USOC nets 23 medals only
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea (AP) — The U.S. Olympic team will leave Pyeongchang with its lowest medal haul in 20 years — a number even worse than it looks because of all the new, American-friendly sports that have been added to the program over the past two decades.
The U.S. finished with 23 medals. It’s the poorest showing since 1998, four years before a home Olympics in Salt Lake City sparked a renaissance for the country’s winter sports program.
Alan Ashley, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief of sport performance, wasn’t shirking from the bad result.
“We’re going to take a hard look at what occurred here,” he said Sunday at the USOC’s closing news conference.
Ashley was joined by four U.S. medalists, including Lindsey Vonn, who a few days earlier gave an impassioned plea to not judge everything by the numbers of medals collected.
“To quantify it in how many medals you have is not appropriate and doesn’t respect the athletes and what they’ve put in to be in these games,” she said.
But Ashley acknowledged there was plenty of room for improvement, and promised to break down what went wrong when he returns home.
“Everything we’re responsible for, and everything that is basically under my responsibility, is focused on how to help our top athletes achieve success,” he said. “I’m accountable for that, and I’m not going to shy away from that.”
He also said he derived hope from the 35 athletes who finished fourth through sixth over the twoplus weeks in South Korea.
“It’s not as though we were in these situations where you’re saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this great achievement,’ and then we were 20th, 40th, 70th, whatever,’” he said.
But the USOC certainly expected more.
An internal document obtained by The Associated Press set a target goal of 37 medals, with a minimum of 25.
Eleven of the 23 U.S. medals came from snowboarding and freestyle skiing, events that were added beginning in 1992 and have played a large part in a near doubling of medals up for grabs at the games. Many of the newer events are skewed toward North American athletes, and it’s no surprise that the U.S. started vaulting up the medals table in 2002, when it won 34, buoyed by a U.S. sweep on the men’s halfpipe in Park City.