The U.S. Olympic team will leave Pyeongchang with its lowest medal haul in 20 years — several even worse than it seems because of all the new, American-friendly sports activities introduced to this system during the last two years. The U.S. Group went into the final day of motion Sunday with 23 medals and an outdoor rink at one greater. It will be the poorest showing because 1998, four years earlier than a domestic Olympics in Salt Lake City, sparked a renaissance for u . S .’s winter sports activities program. Alan Ashley, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s leader of overall sports performance, wasn’t shirking from the awful result. We’re going to take a hard observe what occurred here,” he stated Sunday on the USOC’s closing news conference.
Ashley became joined on the news conference by 4 U.S. Medalists, together with Lindsey Vonn, who a few days earlier gave an impassioned plea to no longer choose the entirety via the numbers of medals amassed. “To quantify it in what number of medals you have isn’t always suitable and would not admire the athletes and what they have installed to be in those games,” she stated. But Ashley mentioned there has been plenty of room for development and promised to break down what went incorrect while he returns home. Everything we are responsible for, and the entirety that is essentially underneath my duty, is focused on the way to help our pinnacle athletes attain achievement,” he said. “I’m chargeable for that, and I’m not going to shrink back from that.”
He additionally stated he derived hope from the 35 athletes who completed fourth via 6th over the 2-plus weeks in South Korea. “It’s now not as even though we had been in these conditions where you’re announcing, ‘Oh, we are going to do this extraordinary success,’ and then we had been twentieth, fortieth, 70th something,'” he said.
But the USOC clearly anticipated more.
An inner file acquired with the aid of The Associated Press set a goal purpose of 37 medals, with at the very least 25. Team USA will attain neither range. Eleven of the U.S. Medals came from skiing and freestyle snowboarding, occasions that had been introduced beginning in 1992 and have performed a significant element in a near doubling of medals up for grabs at the games. Many of the more recent activities are skewed in the direction of North American athletes, and it is no surprise that the U.S. Started vaulting up the medals table in 2002, when it won 34,
buoyed through a U.S. Sweep on the men’s halfpipe in Park City. That 12 months, Team USA took 14. Five percent of the medals to be had. This 12 months, it is projected to take 7.5 percent. The U.S. Headed into Sunday with 12 medals in events that existed before freestyle and snowboarding. That’s one fewer than in 1998, however, still, double the whole of 1988. After those games, Yankee’s proprietor George Steinbrenner, who turned intoV.P.P of the USOC, issued a file known for the federation to attention extra on prevailing medals. These days, the USOC spends additional than $60 million in the course of an Olympic cycle to support iciness athletes and their sports activities businesses. Since Ashley took over, greater emphasis has been placed on funneling the money toward sports with medal hopes in preference to develop pipelines for much less-a successful sports to create.
