weeks and more, China’s stance on questions about its politics and policies has been straightforward: It’s the Olympics, and we’re not talking about these things.

That changed Thursday at the Beijing organizing committee’s last regularly scheduled daily news conference, three days before the end of the Games. The persistent and polite refusal to answer such questions gave way to the usual state of affairs at news conferences with Chinese officials — emphatic, calibrated answers about the country’s most sensitive situations.

Taiwan? An indivisible part of China. The Uyghur population of the Xinjiang region? Not being pushed into forced labor. China’s sovereignty? Completely unassailable under international norms.

“What I want to say is that there is only one China in the world,” organizing committee spokeswoman Yan Jiarong said, calling it “a solemn position” for China. She referred to other assertions about China’s treatment of Uyghurs and living conditions in the northwestern region of Xinjiang as “based on lies.”

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