Pyeongchang Winter Olympics 2018: Previewing What to Watch for on Day 8

If you like second (or third or fourth) chances, this is the day for you in the 2018 Winter Olympics.

U.S. cross-country skier Jessie Diggins has finished fifth, sixth and fifth in her three events, missing the podium in the 10-kilometer freestyle by 3.3 seconds in a race that takes more than 25 minutes. She and her teammates will aim to find those extra seconds in the relay.

Freestyle skier Maggie Voisin was the youngest athlete on the U.S. Olympic team (all sports) in 2014. She was injured in a training run in Sochi. Her four-year wait ends today.

The U.S. men's hockey team gets an opportunity to replicate the Miracle on Ice, sort of.

After the misfortunes of Mikaela Shiffrin (sick), Lindsey Jacobellis (just edged out of the medals) and Nathan Chen (no idea), the USA could certainly use a pick-me-up. But it's not just the Americans.

British short-track skater Elise Christie has continued an epic run of Olympic misfortune in South Korea. She's up again in the women's 1,500 meters.

And what's going on with curling world champion Rachel Homan of Canada?

Among those who are simply trying to add to a crowded trophy case, Lindsey Vonn will be in action.

To watch live Olympics coverage in real time, including the highlighted events detailed below, you can visit NBC's Olympics site anytime. Reminder: South Korea is 14 hours ahead of Eastern time, so an event that takes place Saturday morning in Pyeongchang will be on Friday night in the U.S.

Nathan Chen won't catch Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu. The American skater with the arsenal of quad jumps faltered in the short program, getting marked down on all three of his jumps. He stands 17th, too far back to contend, even if he lands all five quads he has planned for the free skate.

Adam Rippon, currently in seventh place, has an outside chance at a medal if the favorites do what Chen did in the short program. But Rippon doesn't have a quad scheduled in his program, which will put a low ceiling on his score.

The medals will go to the people who can land quads.

Hanyu did two in his short program and, like Chen, plans five in his free skate. If he remains upright through his program, that's going to be awfully hard to top. Spain's Javier Fernandez, 4.1 points behind Hanyu after the short program, plans three. Japan's Shoma Uno, who's third, plans four. Canadian favorite Patrick Chan is sixth but is likely too far back to medal unless we see a lot of falls.

So do the math if you like. Or just enjoy a long evening of the free skate (8 p.m. ET). Or both.

Imagine being 15 years old and the youngest member of the U.S. team in the Winter Olympics. You go to Russia, psyched to compete in the freestyle skiing slopestyle event. You take a training run on the course...

...and you break your ankle.

And then you tear an ACL and miss the 2014-15 season.

Not that Maggie Voisin has been sitting around feeling sorry for herself. Like a lot of extreme sports athletes, she has divided her time between World Cup events and other competitions. She was second on the 2018 Olympic course in a test event in 2016. She has finished in the top four in eight of her nine World Cup starts, and she won the X Games last month in Aspen.

She'll finally be an Olympian once she starts the slopestyle (qualifying 8 p.m. ET, final 11 p.m. ET). When she finishes, she might be a medalist.

Lindsey Vonn has earned 20 crystal globes, the trophy given for a World Cup season title (overall or in a specific discipline). No one else has more.

She has 81 World Cup wins. No other woman has more. Only Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark has more on the men's side with 86, and given the tear Vonn has been on lately, that record is on shaky ground.

She hasn't had the best luck in the Olympics with a long injury history that unfortunately coincides with a lot of big events. In 2006, she was airlifted off the mountain after a training crash but came right back to finish eighth in the downhill and then seventh in the super-G. She missed 2014 entirely.

Even in 2010, she was injured but managed to win her two Olympic medals to date—gold in the downhill and bronze in the super-G.

Eight years later, she's in great form even by her standards. She has won her last three World Cup downhills after placing second in the race before that. She also had the fastest time in the super-G of a combined event and won a super-G earlier in the season.

Assuming the weather cooperates, she'll start her 2018 quest with the super-G (9 p.m. ET). Oddly enough, she's first on the start list. Mikaela Shiffrin will be resting up for the combined.

So close.

Jessie Diggins came into South Korea as the brightest hope for finally breaking the U.S. women's shutout in Olympic cross-country skiing medals. Her fifth-place finish in the skiathlon set a record for the best-ever U.S. result. She battled her way to the six-skier sprint final but finished sixth.

Then the most heartbreaking result of all, fading down the stretch in the time trial-style 10-kilometer freestyle and finishing fifth again, just 3.3 seconds off the podium.

The best remaining chance to break the Olympic hex may be the team sprint later in these Games. But they'll also have a chance in the relay (4:30 a.m. ET), in which four skiers take turns going five kilometers. Diggins will race the anchor leg after ace sprinter Sophie Caldwell, sprint and 10-kilometer World Cup medalist Sadie Bjornsen and three-time World Cup sprint champion Kikkan Randall.

Short-track speedskating is always dramatic. But Elise Christie has surely been through enough.

In Sochi, she crossed the finish line second in the 500-meter final but was disqualified. She was disqualified again in the 1,500-meter heats and shut down her Twitter account in response to the negative reaction she was getting. Incredibly, she made it a clean sweep of disqualifications in the 1,000-meter semifinals.

In the first race in Pyeongchang, she wasn't disqualified. Should someone else have been disqualified? Christie crashed out of the 500-meter final (start at the 2:18 mark of the NBC video). If the judges had ruled that the Netherlands' Yara van Kerkhof had impeded her, she would've been awarded bronze. Christie's take? "I got knocked over."

It's not as Christie is looking for a fluke gold. She holds the world record at 500 meters. She won the 1,000 meters and 1,500 meters at last year's World Championships, her first golds after four silvers and two bronzes.

The short-track schedule on this day is relatively simple. The women's 1,500 meters and men's 1,000 meters start with the opening rounds (5 a.m. ET) and then work through semifinals to the finals of each event (approximately 7:05 a.m. ET).

Perhaps you've noticed Canada is quite good at curling. More than half of the top teams in the world are Canadian, making the competition to represent the country at the Olympics or World Championships quite brutal.

That's a lot of pressure on the winner of the trials. But so far, no Canadian team has failed to medal since curling returned to the Olympics in 1998. Five of the 10 teams have won gold in addition to the gold they've already claimed in Pyeongchang in the new mixed doubles event.

So you can imagine the state of panic in Canada now that Rachel Homan and her teammates, who usually cruise through elite competitions with mind-numbing perfection, have lost their first three games in round-robin play. Another loss would leave the overwhelming favorites teetering on the brink of elimination well before the playoffs start. Even now, they might have to win out to make it through.

It's a bit like watching the U.S. women's soccer team lose and tie its first two games in a World Cup, facing a must-win game just to make the next round.

You'd hate to be the next team they face when they return to the ice (6:05 a.m. ET). And that would be...

...the United States. Uh-oh.

Nina Roth's team may also be in desperate shape, depending on how the Americans fare earlier in the day against the Russians.

If the U.S. men's hockey team beats the Olympic Athletes from Russia in their final group-stage game (7:10 a.m. ET), it wouldn't quite be the Miracle on Ice. We're not in the midst of the Cold War, though the current geopolitical situation is complicated. And like the U.S. team, the OAR team is missing NHL stars such as Alexander Ovechkin and Nikita Kucherov.

But on paper, this game is a mismatch. OAR has a bunch of players from the KHL, which covers most of Russia and parts of Europe and Asia. The KHL is the NHL's biggest global challenger. Team USA has a couple of players from the KHL but also a bunch of players from the second-tier AHL and a few European leagues.

And as in 1980, it has college players. Harvard's Ryan Donato had both goals in the 2-1 win over Slovakia.

In the bizarre format of the Olympics, every team makes the playoffs. But the U.S. could get a bye to the quarterfinals with a win.