Madison Chock and Evan Bates, of the United States, react to their scores after competing during the figure skating ice dance team event Friday at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy. Associated Press

MILAN — Madison Chock and Evan Bates set the tone for the powerful U.S. Figure Skating team at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Friday with a rocking, high-energy rhythm dance set to music by Lenny Kravitz to open the team figure skating competition.

Alysa Liu made sure the defending champion Americans would maintain their lead going into Day 2 of the event.

Chock and Bates scored a world-leading 91.06 points to open the three-day competition, where the U.S. is the defending champ.

Pairs skaters Ellie Kam and Danny O'Shea finished solidly in the middle of the pack in their short program for the U.S., while Liu was second to Japan's Kaori Sakamoto in the women's short program, leaving the Americans with 25 points.

Japan was second with 23 and host-nation Italy third with 22 going into the men's short program Saturday. After that, the competition is whittled from 10 teams to the top five, with those five also performing their free dance later in the day.

The men's, women's and pairs free skates will ultimately decide the medals Sunday.

“We definitely skated great and we’re very happy, as you saw when we finished. I think we both felt the excitement of just getting these Olympics underway,” said Bates, who along with Chock were part of the gold medal-winning team at the 2022 Winter Games.

Yet Chock and Bates, the three-time world ice dance champions, never received their medals in Beijing, thanks to an investigation into Russian doping. In fact, Chock and Bates wouldn't get them until two years later at the Summer Olympics in Paris.

So there is a little added motivation for the Americans to win a second consecutive team title.

A week after rupturing the ACL in her left knee, Lindsey Vonn opened her chase for Olympic gold at the age of 41 with an aggressive and successful downhill training run Friday — two days before the race.

Vonn got tight with her line midway down and only narrowly cleared a gate, but she led at the final checkpoints then stood up out of her tuck before the finish and placed 11th as skiers got their first official turns on the Olympia delle Tofane cours.

“She was smart. She didn’t go all in,” said Aksel Lund Svindal, a former Olympic downhill champion from Norway and now one of Vonn’s personal coaches. “She made a mistake on the bottom, but the rest looked like just good skiing, but no big risk. And to me it looked symmetrical.”

At the finish, Vonn traded fist pumps and a hug with teammate Breezy Johnson, who came down immediately before her and placed sixth, after a nearly hour-long delay because of fog.