YES SHE CAN!
Women wake Americans from their Winter Olympics slumber
My niece is going to wake up tomorrow and see this and it’s going to be more important for her than it is for me. — U.S. women’s hockey player Gigi Marvin
Women are saving the Winter Olympics for Team USA.
Midway through the two-week competition, the Americans were on pace for their fewest medals in 20 years, but a recent surge could lift them out of that slump. Entering competition Friday in Pyeongchang, South Korea, women had accounted for eight of the past 10 American medals.
The most thrilling of them all came in Team USA’s 3-2 shootout win over archrival Canada for the women’s hockey gold, its first since winning it all in the sport’s inaugural Olympics in 1998.
“My niece is going to wake up tomorrow and see this and it’s going to be more important for her than it is for me,” center Gigi Marvin, who scored in a shootout, told USA Today.
It may well go down as the most memorable American medal to come out of these Olympics, 38 years to the day after the “Miracle on Ice.”
“They should make a movie on [this women’s final],” forward Hilary Knight said. “We had all of the drama.”
It’s been a dominant, and historic, few days for American women.
Brita Sigourney won bronze in halfpipe skiing Tuesday to jump-start the three-day surge and Team USA’s medal count stood at 21 — good for fourth place behind Norway, Germany and Canada — entering Friday.
The U.S. had been on track for its weakest performance since 1998, when it collected only 13. Now, entering the final three days of competition, reaching 2006’s mark of 25 is in sight — much of it thanks to the women.
Wednesday was the best day of the Olympics for Team USA as it took home four more medals.
Lindsey Vonn captured bronze in the downhill for her first medal since 2010 after battling back from ACL injuries. Heather Bergsma, Brittany Bowe and Mia Manganello teamed up to win bronze in the speedskating team pursuit — the first U.S. Olympic women’s speedskating medal since 2002. Elana Meyers
Taylor and Lauren Gibbs nabbed a silver in the twowoman bobsled race — the third Olympic medal for Meyers Taylor.
And Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall put an exclamation point on the day by making a late push to win gold in the cross-country sprint team race. It was Team USA’s first medal of any kind in women’s crosscountry skiing.
“This is something the American team has been working on for a long, long time,” Randall said. “We’ve known it was possible. This is amazing validation for a team that has worked so hard.”
On Thursday, both Mikaela Shiffrin and Jamie Anderson made return trips to the podium — Shiffrin for giant slalom (gold) and super combined (silver) and Anderson for slopestyle (gold) and big air snowboarding (silver).
Halfpipe skiing medals from David Wise (gold) and Alex Ferreira (silver), in addition to the women’s hockey gold, made the American medal breakdown show 12 for women, seven for men and two for mixed events.
“What this group has been able to accomplish is way bigger than sports,” Marvin said, wearing a new gold medal around her neck. “That’s something that’s never going to fade.”