Need a new Boss to put pedal to medals

PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA — At lunch last week, I met a Norwegian men’s hockey player and his parents sitting at the next table. They were from a tiny town wedged in the fjords on Norway’s southwest coast. We got to talking how Norway has dominated the medals table at the Pyeongchang Olympics, how it embraces winter and winter sports. As a matter of explanation, his mother, a school teacher, pulled out her phone and scrolled to pictures from a trip she took with some girlfriends last year. To hike on a glacier. In July. Why, I wondered, would someone from a place with six, seven, eight months of winter seek more of it? The middle-aged Norwegian schoolteacher shrugged: “Why not?”

That helps explain how, with only a few events remaining on the final day, a nation of 5.3 million has won 13 gold and 38 medals entering the final day here, a record for a Winter Olympics.

That doesn’t help explain why a nation of 325 million could only win 23.

You’ll hear about all the fourth and fifth-place finishes, about the breakthroughs in cross-country skiing and curling, how this is Team USA’s fifth largest medal haul in Winter Games history, how it’s only two behind 2006 and five behind 2014.

Or maybe the U.S. Olympic Committee will do what figure skater Karen Chen did after both her short and free programs (and before blaming it on not being around “my mom 24/7” at the Athletes Village). “I’m not going to lie,” she said. “This was a pretty big disappointment.” Because it was. Let’s start with 1988 in Calgary, where the Americans won two gold and six total medals. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who sat on the USOC’s board, was so furious that he called a news conference in Calgary four days before Closing Ceremony to announce this was a national disgrace and he would head a blue-ribbon commission that would fix it.

In the same events that were contested in Calgary, the U.S. won one gold and five total medals here. Or you can look at the USOC’s colored spreadsheet of internal projections, which they smugly refuse to share with the public despite preaching transparency but which were leaked to The Associated Press (oops) two days ago. The worst-case “minimum” was 25. The “target” was 37. The “reach” was, gulp, 59.

Or you can look at placement on the medals table: first or second in the last four Games, and fourth this year (and that’s with winter power Russia bringing a shell team).

Or you can look at the percentages, since the International Olympic Committee keeps adding events like photos on your phone’s hard drive. In 1994, U.S. athletes won 13 of 183 possible medals, or 7.1%. On home ice and snow in Salt Lake City in 2002, they won 14.5%. In 2010, 14.3%. The three Olympics since: 9.6, 8.1 and now 7.4%. What all that tells you: This is a Ponzi scheme. The IOC keeps adding obscure events that Americans excel in because, well, NBC isn’t paying $7.75 billion to show them get fourth. And indeed, nine of the 23 medals here came from new events in 2014 or 2018: one of each color in freestyle skiing halfpipe, two golds in snowboard slopestyle, two silvers in snowboard big air, a silver in freestyle skiing slopestyle.

But what invariably happens is the rest of the world catches up. U.S. men won seven of a possible nine medals in snowboard halfpipe between 2002 and 2010, and only one since. They were shut out of the medals in moguls skiing for a second straight Games after being on the podium at five of the previous six.

Or better yet: Maybe they could start handing out fourth-place medals.

Short of that, there are two problems facing the USOC and its winter sports programs — one that can’t be easily fixed, one that can.

Elite athletes can circumvent the ravages of global warming by chasing snow on different continents and hemispheres. But ordinary families are beholden to Mother Nature, and the sharp decline in traffic at increasingly barren U.S. resorts means fewer kids take up the sport, ultimately reducing the talent pool.

More than numbers, though, you need wealth. Norway ranks No. 1 in the world in various human development indexes, and it has a populace that love snow so much it road trips to the Arctic Circle to find it in July. Voila, 38 medals. The United States also has money. There are just questions about how much of it is being spent. The USOC’s most recent federal tax returns listed net assets of $250 million. Yet Olympic athletes in this country are so poor that, based in part on financial figures provided by the USOC, the new 100-bed dormitory at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista is being built for free by a developer to satisfy affordable housing requirements.

Fourteen USOC employees, meanwhile, made $250,000 or more in 2016, topped by CEO Scott Blackmun’s $1 million.

Back in 1988, the USOC rationalized a measly six medals by invoking the hallowed words of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games: that the most important thing is not winning but taking part, that the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.

The Boss wasn’t buying it. (The joke went, he was so mad at the Olympic performance that he fired Billy Martin.) His commission’s report based on 14 fact-finding sessions and hundreds of interviews concluded that Americans weren’t interested in noble ideals. “Winning medals,” the report said, “must always be the primary goal.”

Steinbrenner cracked heads as only he could and brought a sense of accountability to the USOC, restructuring funding mechanisms to a performance-based model in terms of how it allocates money to its national governing bodies and in turn how the NGBs allocate money to individual athletes. You win, you get to eat. You don’t, you starve.

Americans won 11 medals four years later, then 13 in 1994 and ’98, then 34 in 2002 in Salt Lake City, then a record 37 in 2010 a few months before Steinbrenner died.

In those same events in Pyeongchang, they won 14. Karen Chen missed her mommy. The USOC misses its Papa.