With a flash of a skate, China won its first medal of the Beijing Winter Olympics on Saturday, which was also the first gold medal in a new Olympic event: the short-track speedskating mixed-gender team relay.
Wu Dajing struck his right skate across the finish line two-hundredths of a second ahead of a lunging Pietro Sighel from Italy as several hundred Chinese spectators cheered wildly, ignoring an edict not to cheer to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus.
“I feel that I’ve waited for this Olympic gold medal for too long,” Fan Kexin, a member of the Chinese team whose previous quests for a gold ended in disappointment, told journalists after the win.