Pyeongchang Winter Olympics 2018: Previewing What to Watch for on Day 10

Don't expect the United States to charge up the medal table Sunday. Only three medal events are on the schedule for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, and Americans will be well out of the running in at least two of them.

But it's an important day for positioning. Some of the biggest extreme sports stars—including two-time Olympic slopestyle gold medalist Jamie Anderson and defending Olympic freestyle skiing halfpipe champion Maddie Bowman—will take to the slopes for qualifying. The ice dancing competition will begin, women's hockey teams will face off in the semifinals, and curling will hit crunch time.

Here are the storylines to watch.

To watch live Olympics coverage, including the events detailed below, visit NBC's Olympics site. Reminder: South Korea is 14 hours ahead of Eastern Time, so an event that takes place Monday morning in Pyeongchang will be on Sunday night in the U.S.

Team USA's first game in the women's curling competition was brutal. Nina Roth won the hammer, but Japan scored seven points in the first three ends on the way to a 10-5 decision. The stats were terrible for the American—while most players are typically graded around 75 to 85 percent, Roth's first game was scored at 49 percent. Her vice skip, Tabitha Peterson, was scored at 51 percent.

The next three games were much better. Roth and Co. stole two points in the last end to beat 2014 bronze medalist Eve Muirhead and Britain. After a 6-5 loss to Switzerland, Roth came up big in an extra end to beat the Olympic Athletes from Russia 7-6.

Then they had the misfortune of facing the Canadians, who had shockingly dropped their first three games. No need to talk about that one.

Roth (2-3) has two games Monday (South Korean time), against 1-4 Denmark (7:05 p.m. ET Sunday) and 3-3 China (6:05 a.m. ET Monday). Two wins would put the United States in good position to make the four-team playoffs. Two losses would surely knock it out.

New event, familiar faces.

Take a slopestyle course, remove the rails and smaller jumps at the top, ramp up the kicker at the end for a single big jump, and you get big air, which is making its Olympic debut in Pyeongchang.

It's no surprise a lot of the athletes who compete in slopestyle will turn up again in big air, a popular event in World Cup and X Games competition. Organizers build big ramps wherever they can, even in Boston's Fenway Park, and snowboarders follow with cool tricks.

Jamie Anderson already won gold in 2018, her second straight Olympic slopestyle victory, but she's not quite as accomplished in big air. Fellow American Julia Marino won the Fenway Park event in 2016. Austria's Anna Gasser won the competition at the recent X Games and the 2017 World Championships.

Athletes will have a four-day gap between the qualifiers (8 p.m. ET) and the final.

Ice dancing is not prone to the wild swings of other figure skating disciplines. No one tries a bunch of high-risk, high-reward quad jumps, so no one will pull a Nathan Chen—17th in the short program, first in the free skate.

Canada's Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir finish first or second. All the time. France's Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron also have finished first or second in the World Championships or Grand Prix competitions of the last couple of years. Those pairs will almost certainly duel for gold. And they'll skate to some familiar music. The Canadians will go with a medley of "Sympathy for the Devil," "Hotel California" and "Oye Como Va." The French will opt to dance to Ed Sheeran.

The bronze medal will be up for grabs between three United States teams and three from elsewhere. Maia and Alex Shibutani represented the U.S. in the team event and won bronze, but Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue upset the Shib Sibs in the U.S. Championships. Madison Chock and Evan Bates recorded the best free skates among the three American pairs in the U.S. Championships and the 2018 Grand Prix final.

The other medal contenders are Canada's Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje, Italy's Anna Cappellini and Luca Lanotte and Olympic Athletes from Russia's Ekaterina Bobrova and Dmitri Soloviev.

The eight favorites will be the last eight to compete. The short program starts at 8 p.m. ET, but if you want to see the top teams, turn on the tube at 10:30 p.m. ET and settle in for about 75 minutes of greatness. There will be a different order for the free dance, in which multiple pairs will skate to Muse.

Yes, freestyle skiers get a shot at the halfpipe, too. The event debuted in the Olympics in 2014, with Maddie Bowman winning gold.

The Americans have a shot at a sweep this year. Bowman and Brita Sigourney finished 1-2 in the recent X Games, and Canadian Cassie Sharpe was third. That was Bowman's third X Games win in the last four years. Sigourney has a World Cup win this season. Devin Logan was third in last year's World Championships, one spot of ahead of Annalisa Drew.

The toughest test will come from France's Marie Martinod, a pioneer of the sport (World Cup champion 14 years ago) who won silver in the 2014 Winter Games and 2017 World Championships. Japan's Ayana Onozuka won gold in the 2017 World Championships.

Skiers will get two qualifying runs (8 p.m. ET), with the final runs the next night.

Four of the five Olympic women's hockey tournaments have ended with a United States-Canada final.

All 18 of the women's hockey World Championships have ended with a United States-Canada final.

To have yet another United States-Canada final, two things need to happen. The Americans need to beat Finland (11:10 p.m. ET Sunday), and the Canadians need to beat the Olympic Athletes from Russia (7:10 a.m. ET Monday).

Those are the same matchups from the first day of Group A play, when the United States beat Finland 3-1 and Canada beat OAR 5-0.

Through two of four runs in the two-man bobsled, German sleds are first (Nico Walther and Christian Poser), second (Johannes Lochner and Christopher Weber) and fifth (Francesco Friedrich and Thorsten Margis).

Friedrich is trying to shake off an Olympic hex. He's the four-time defending world champion and won the last World Cup event with Margis but finished eighth with Jannis Backer in the 2014 Olympics.

The challenge for Canada's Justin Kripps and Alexander Kopacz, tied for third with South Korea's Yunjong Won and Youngwoo Seo, will be to stay on the podium. Kripps finished sixth in Sochi in 2014 with Bryan Barnett and second in last year's World Championships. He also edged Friedrich for the World Cup season title.

The U.S. sleds are 11th, 24th and 25th heading into the final runs (6:15 a.m. ET Monday).

We're quickly running out of races for American long-track speedskaters to break a medal drought dating to 2010.

In the men's 500 meters (6:53 a.m. ET), the United States has four entrants: Mitchell Whitmore, Jonathan Garcia, Kimani Griffin and the ever-present Shani Davis. This season, they've combined for 154 points in World Cup 500-meter races. Whitmore has 142 of those, good for 21st overall. Seven skaters, four of them from the Netherlands, have at least 300 points.

But Whitmore finished fourth in last year's World Championships, and he has reached a couple of World Cup podiums in the last three years. Davis doesn't skate this distance often.

So the Americans are due, right?