Best of 2018 Winter Olympics

Post date: Mar 02, 2018 6:20:40 PM

By: Tina Zhang and Kaitlyn Tse

The 2018 Winter Olympics was held at PyeongChang, South Korea. This was the 23rd Winter Olympic Games. The Olympics started on February 9th and ended on February 25th. The U.S. team for the winter Olympics were comprised of 244 Olympians (135 men and 109 women). There has been an approximate number of 20.1 million viewers as of February 15th.

There are 15 different sports that can be done, including alpine skiing, figure skating, bobsledding, and many others. The International Olympic Committee added the following new events to the 2018 Winter Olympics: big air snowboarding, freestyle skiing, mass start speed skating, and mixed doubles curling.

A total of 92 countries are competing in the Winter Olympics. Russia was banned by the International Olympic Committee because they had found that the Russian athletes doped, or used steroids to improve their performances. The athletes that hadn’t used steroids could still participate in the Olympics, but could not play for Russia; they had to compete as neutral athletes. In the record books of the Olympics, Russia will be shown to have won 0 medals.

The mascot for this years Olympics is a white tiger named Soohorang. A white tiger is considered a guardian in Korean culture. In Korean, Soohorang means “protection tiger”.

This is the logo for the 2018 Winter Olympics

We asked some students at Marina about how they felt about the Olympics.

Rachael Lin, a 7th grader, says, “I think the Olympics were very fun to watch. The people that race are very inspiring to me.”

Fiona Lee, an 8th grader, says, “I love the Olympics. The athletes inspire me. I feel like the US team should have tried harder to get to a better placing on the medal count.”

Another 8th grader, Mandy Zhu, says, “I think the Olympic sports are very inspiring because it shows how all the hard work pays off at the end. I’m really happy that the U.S. came in 4th!”

Coming in first for the medal counts, Norway has a total of 39 medals. In second for the most medals is Germany with 31 medals. Third place is held by Canada with 29 medals. In fourth place, is the United States with 23 medals. 12 of the medals for the United States were won by women, while 9 were won by men. There were also 2 other medals for mixed sports. It has been the first time in 20 years that American women have won more medals than men although the men had outnumbered the women 135-109.