Olympics Highlights: Shaun White Wrapped Up His Competitive Career Without a Medal in Beijing

The U.S. Olympic team is doing a lot better in the medal count than earlier this week.  It was looking bleak for a minute there, but not so bad now.

After Nathan Chen and Chloe Kim won gold on Day 6, our freestyle skiing team also took gold in mixed team aerials.  It’s the first time we’ve medaled in aerials since 2010. So that brought us up to four gold medals . . .

Unfortunately we didn’t add any medals to the total overnight.  Shaun White finished in 4th place in men’s halfpipe.  He announced recently that he’d be retiring after the Beijing Games, and was pretty emotional after his final run.  And Mikaela Shiffrin made it down the mountain in women’s Super G, but finished in 9th place.  She crashed out in her previous two races.

Here’s the latest leaderboard we saw.  (Friday, February 11th at 5:00 A.M. ET)

1.  Austria:  14 . . . 4 gold, 6 silver, 4 bronze.

2.  Norway:  13 . . . 5 gold, 3 silver, 5 bronze.

3.  Russia:  12 . . . 2 gold, 4 silver, 6 bronze.  (One of those gold medals could end up going to the U.S. if figure skater Kamila Valieva gets DQ’d for doping.)

4.  Canada:  12 . . . 1 gold, 4 silver, 7 bronze.

5.  USA:  10 . . . 4 gold, 5 silver, 1 bronze.

(You can check the up-to-the-minute medal count at NBCOlympics.com.)