At the 1998 Winter Games, Michelle Kwan of the United States was widely favored to win a gold medal. But Tara Lipinski, then 15, entered those Olympics as the world champion and skated with a technical mastery and joyous inevitability while Kwan displayed the slightest caution. While Michelle Khan had more experience, Lipinski had less pressure. Lipinski won and remains the youngest Olympic champion by a few weeks at a comparable age to Zagitova (Mather).

Bickner, 21, was born in 1996 in Wauconda. He attended Wauconda High School until moving to Park City, Utah, to train. He has been downhill skiing since he was 4 years old and began jumping at age 10. Bickner is one of three Olympians from the Norge Ski Club of Fox River Grove. In 2012, he moved with his family to the Utah U.S. Olympics training center and made the developmental squad. Bickner currently attends DeVry University (Associated Press New York Post).

Using the same methods for the 2016 and 2012 summer Olympics, we can compare the overall injury rates. The Winter Games comes out slightly ahead at 12.6 injuries per 100 athletes, whereas the rate from the past two summer Olympics is 11.3. The only summer sports approaching the higher injury rate of snowboarding and skiing events are BMX and taekwondo (Cohen and Robinson).

More than anything, being at the Olympics in Pyeongchang— at two clusters of venues on the shores of the Sea of Japan and in the Taebaek Mountains — is a feast for the senses. Your palate is regularly lit up by the food, which is superspicy, or supersweet, or sometimes a bit of both. You can be freezing outdoors one moment and sweating in an overheated bus the next. Your eardrums get a workout anywhere there is music (Segal).

Wind greatly affected the women’s slopestyle snowboard contest on Monday, a day after qualifying runs had been canceled because of wind. In the finals, athletes crashed or simply gave up runs. Some approached the big jumps at full speed, only to pull up at the last moment because snow made it impossible to see or the wind socks on the jumps were completely stiffened. Tess Coady of Australia blamed the wind for a knee injury sustained in a training run before the competition (Branch).

As a spectator you are constantly faced with two temperatures-hot and cold; there is no happy medium for this Olympics. Lovely as they are, the buses at the games have a pretty consistent flaw. They are heated to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. O.K., that’s an exaggeration. But it is common to spend hours outdoors shivering at an event and then step inside a vehicle that is sweltering. The transition from too cold to too hot occurs almost instantly. You’re only in that Goldilocks place of just right, temperature-wise, for about five seconds. Riders shed layers as fast as they can (Branch).

A year ago, Zagitova was the world junior champion, while Medvedeva was the senior world champion favored to win Olympic gold. Then Medvedeva broke a bone in her right foot last fall, missed training time and two important competitions and perhaps never fully regained her stamina (Mather).

Everything is too long these days. College football is way too long. Movies are too long. Tweets are way too long. We have shorter attention spans than ever, and because of the way technology is constantly rewiring our brains—oh, whatever, you already know what this sentence is going to say. It was also going to be too long. Here’s our solution: The Winter Olympics should run from a Friday opening to the second Sunday. Drop the last week altogether. Pack the events into 10 rollicking days. Not a single night of this quadrennial television event should go by without at least one marquee event (Cohen and Robinson).

The birth name you were given when you were born is a fact.