On Friday the US — despite the loss of its biggest gun in slopestyle — grabbed the event’s first gold medal. Sage Kotsenburg upended expectations when his quirky style and an impressive spur-of-the-moment trick he’d never tried before set the bar too high for the Canadians everyone expected to win. (Mark McMorris took the bronze and Max Parrot, who had taunted Shaun White in a tweet for being too “scared” to compete, placed fifth.) Kotsenburg seemed more surprised than anyone at his win, which marks a memorable start to the Winter Olympics’ newest — and, at least in its Sochi guise, most dangerous — sport.

New, dangerous, surprising, extreme — these descriptions of slopestyle could just as easily characterize the master vision behind not only “Putin’s Games” but also Putin’s Russia. And conspicuously, if unsurprisingly, absent from the opening ceremony’s cultural and literary love-in was any mention of one of Russia’s most important — and controversial — contemporary writers, Vladimir Sorokin.

-Jeremy Glazier

Vladimir Sorokin is the newest competitor in the LARB Poetry Olympics! Will he win gold like Sage Kotsenburg? Hopefully he has long, flowing hair!