Here’s What You Need to Know Before Watching Women’s Figure Skating Tonight

Tonight, the Winter Olympics’ most high-drama event—women’s figure skating—begins in earnest with the short program (the second and deciding part, the free skate, will be shown on Thursday). We’ve broken it down country by country to give you a cheat sheet of what to expect, who to root for—and who’s going to be wearing a Gumby outfit.

Team Olympic Athletes from Russia: The team, pairs’, men’s, and dance competitions are over, and except for a silver in the team event, the OAR has not yet medaled at Pyeongchang. (This is the first time since 1976, when ice dance was added to the Winter Games, that Russia has finished off the podium in that discipline.) That’s expected to change after Thursday’s free skate.

For the past two years, Evgenia Medvedeva—two-time and reigning world champion, holder of a dozen world records—has been the presumptive 2018 Olympic gold medalist. A solid jumper with a flair for characterization (in this season’s free skate, she’s Anna Karenina), Medvedeva is a staunch competitor who has had no competition. A foot injury kept her from defending her Grand Prix title in December, and the next month, at the European Championships (at home in Moscow), she lost her title to the new Grand Prix champion: her training-mate Alina Zagitova.

Fifteen years old, Zagitova just met the age requirement for these Olympics. She favors Swan Lake and Don Quixote and tutus with matching opera gloves—choices that can make her look older and more traditional than Medvedeva, three years her senior. Both skaters are shrewd point-getters: Medvedeva performs most of her jumps with a Tano variation, the overhead arm that adds to the jump’s difficulty; Zagitova has back-loaded her free skate, saving all the jumps for the second half of the program, when successful elements earn bonuses. Who will win the gold? The skater whose nerves of steel are steelier. (The third OAR lady, 17-year-old Maria Sotskova, can’t be ruled out of contention: She is the current Grand Prix and Russian silver medalist.)

Team USA: National champion Bradie Tennell has been lucky enough to have her breakout season in an Olympic year. Tennell finished ninth at her second senior nationals, in January 2017; by the fall she was a bronze medalist at Skate America, and by January 2018 she was the U.S. gold medalist. Her teammate Karen Chen, the 2017 national champion, finished fourth at last year’s world championships.

The only Olympic veteran in the group also has a national title: In 2008, Mirai Nagasu, then 14, became the second-youngest U.S. champion (after Tara Lipinski) in history. At the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, she finished fourth. She has already distinguished herself at this year’s team event by becoming the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics.

The rest of the world: Japan has a deep, competitive field of singles skaters represented at Pyeongchang by four-time national champion Satoko Miyahara (an elegant performer whose jumps are often as tiny as she is) and silver medalist Kaori Sakamoto, who won last month’s Four Continents Championship with a charming free skate to the soundtrack of Amélie.

Canadians Gabrielle Daleman (national champion and world bronze medalist) and Kaetlyn Osmond (national and world silver medalist) are already gold medalists in the team event. Their teammate Larkyn Austman qualified for the Olympic team by winning bronze at Nationals.

Italy’s Carolina Kostner, the 2014 Olympic bronze medalist, is already the grand old lady of figure skating—at 31. For her free skate, to Afternoon of a Faun, she may be wearing a spangled green jumpsuit that has already prompted comparisons to Gumby.