Day 5: Short Day Setting Up for Much to Come

Only 3 additional medal events today giving everyone a nice day to enjoy with their Valentine's:

If you're worried about your standings, there are SO many points still out there to claim.  Remember, our projected standings had the leaders just over 200 points, so plenty of chances to work your way up to the podium.

Highlights:

• Nordic Combined is an interesting event to watch because we're finding out that EVERYONE selected contenders.  The event has been conducted in every winter olympics and it clearly is unpredictable.  Watching the ski jump portion the wind essentially died halfway through right before the overwhelming favorites were about to jump.  Johannes Rydzek of Luge Yourself, Jan Schmid, of Incheon Closer, and Jorgen Graabak of Seoul Searching were projected to be the medalists, and all had absolutely terrible jumps that left the athletes and the announcers bewildered.  The second part of the event allows for participants to start the cross-country race in order of finish in the ski jump, and the favorites had too much of a deficit to make up.  Rydzek made up almost a minute of time to finish 5th, but the eventual winners held him off: Eric Frenzel of Red White and Luge took Gold, Akito Watabe of Russian Ministry of Sport claimed the silver, and Lukas Klapfer of Lindsey Vonn-miting was not projected to do anything and took the bronze.
  
• Long track featured the Women's 1000m race where another Dutch athlete took gold! Unfortunately not one anyone picked as Jorien Ter Mors surprises the favorite Marit Leenstra from Seoul Searching, who did not make the podium.  Run DMZ and Red White and Luge cleaned up with Nao Kodaira and Miho Takagi from Japan getting the Silver and Bronze respectively.
  
• The Doubles Luge competition rounds out the medals for the day - the expected medalists did get on the podium, but not where expected! Eggert/Benecken from Soohorang Success is known as "Eggs Benedict," but they maybe ate a little too much breakfast as they could not live up to expectations and slid in for the bronze.  Wendl/Arlt defended their gold medal from Sochi by scoring the gold for Seoul Searching, and Penz/Fischler of Incheon Closer overcame the memory of crashing in Sochi with high expectations to come in second and claim the silver.