The Nagano Winter Olympics witnessed a rare dead heat in the bobsleigh yesterday while Games organisers scrambled to rescue the Alpine skiing programme from the vagaries of the weather.
After four runs over a total distance of 5.46 km, Olympic timekeepers could not separate the Canadian bob driven by Pierre Lueders and the Italian pair led by Guenther Huber. Each pair won a gold after clocking three minutes 37.24 seconds.
For Ireland, Jeff Pamplin and Terry McHugh finished the run in 3:44.32 seconds to claim 27th place, while Peter Donohue and Simon Linscheid were 35th in 3:47.45.
The only other tie in the event in Olympic history was in Grenoble in 1968. Initially, both pairs were then given golds, but the judges later changed their minds and gave gold to the pair that achieved the fastest single run.
"It's quite amazing that we have been down the track four times and we're equal," said Lueders, who was the first non-European to win the gold since the 1936 Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany when the United States took the title.
Elsewhere at Nagano, ski jumper Kazuyoshi Funaki won Japan's third gold medal and Canada won one gold and lost another in the new Olympic sport of curling.
Soldier Galina Koukleva took Russia to the top of the medals table when she won the women's 7.5-km sprint biathlon. On the speed skating track, Dutchman Ids Postma set an Olympic record for a surprise win in the men's 1,000 metres.
But the biggest headache for people running the 18th Winter Olympics remained the weather. Five out of eight days of Alpine skiing competition have been wiped out by snow, rain, wind and fog. Yesterday's men's super-G became the latest victim.
If the bad weather continued today - when three Alpine speed races were scheduled - there would be a serious risk that the Nagano Games could become the first Olympics in history to end with titles undecided.
More than 30,000 fans packed into the Hakuba ski jump arena to see Funaki outjump Finland's Jani Soininen in the large hill event and reverse the placings of Wednesday's normal hill competition.
A monster second jump from another Japanese, Masahiko Harada, left the crowd - and the prime competitors - in confusion for a time. Harada's 136-metre jump, 4.5 metres over the course record, proved too long for the video measuring machines.
After a disappointing first jump and with poor style marks on his second, Harada was eventually given the bronze.
The new Olympic sport of curling handed out its medals and curling's superpower won one final and lost the other.
The Canadian women outsmarted and outscreamed Denmark 7-5 to take the gold, although Denmark's medal was its first in Winter Olympic history.
But the Canadian men suffered a major upset, beaten in just eight ends by Switzerland, 9-3.
