Jessie Diggins Wins Her Second Medal in Beijing

Greater than a month in the past, when Olympic rosters had been nonetheless coming into view, Sweden’s coach supplied a plain-spoken evaluation of a subject whose fluidity and thriller had been flummoxing males’s hockey executives all over the world.

“Russia and Finland,” Johan Garpenlov stated, “are robust.”

They performed for the gold medal on Sunday, when Finland beat Russia, 2-1, within the final scheduled competitors of the Beijing Video games.

The Finns didn’t hesitate to deliver an aggressive assault to the ice at Nationwide Indoor Stadium, the place they greater than doubled the Russians in pictures within the first interval.

Males’s Gold Medal Recreation Last					T
Russian Olympic Committee		1	0	0	1
Finland		0	1	1	2

The Russians nonetheless managed a lead popping out of the primary. However even because the Finnish tempo lagged within the second, a aim evened the rating, and the match entered its final regulation interval with the sport locked in a tie.

A Finnish aim within the third interval, although, proved to be decisive and left the finale with out a few of the shootout dramatics that had dotted elimination video games in Beijing.

Sunday’s contest capped an Olympic match stripped, for the second straight Video games, of present N.H.L. gamers, which left many rosters largely full of gamers from faculties, European circuits and different much less seen leagues.

There have been surprises alongside the best way. The US, which despatched its youngest group to a Video games since 1994, stormed by way of the preliminary spherical and compiled an ideal file earlier than it misplaced to Slovakia in a quarterfinal recreation that ended with a shootout. Slovakia went on to win the bronze medal, its best Olympic displaying in males’s hockey, when it embarrassed Sweden, which practically reached the gold medal recreation.

The match was much more suspenseful than the ladies’s competitors, the place Canada and the USA dominated, as ordinary and as anticipated. The Canadians received the gold after they beat the People on Thursday. Finland’s ladies’s group took the bronze.

However within the males’s competitors, the Russian squad — formally competing because the Russian Olympic Committee as a penalty for the nation’s historical past of doping — was a pretournament favourite, if an imperfect one.

The Russians practically misplaced their first recreation in Beijing, a gathering with the Swiss. They later beat Denmark, which was making its inaugural Olympic look in males’s hockey, by two targets. The Czech Republic’s group outlasted the Russians, 6-5, to complete the preliminary spherical.

They nonetheless earned a spot within the quarterfinal spherical, the place they beat Denmark once more, after which survived a semifinal in opposition to Sweden on Friday night time, when it took a 17-shot shootout to resolve a winner.

The Finns had a considerably smoother path to Sunday’s assembly: They pummeled Slovakia within the preliminary spherical, the place additionally they beat Latvia and edged Sweden, and eviscerated Switzerland in a quarterfinal. They extra narrowly beat the Slovak group within the semifinal however superior with far much less of a battle than their Russian counterparts.

However it was the Russians who scored first on Sunday. Mikhail Grigorenko, a ahead who was on Russia’s gold medal-winning group in 2018 and beforehand performed within the N.H.L., sliced a shot towards the web, the place, with nearly 13 minutes to play within the first, it streaked previous Finland’s Harri Sateri.

The Finns tied the sport early within the second, when Ville Pokka, a Finnish defenseman, took a shot from the rink’s edge, proper in entrance of his personal bench and simply yards forward of the blue line. The puck zipped previous a Finn, a Russian and Ivan Fedotov, the 25-year-old netminder who was born in Finland however reared in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Fedotov opened the third interval with extra distress: Simply 31 seconds in, Hannes Bjorninen redeemed an earlier penalty field stint by taking a straight-on shot on the Russian internet.

When it went in, with out a lot resistance from Fedotov, the Finnish delegation seated close to the centerline erupted and raised the nation’s flag.

The Russians predictably mounted a sequence of fearsome, determined tries as minutes drained from the clock.

They killed an influence play with simply greater than six minutes remaining, holding them — and their very own ambitions — inside a single shot of the Finns.

However the aim horn by no means sounded once more. Finland, which first performed Olympic hockey in 1952, would lastly get its gold medal.

	Finland	2	31	0 for 3	2
	Russian Olympic Committee	1	17	1 for 1	6