There was double delight for the skiing Swiss on the famous Stelvio course as its teams claimed gold and silver in the inaugural team combined event at the Winter Olympics.
Franjo Von Allmen secured his second gold of the Games alongside Tanguy Nef, while their compatriots Marco Odermatt and Loic Meillard claimed silver, 0.99 seconds behind.
That had the legions of Swiss supporters wildly waving their flags in the stands at the base of the course, drowning out the ubiquitous heavy, pumping music to create a raucous atmosphere in the pleasantly warm, 7-degree Celsius sunshine.
However, there was a silver lining for the third pair on the podium as well, with Austria's Vincent Kreichmayr and Manuel Feller also claiming silver.
"Celebrating a medal at the Olympics is a childhood dream come true," Feller said after the event.
"It's even better if you can share it with someone else."
He didn't actually mean someone else entirely, by the way, He was talking about his teammate, Kreichmayr.
The combined event sees the first team member complete a downhill run in the morning, before the slalom poles are placed on the lower slopes for the team's second skier to complete a slalom run.
The two times are combined, with the fastest being awarded the gold medal.
Needless to say, to have two teams record the same time after negotiating 107 gates across over 4,000 metres of skiing is quite impressive.
But it's not unheard of. Far from it, in fact.
It is the seventh time it has happened in Alpine skiing at the Winter Olympics and 31st time overall at the Winter Games.
But, with Odermatt/Meillard and Kreichmayr/Feller both being awarded silver medals, it raised an interesting question — what happens to the bronze medals that were set to be awarded?
Well, according to the International Olympic Committee, the medals that are not awarded cannot be reused for future Games, for obvious reasons.
Each Olympic medal is a unique piece of art, after all.
The IOC told ABC Sport that they are typically kept by the Organising Committee.
Alternatively, "they are transferred to the Olympic Museum for archival and historical purposes".
Well, there you go.
Incidentally, Organising Committees always produce extra medals in advance of their Games and have a supply at the event venue for this exact issue, to prepare for possible ties.
Overall, across Winter and Summer Olympics there have been 157 instances of medals being shared.
There have only ever been three instances of Australians sharing Olympic medals across Summer Olympics — it's never happened at a Winter Games. Yet.
High jumper Tim Forsyth was involved in a three-way tie for bronze at Barcelona 1992 with Hollis Conway (USA) and Artur Partyka (Poland).
In Beijing, Hayden Stoeckel tied for bronze with Russia's Arkady Vyatchanin in the men's 100m backstroke in 2008.
And then in Paris, Eleanor Patterson claimed a joint bronze medal with Ukraine's Iryna Herashchenko in the women's high jump.
Speed skating has had the most shared medals at the Winter Olympics with 12, although there have been none since the men's 1,000 metres event at Lake Placid in 1980, when Vladimir Lobanov (Soviet Union) and Frode Rønning (Norway) shared bronze.
That was the first and only instance of a tie in that sport since electronic timing was first introduced to speed skating at the 1972 Sapporo Games.
