Kicking ice: U.S. a favorite to supply thrills and chills during Winter Games
These are the wacky, Winter Games of Vancouver, where there is more rain than snow and where the U.S. Olympic team figures to kick serious butt – though not necessarily in the sports you want to watch.
While you were dozing these past four years, your fellow Americans somehow became proficient at biathlon, ice dancing, snowboarding, luge, Nordic combined, women’s bobsled and a lot of events that normally make you roll your eyes and dream about Opening Day. What China does at the Summer Games – collects the most obscure of precious medals – we are now ready to pull off on wet snow and slushy ice in Vancouver.
This is no longer your father’s or grandfather’s Olympic team. For one thing, there is a giant, unfamiliar hole in the lineup. The Americans likely will fail to medal in women’s figure skating for the first time in 46 years.
But at the same time, the U.S. will win a lot of medals in nutty, marginal sports. Sports you never knew were sports. Some, like the halfpipe, will be dangerous and X-Games-y. Others, like ice dancing and short-track speed skating, will no doubt prove controversial. Still others, like biathlon, will make you scratch your head and wonder what this has to do at all with the Olympic ideal.
And when the 16 days and nights are done, all this specialized, weird expertise by the Americans just might be enough to topple top dog Germany and the home team, Canada, in the gold medal count – which would be the first time since the 1932 Lake Placid Games that the U.S. has managed such a feat.
Four years ago, in Turin, the Americans were already close, finishing second behind only Germany in a tight, six-nation race with nine golds, nine silvers and seven bronzes. This time, the team may have the breadth and depth to take the last step up the podium – provided Lindsay Vonn is healthy enough to collect her quota. There are 87 returning Olympians on the team with 48 medals already dangling around their necks or stuffed into a drawer back home.
Unfortunately, U.S. Olympic officials and athletes won’t talk trash. They are not Chad Ochocinco. They will only put the world on notice that these may become America’s breakout Winter Games, when it comes to sports that once were broken.
“We’re not going to give a medal projection,” says Mike English, chief of sport performance for the U.S. Olympic Committee. “We expect the Canadians to be in strong position, with the home advantage. Germany certainly will have a strong contingency. But we haven’t exactly been sitting back, either. Our breakout sports will add a lot of opportunity.”
“Our goal is to have great ambassadors, a clean team,” English adds. “Every medal counts. It’s important for a nation, and we’re in a great position from where we’ve been in years past.”
There will certainly be no shortage of American multievent darlings, on the slopes and in the rinks. Despite the shin-bang, Vonn remains a favorite in a couple of glamour alpine competitions. Because of Apolo Ohno’s successful, risk-taking antics in two previous Games, the short-track speed skater now needs just two more medals to become America’s most decorated Winter Olympian.
Shani Davis is entered in four speed` skating events, and should win one or two of them. Shaun White, the Flying Tomato, will no doubt will wow everyone with his perilous flips above the half pipe.
But for each of these high-profile athletes, there will be several less-vaunted heroes and heroines, like ice dancers Meryl Davis and Charlie White, favored to beat their more famous U.S. teammates Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto; snowboarders Kelly Clark, Gretchen Bleiler and Lindsey Jacobellis; luger Erin Hamlin; skeleton racer Noelle Pikus-Pace; and biathlete Tim Burke.
“Obviously we’ve had some great improvements in emerging sports,” says English. “We’ve been strategic in planning. We made major changes in some cases. The philosophy is to get more customized, so we were listening intently, making sure we can dial in with nutrition, sports psychology, technology, understanding the specific needs of each sport.”
For the past 50 years, biathlon has symbolized the most obscure and most hopeless of sports for U.S. Olympic teams. After 53 biathlon events over five decades, a sixth-place finish by the U.S. relay team in 1972 was the sad highlight of much huffing, puffing, sliding and errant firing of rifles.
But now comes Burke of Paul Smiths, N.Y., who happens to be the world’s overall points leader in the sport, the wearer of the yellow bib, heading into the Vancouver Games. Burke is far from a shoo-in – not with Norwegian legend Ole Einar Bjoerndalen still around in the 10-kilometer sprint – but he will be in the mix and has become an important symbol for the versatility of the American team.
Like many of the other U.S. specialists, he attributes his sudden world-class emergence to coaching, in this case to Per Nilsson.
“Before Per started coaching me, I had never scored a World Cup point,” Burke said. “I thought I was training really hard in 2006, then I met Per and I have a new meaning of training hard. I can’t say enough about the work he’s done for me.”
This rush of obscure medals will no doubt create a great dilemma for NBC, which must make some difficult decisions along the way.
Does the network highlight the most videogenic and historically respected sports, such as women’s figure skating and men’s ice hockey? Does it focus its coverage on Kim Yu-Na, the incredibly graceful South Korean figure skater and a sure gold medalist? Or does it go U-S-A crazy and commit more air time to biathlon?
Preliminary plans have NBC sticking to its conventional standards, broadcasting primarily figure skating, Alpine skiing and speed skating events to appeal to the mass audience. The network is counting big time on Vonn, Ohno and Davis, but it will surely show all Americans’ gold-medal performances, live and on tape. There are a total of 835 hours of programming planned, and much of it will be farmed out to MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network and Universal HD.
How many medals will the U.S. win? One official said the hope is to near the count of Salt Lake City in 2002, when Americans captured a total of 34 gold, silver and bronze. Only 10 of those medals were gold, however, a number that can be surpassed only with help from the athletes with rifles strapped to their backs or sleek sleds beneath them.
“We have a team that’s going to be very strong with quite a few returning Olympians,” says Alan Ashley, another USOC sport performance leader. “When you look at the results coming into these Games, it’s a reflection of work put in and support of national bodies. People are excited about it. They’re fired up and ready to come.”
It’s all very exciting – until the Nordic combined team event starts and you’re forced to watch 20 kilometers’ worth of sliding. It’s all remindful of the day a South Korean soccer player scored a goal against the U.S. at the 2002 World Cup, then celebrated by mimicking the motions of a short-track speed skater. This was supposed to be revenge for a controversial gold medal won by Ohno in Salt Lake City, but the demonstration was completely lost on the U.S. national soccer team.
“There are so many sports in the Winter Olympics,” said former U.S. soccer coach Bruce Arena. “What’s next? Frisbee on ice?”
If it is, the Americans will become very good at it.