Goodbye Winter Olympics, I Loved You So

After two glorious weeks of sexy Canadian ice dancers, cutthroat Russian teens, falling Americans, Adam Rippon, and some sports that were not figure skating, the 2018 Olympic Winter Games have come to an end. Early Sunday morning, there was a beautiful closing ceremony, complete with competing K-Pop artists and some luminescent pandas. Here is a performance by K-Pop star CL, whom Johnny Weir aptly deemed “ferocious:”

And here is extremely good K-Pop boy band Exo:

At some point, the Beijing 2022 coalition rolled out skating, flying, sparkling pandas, just so we know what to expect if we survive the next four years:

The pandas then sent some emails:

The United States is leaving PyeongChang with 23 medals (including a gold one for men’s curling, our longtime national sport), a new celebrity, and a lifetime of foreign policy arbitration, courtesy of one Ivanka Trump. The Washington Post does note that the U.S. actually fell short of expectations at this Olympics, which is in keeping with our general tumble from the national stage. But there is one cool piece of news, which is that for the first time ever, women outperformed men, with 12 women’s events taking home medals as compared with nine men’s (there were two medals from mixed events).