The United States held off a strong Japan team to win gold in the team figure skating event at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games.
Ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates, pairs skaters Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea, and individual skaters Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn and Ilia Malinin all delivered competitive programs over the course of the three-day, four-discipline, eight-part event.
It’s Team USA’s second straight gold in the event after taking home the top prize in Beijing in 2022.
A close call
With Japan dominating pairs, the U.S. dominating ice dance and both nations on equal footing in the men’s and women’s disciplines, the fight for gold was always going to be close.
No one, though, expected it to be quite this close. The two nations entered the eighth competitive rotation—the men’s long program—in a dead heat with exactly 59 points apiece. Japan’s Shun Sato and the U.S.’s Malinin took to the ice knowing that their performances would make all the difference.
Sato and Malinin are wildly different skaters, and they showed that over the course of their programs. Sato delivered a crisp, elegant, technically precise performance to Stravinsky’s Firebird, while Malinin delivered an athletic, brazen, boundary-pushing performance of his own custom song. Sato’s program offered a higher grade of execution, but Malinin’s offered a higher difficulty level thanks to its abundance of quad jumps.