US gets grip on snow, ice
Who to watch as team readies for best-ever Winter Games
These have never truly been America's Games.
Sure, the United States has its share of Winter Olympic medals. It has even had those brief-but-brilliant moments - the hockey "miracle on ice," or Eric Heiden's five golds - when it felt like it almost belonged. Yet the Winter Games have always seemed more foreign than familiar, the province of those who are blanched by a lack of sun and see nothing at all peculiar about the word fjord.
The United States is a nation with one cross-country medal, one ski jumping medal, and no top-three biathletes in 80 years of competition. While it has never finished lower than third in the Summer Games, it has not finished higher than fifth in any Winter Games since Lake Placid in 1980.
Starting today, however, that cold streak will almost certainly end. The US team that has come to Salt Lake is as deep and talented as any in recent history, and most people expect America to shatter its previous record medal haul - a mere 13.
Of course, there are the Michelle Kwans and Casey FitzRandolphs - the figure and speed skaters who have traditionally succeeded at the Winter Games. But alongside them have risen stars from the new stunt sports like moguls and freestyle aerials - as well as a rare crop of American medal contenders in sports more evocative of the Matterhorn than middle America.
There's Todd Hays, a favorite to win the first US bobsled medal since the Eisenhower administration. Or Bode Miller, who this year has become the most dominant force in slalom - and the best hope in a generation to capture America's first-ever men's giant slalom medal. And there is Todd Lodwick, flirting with the podium in an event that has historically been one of America's worst: nordic combined.
These 17 days in Salt Lake will not likely push America to the top of the medal table, or make curling America's new national pastime. But a good result, boosted by home-field advantage, could mean a new measure of respect for America's winter athletes - both at home and abroad - and kindle America's often-meager interest in the "other" Olympic Games.
"It's going to take a medal to really put us on the map," says Lodwick, echoing the sentiment of a number of US athletes here.
The reasons for America's historic winter hibernation are not difficult to discern. The Winter Games are essentially a Scandinavian creation, emerging out of a Norse winter sports festival held a century ago. Then, as now, many of the events were as much a celebration of a distinct and snowbound culture as a sporting event. While American kids grew up on sandlot diamonds and schoolyard gridirons, Swedes and Finns have chased each other on skis across the barren wastes of Lapland for centuries.
"These winter sports have almost been imposed upon America," says Jeffrey Segrave, an Olympic historian at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "In Europe, they are symbolic of a deeply embedded way of life."
Still, there are signs that America's commitment to success in the Winter Games is gradually growing. Several former football and track athletes brought into bobsledding years ago - including Hays - have now matured with the experience of several Olympics and form the nucleus of a team favored to medal in both the two-man and four-man events. The ski jumping team has been rejuvenated since the hiring of Finland's former head coach, and a similar move in skeleton - one of the new events at the Salt Lake games - has made the US the top team in the world.
"By getting ... Ryan [Davenport], we got the best skeleton coach in the world," says Lincoln DeWitt, who won the World Cup circuit last season. "Since he came on, we've had at least one American on the podium in every World Cup event."
The very presence at the Olympics of this luge-like event, where competitors go down face first, is a good sign for the United States. Like women's bobsledding - the other new event in these Games - skeleton has been a better fit for Americans than the ancient nordic or alpine disciplines. So, too, have been other new events added since 1992, ranging from snowboarding to freestyle ski jumping.
