🇨🇦Team Canada: Two prolific Canadian Paralympians added to their ever-expanding medal collections this weekend. Swimmer Aurélie Rivard broke her own record twice in the S10 100m freestyle on Saturday to win Canada’s first gold medal of the Tokyo Games, and then won a bronze in the women’s 4x100m yesterday. Too hot, hot damn.

• Track star Brent Lakatos won two more silver medals, in the T53 400m and T54 5,000m. Lakatos nearly retired after he failed to podium at the Beijing Games in 2008, but he now has a career total of nine Paralympic medals. 

🇦🇫Big story: Despite fears that Afgan athletes Zakia Khudadadi (taekwondo) and Hossain Rasouli (track) would not be able to leave Afghanistan due to the recent Taliban takeover, the pair were safely evacuated thanks to a “major global operation” and arrived in Tokyo on Saturday.

• With this news confirmed, Khudadadi will now become the first female Paralympian from Afghanistan ever. History is happening.

👀Key events:

• 🏊‍♀️Women’s S9 100m freestyle heats tonight at 9:43 p.m. ET and final tomorrow at 6:14 a.m. ET. Watch 2016 gold medalist Katarina Roxon. 
• 🧑‍🦽Men’s T54 1,500m final, tonight at 10:46 p.m. ET. Watch Canadian Brent Lakatos. 

🏀Women’s wheelchair basketball quarter-final, tonight at 11:30 p.m. ET. Watch Canada vs. USA.  

🏊‍♀️Swimming: Penny Oleksiak became the most decorated Olympian in Canadian history on Saturday night, winning her seventh-career Olympic medal — a bronze — in the women’s 4x100m medley relay. 

• With a silver and two bronze to add to her four medals from Rio 2016, Oleksiak’s Tokyo 2020 Games are over...but don’t worry, she’ll be back for Paris 2024. 

🏃‍♀️Track & Field: Andre de Grasse won bronze in the men’s 100m — aka the fastest man in the world race — to finally put Canadian men on the medal board. de Grasse will be back in action tonight at 10:05 p.m. ET to qualify for the 200m, which he won silver for in Rio 2016.

🏐Volleyball: Both Canadian women’s beach volleyball teams have advanced to tomorrow’s quarter-finals. Heather Bansley and Brandie Wilkerson will play Latvia at 8 a.m. ET, while the still-undefeated duo of Melissa Humana-Paredes and Sarah Pavan play Australia at 9 a.m. ET. A win for both (fingers crossed) means they’ll face each other in the semis.

🏀Basketball: After going 1-2 in group play, Canada’s women’s basketball team is out of the Olympics. A disappointing showing for the fourth-ranked team in the world.  

🏋️‍♀️Weightlifting: Canada’s second gold medal is extra shiny and new. Just a couple of hours ago, Maude Charron won Canada’s first gold medal in weightlifting since 2012, crushing the competition in the 64kg event. 

🏊‍♀️Swimming: Another medal from the aquatic centre last night. Windsor’s Kylie Masse, who spent the pandemic training in her parents’ backyard pool, won silver in the women’s 100m backstroke, upgrading her bronze from Rio 2016.

🥎Softball: Team Canada won its first-ever softball medal early this morning with a nail-biting 3–2 win over Mexico. After Mexico tied it up in the fifth inning, it was Kelsey Harshman who drove in the winning run. The team’s winning reaction was priceless, making it all the more sad that softball won’t be returning to the Olympics in 2024.

🤼‍♀️Judo: Two days ago, Canada had never won a medal in judo. Now, we have two. After Jessica Klimkait won the bronze yesterday, Catherine Beauchemin-Pinard followed it up with a bronze of her own in the women’s 63kg event today. All that shimmers is gold bronze.

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.

🏊‍♀️Swimming: Katie Ledecky is back on the podium. After a year out of the pool (because of COVID-19), Ledecky returned for the TYR Pro Swim Series and won four titles in four days. Fellow Team USA swimmer and Togethxr founding member, Simone Manuel, also won her event. Our Olympic fever is heating up.

🏒Hockey: The PWHPA’s Dream Gap Tour had another successful weekend, with Team Minnesota winning both games over Team New Hampshire. No future stops on the Tour have been announced yet, but we’re sure we’ll get some good news soon.

⛳️Golf: Bryson DeChambeau won this weekend’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. Cool. But what really impressed us was his monstrous 377-yard drive on Sunday, following up to his 370-yard drive on Saturday (for reference, the average drive distance in the PGA is 295 yards). He officially entered #BeastMode.

🥊 Boxing: Claressa Shields made history this weekend as the first boxer (male or female) to become the undisputed world champion in two different weight classes. The historic moment came after Shields, of Flint, Michigan, handed Canadian Marie-Ève Dicaire her first-ever loss. Sting like a bee.

🤼‍♀️ MMA: Speaking of two-class champs, Amanda Nunes (pronounced NOON-EZ) continued her reign as queen of the octagon on Saturday with a submission win over Megan Anderson. With the win, Nunes defended her featherweight title and still holds her bantamweight championship belt.