Tokyo Olympics Gold-Getters

July 26, 2021
The GIST: It’s Day 4 of the Olympics, and a 13-year-old — Japanese skateboarder Momiji Nishiya — has already won a gold medal. Feeling old yet?
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Tokyo Olympics Gold-Getters
Source: TSN/Twitter

Team Canada: While these are the most gender-balanced Olympic Games in history, it’s the women who are carrying Team Canada. The women’s 4x100m freestyle relay swim team won the first Canadian medal — a silver — on Saturday night, and Maggie Mac Neil doubled her medal total last night, bringing home Canada’s first gold in the 100m butterfly. Sugar, baby.

Early yesterday, the pair of Jennifer Abel and Melissa Citrini-Beaulieu won silver in 3m synchro diving, and just this morning, Jessica Klimkait won the red and white’s first-ever judo medal, a bronze in the under-57 kg category. Who run the world?

🏅Other medal winners: The theme of the weekend was dark horse. Though Dutch medal favorite Annemiek van Vleuten thought she’d won gold when she finished the women’s road cycling race yesterday, the actual winner — teamless, coachless, unsigned, unknown Austrian Anna Kiesenhofer — had crossed the finish line first a shocking minute and 15 seconds earlier.

  • And in Saturday’s men’s 400m freestyle, 18-year-old Tunisian swimmer Ahmed Hafnaoui won the gold despite qualifying eighth of eight and starting from the outside lane. His family’s reaction is why we love a good underdog story.