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Sarah Nurse
HOCKEY, CANADA
Growing up in
hockey-mad Ontario,
Sarah Nurse made
gold medals out of
construction paper.
In 2018, Nurse fell
just short of the real
kind when Canada—
the reigning fi ve-time
Olympic champ—
lost the gold-medal
game to the U.S. in
a 3-2 shoot-out. A
championship rematch
in Beijing wouldn’t be
surprising.
Nurse, a biracial
woman competing
in a majority- white
sport, will be playing
for something more
than her fi rst Olympic
gold. “Black Lives
are more important
than sports. PERIOD,”
Nurse, 27, wrote on
Twitter in August 2020,
as North America
reckoned with its
history of racial
injustice. “I’m going
to need hockey,
especially, to
understand that.”
A week later, Nurse
was appointed to
the board of the
Professional Women’s
Hockey Players
Association; she counts
increasing diversity
in the sport as one
of her goals.
—S.G.that earned him the
highest scores of his
career. He will need to
nail them. The competi-
tion in Beijing is fi erce:
U.S. teammate Vincent
Zhou, who beat Chen
earlier this season, and
a squad of Japanese
skaters, including
reigning Olympic gold
medalist Yuzuru Hanyu,
are all strong contend-
ers for the podium.
But Chen has
proved that he can rise
above the competition;
after those disastrous
skates in 2018, he
pulled off the highest-
scoring free program
of PyeongChang,
complete with six
quadruple jumps, that
propelled him from
17th to fi fth in the
fi nal standings. Don’t
ever count Chen out.
—A.P.Mikaela
Shiff rinALPINE SKIING, U.S.