Cheating has been part and parcel of the Olympics since at least Eupolus of Thessaly in 388BC. But crooked boxers from ancient Greece never confessed their indiscretions on live television. The Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid did exactly that after winning bronze in the men's 20km biathlon for his first individual Olympic medal, publicly admitting he'd two-timed his girlfriend three months earlier and calling it 'my biggest mistake' in an overshare for the ages carried live by national broadcaster NRK. Lægreid's shot appeared to have missed the target one day later when the wronged party, wishing to remain anonymous, told the Norwegian paper VG it was 'hard to forgive' what he did.
Every Olympics produces at least one breakout star. Few of them, however, arrive on four legs. Nazgul, a two-year-old Czechoslovakian wolfdog who lives at a nearby hotel in Tesero, burst on to the course during the women's cross-country team sprint qualifier and launched a pell-mell dash for the line behind Croatia's Tena Hadzic, though his time did not count because he is male. And a dog. Hadzic briefly wondered if she was hallucinating before officials escorted the crowd favourite off the snow. 'He was cute but not aggressive,' Greece's Konstantina Charalampidou observed. Nazgul, a very good boy according to multiple sources, has yet to comment on his tactics.
Canadians' near-mythical reputation for politesse took a hit on the curling sheet during a bad-tempered game near the start of the competition. Tempers flared as Brad Jacobs' Canada beat Sweden in a spicy round-robin tie, with Niklas Edin's team alleging the Canadians were double-touching the stone after release. After a passive-aggressive back-and-forth in which each side asked the officials to monitor the other's deliveries, tensions boiled over in the penultimate end when Marc Kennedy responded to Oskar Eriksson's accusations of impropriety by telling him to 'fuck off'. In a sport that prides itself on self-policing civility, the memes alone may have been worth it.
There was no bigger story during the early days of the Milano Cortina Games than 'Penisgate', the scandal that alleged ski jumpers, seeking marginal aerodynamic gains after tighter suit regulations, had resorted to injecting hyaluronic acid into their members to inflate 3D body measurements and secure looser suits with the goal of increasing drag. World Anti-Doping Agency officials were asked, for perhaps the first time, to comment on penile enhancement as performance aid. The body's Polish president, Witold Banka, clearly as amused as the rest of us, said: 'Ski jumping is very popular in Poland, so I promise you I'm going to look at it.'
'Don't jump in them,' was Breezy Johnson's warning after the downhill champion's gold medal detached from its ribbon during a moment of customary excitement on the podium. The American was hardly alone. The German biathlete Justus Strelow and the US figure skater Alysa Liu both reported a faulty clasp connecting the medal to the ribbon, while the Swedish cross-country skier Ebba Andersson said her silver medal split into two after falling in the snow. Some have attributed the design flaw to a breakaway mechanism required by law to prevent choking, but the rapid accumulation of complaints represented a rare wobble for Italian craftsmanship.
