About Health: See Two Winter Olympic Events for the First Time EVER

See Two Winter Olympic Events for the First Time EVER

Learn the #BigEvents happening in Sochi today

It’s game time in Sochi! For the next two and a half weeks, we’ll be keeping you up to date on all the Olympic-sized excitement right here on WomensHealthMag.com.

The 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony doesn’t take place until tomorrow, but the competition actually kicked off today—including two brand-new-to-the-Games events: Team Figure Skating and Slopestyle.

Team Figure Skating
You know how teams compete together for one of the Gymnastics events in the Summer Olympics? Now Figure Skating teams do so, too. Each team has a male, female, pair, and ice dancing couple represent them. Today the team competition gets rolling (or, well, skating) at 10:30 a.m. EST/7:30 a.m. PST with the men’s and pairs’ short programs—Jeremy Abbott (men) and Marissa Castelli and Simon Shnapir (pairs) are stepping onto the ice for Team USA.

Slopestyle
Slopestyle is debuting at Sochi for both Skiing and Snowboarding. The event sounds like a fun run (it consists of a downhill run filled with jumps and rails), but, of course, it’s way more challenging and dangerous—in fact, Norwegian medal contender Torstein Horgmo broke his collarbone during slopestyle training and can no longer compete, and Shaun White pulled out after injuring his wrist while practicing so that he can focus on the halfpipe. Both men and women snowboarders took to the course early this A.M. for the qualification round.

Women’s Moguls
The qualification round for this event just wrapped up. Hannah Kearney (the Vancouver 2010 gold medalist) is the Team USA woman to watch.

You can visit nbcolympics.com for results and to live stream events (generally super early in U.S. time zones), and to check out your local TV listings for the Games.

Meanwhile, we want to know…

Which Winter Olympics sport is your favorite to watch?