Meet Your 2018 Winter Olympic Hopefuls
With 100 days to go until the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, Team USA athletes are skating, skiing, sliding, sweeping, snowboarding, ski jumping, shooting and scoring on the road to South Korea.
An estimated 234 athletes will wear the Stars and Stripes in February.
Some have already carved their names into Olympic lore by winning medals, while others will be making their debut at the Games. There will be a record 102 events in seven sports (15 disciplines), including six new events: men’s and women’s snowboard big air, men’s and women’s mass start speedskating, mixed doubles curling and an alpine team competition. Alas, the men’s and women’s snowboard parallel slalom events were dropped from the program after only one appearance.
Even with defending Olympic champions Meryl Davis and Charlie White not returning for these Games, the United States has more depth in ice dance than in any other figure skating event. Madison Chock and Evan Bates are two-time world medalists, capturing silver in 2015 and bronze in 2016, while Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue won the Four Continents title in 2014 and placed third in the short dance at last season’s world championships.
Jamie Anderson is Team USA’s best bet to be a double threat in snowboard. The 2014 Olympic slopestyle gold medalist is also a world leader in big air. She won the Olympic test event in slopestyle in PyeongChang and captured golds in both events at the 2016 world championships. On the men’s side, 2015 slopestyle world champion Ryan Stassel was third in the big air test event in PyeongChang.
Source: teamusa.org
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