Highlights from Day 13 at the Beijing Winter Olympics

BEIJING — Once the undisputed gold medal favorite and then the center of an Olympic doping scandal, 15-year-old Kamila Valieva looked broken. She slipped, stumbled and fell two times during a free skate that a mere weeks ago seemed poised to become her Olympic title-winning dream. Instead, the disastrous performance and pent-up emotion left the teenager inconsolable.

Her mistakes opened the door for fellow Russian and reigning world champion Anna Shcherbakova to win gold, followed by Russian Alexandra Trusova in second. A strong performance from Valieva could have led to a provisional Russian sweep of the podium, but instead, Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto managed to win bronze with a less difficult but clean performance.

After a few minutes of tears, Valieva left the arena and the podium ceremony began. If she had medaled, that moment wouldn’t have taken place. The International Olympic Committee seemed to be preparing for the possibility that Valieva is later disqualified.

Find our live coverage of the women’s figure skating event here.

Mikaela Shiffrin’s surprisingly medal-less Olympics continued Thursday when she once again skidded out of an event, this time the slalom portion of the Alpine combined.

A few hours later, Shiffrin responded to her detractors on Twitter with a lengthy message in which she promised to “get up” and said “it’s not the end of the world to fail.”

“Why do I keep coming back?” she wrote. “Gosh knows it hurts more than it feels good lately. I come back because those first 9 turns today were spectacular, really heaven. That’s where I’m meant to be and I’m stubborn as s---.”

Shiffrin still has one event remaining, the parallel team competition on Friday night Eastern time.

“I’m certainly questioning a lot,” she said after Thursday’s racing.

“I’m really disappointed, and I’m really frustrated.”

BEIJING — Sarah Hirshland, the CEO of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, continued to express exasperation Thursday over the way Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva’s positive doping test has been handled.

“This is just absolutely a frustrating and difficult situation, and it is unfair to these athletes,” she said on a conference call not long before the final evening of the women’s skating competition began. “It’s unfair not only to the athletes on our team who won the silver medal, but it’s unfair to all of the athletes who show up here and expect the integrity of the competition to be intact. And they deserve that from us, and we didn’t give it to them and that’s not right.”

Alysa Liu, the perpetually smiling 16-year-old American figure skater, moved into first place after her performance in the free skate, with the top seven skaters still to perform.

Liu, performing to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D, is the first American female to land a quadruple jump in competition, but she used a triple axel (missing about a half a rotation on her leap) to attempt to keep pace with the high-powered Russian quadruple jumpers.

The last of the three American skaters to perform, Liu earned 139.45 points in the free skate for a total score of 208.95.

Follow our live coverage of the women’s figure skating competition here.

YANQING, China — The Swiss were hugging. The Swiss were crying. The Swiss were standing for another rendition of their national anthem, “Schweizerpsalm” (“Swiss Psalm”), on the side of a Chinese mountain. Michelle Gisin had just won the women’s Alpine combined, Switzerland’s fifth gold medal in Alpine at the Beijing Olympics, and the party that had begun 11 days earlier with the first of those golds would be starting up again soon for number five.

But before that, Gisin had something she needed to do. She waded through the post-race chaos and the well-wishers until she found Mikaela Shiffrin, and she threw her arms around her and whispered encouragement in her ear.

Even at her highest moment — a successful defense of her 2018 Olympic gold medal in Alpine combined — Gisin, 28, could empathize with a rival at her lowest. Shiffrin, the American superstar, had skied out in the slalom portion of the combined, her third such calamity at an Olympics in which she has no medals to show for five starts. If it’s lonely at the top, it is more so at the bottom, and maybe only another elite skier could understand the thin difference between the two.

“The wheel turns, you know,” Gisin said. “And [Shiffrin] managed to stay on top of the wheel for incredibly long time, and now it’s a low. … It’s just normal.”

Mariah Bell, the 25-year-old, first-time U.S. Olympian, chose “Hallelujah,” the soaring Leonard Cohen song that provided an emotional moment at the Vancouver Games, for her performance in the women’s figure skating free skate and vaulted into first place — for now.

Gold medalist Nathan Chen was in the crowd to root for Bell, who was in 11th place after the short program and turned in a memorable performance, slipping but still landing one jump as one of her coaches, Adam Rippon, cheered her on.

“It was absolutely incredible,” NBC’s Tara Lipinski said. “I just felt my emotions rising jump after jump.”

The reigning U.S. national champion, Bell scored 136.92 points for a total of 202.30, with the best skaters still to take the ice.

The team from Norway earned a dominant victory in the final Nordic combined event of the Beijing Games, beating the rest of the field by nearly a minute in the team Gundersen large hill event Thursday in Zhangjiakou.

The Norwegians finished in 50 minutes 45.1 seconds, 54.9 seconds ahead of the silver medalists from Germany and 55.2 seconds ahead of the bronze medalists from Japan.

The U.S. team finished in sixth place, 2:22.0 off Norway’s gold medal pace.

Norway leads the overall medal count with 28 medals, including 13 golds.

Karen Chen, the American skater who has been mentored by Kristi Yamaguchi, performed well in Thursday’s free skate but made mistakes on a triple loop and Lutz and fell during her performance.

For the third time during the Olympics, she fell on a triple loop. While her artistry was spot-on, NBC commentator Johnny Weir noted, her technical proficiency was not. She finished with 64.11 points in the short program and 115.82 in the free skate for a total of 179.93.

She is in fifth place overall, with the strongest skaters still to come.

Follow our live coverage of the women’s figure skating competition here.