The Sochi Olympics 2014 have started up live and the winter games stream is online from NBC and the figure staking is streaming Thursday with the team men's short program at 10:30 am ET from Russia, while later on the team pairs short program will go at 12:10 pm ET and comes after the men's slopestyle had their qualifying along with the women, as well as women's mogul qualifications on the day before the Opening Ceremonies.
The figure skating team event is being held for the first time at Sochi and the figure skating competition will be at the Iceberg Skating Palace and the event starts before the opening ceremonies and that is also a first for the Olympic games. There are five events in figure skating that will be going down this year and the team competition is the first to start, while the ladies singles will be the most watched, especially after all the drama with the Team USA selections and the medal event should be one of the biggest draws for NBC.
The team events start up on Thursday with the team event pair short and then the men's short before picking up on Saturday with the ice dance short and the ladies short as well as the team event pair free skate and there are currently nearly 150 athletes from 30 different countries competing in the skating events. The team events are new to the Olympics and that means many are not familiar with the way they will be judged and determined and for the team competition, 10 nations will be competing and they will be comprised of one male and one female athlete for the short program and the scored will not be combined, but instead they will be ranked, meaning the top scoring man gets 10 points and then on down the line, after which the top scoring teams overall get points and then those are combined based on the four disciplines. Yeah, not complicated at all.
United States, Canada, and Russia come in as the favorites for most of the competitions in ice skating and those will be the first medals given out for figure skating before things pick up with the individual events next week and those are expected to be the most watched on those days. NBC will have streaming coverage of the team events and they will be the first primetime event to be covered at the games, as it will air Thursday night at 8 p.m. ET and comes before things pick up on Saturday morning and the medal rounds on Sunday.
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The US team has Jeremy Abbott with the pair of Marissa Castelli and Simon Shnapir taking the ice on Thursday and they will be representing as one of the 10 competing teams. The short and long programs will be going down and then later in the games, skaters like Ashley Wagner will get their chance to strike gold and comes after some controversy after she was named to the team despite not performing well at the US championships and that should make the ratings go even higher as people tune in to see how she does.
