GOLDEN GIRLS
U.S. women’s soccer team gets inspiration from triumphant Olympic hockey
Members of the United States women’s national soccer team couldn’t stay up last week to watch their hockey counterparts come from behind to make one of the loudest statements of the Olympics.
Megan Rapinoe and her teammates had an early wake-up call the next morning, as part of training camp in Orlando, Fla., ahead of the third annual SheBelieves Cup, and the 14-hour time difference meant watching the drama play out live wasn’t in the cards — though Kelley O’Hara tried the hardest, waking up for the celebration and falling right back asleep.
Thursday morning Eastern Time, replays of the hockey players dogpiling near where goalie Maddie Rooney made the winning save were playing on a loop in soccer camp. The Americans claimed the gold medal that had eluded them since 1998, ending Canada’s run of fourstraight Olympic titles with a 4-3 shootout victory in Pyeongchang.
“The hockey team are badasses,” said Rapinoe, a 32-yearold midfielder who’s won a gold medal and a World Cup with the national soccer team, which plays France at Red Bull Arena on Sunday in the second leg of the fourteam, round-robin tournament.
“They probably felt like the gold medal just slipped out of their hands at the last moment [in Sochi in 2014], and coming back with this whole redemption story and working so hard to achieve their dreams is inspiring.”
No one on the soccer team understands the fire that burned under the hockey players better than Samantha Mewis, who trained with six members of the gold medal-winning team last winter in the run-up to the Winter Games. She observed a unique drive in captain Meghan Duggan and forward Gigi Marvin, who at 30 were working toward their third Olympics after falling to Canada in Vancouver and Sochi.
Mewis, a 25-year-old midfielder, recalled one particularly grueling day at the Institute of Performance and Fitness (IPF) in North Reading, Mass., when head trainer Walter Norton Jr. had them do continuous bike sprints. The group began slowly dwindling, as whoever recorded the worst time had to step off her bike.
“It was kind of this shameful thing to have to get off,” Mewis told The Post in a phone interview. “And I remember Gigi Marvin just crushing it, and getting to watch her ride her last one alone and seeing her get this crazy look in her eyes and knowing that this was gearing her up for the Olympics, it was just so cool and patriotic almost.”
Though Mewis felt her strength was inferior at times to the hockey players’ — “They’re doing pull-ups with 45-pound plates and I couldn’t do a pull-up,” she said — she also felt a shared responsibility in helping them prepare for their big moment.
If they get the chance to reunite at IPF next offseason, Mewis hopes the newly crowned Olympians would push her toward the same goal. The U.S. women’s soccer team will be going for its fourthcareer World Cup title in 2019 and fifth Olympic gold medal in 2020 — though Mewis would be getting her first taste of each competition.
“Knowing that the [USWNT] could apply to both of us and kind of supporting each other and knowing that when the Summer Olympics come around, that they would be rooting for our team, is pretty cool,” Mewis said.
“I think it’s a really powerful message that we should all be supporting each other. Oftentimes, there’s maybe a lack of connection between women’s sports or leagues, and I think that this is an example of how we can unify.”
The USWNT connection will be on full display Sunday when U.S. Soccer honors the women’s hockey team before kickoff. Though Mewis won’t be in attendance, left off the roster while recovering from a knee injury, she’ll be beaming with pride from afar.
“Honestly, it means the world to have them at our game,” said Rapinoe, the lone goal scorer in the United States’ 1-0 win over Germany in Columbus on Thursday. “It’s pretty cool to have women supporting women like that and we can’t wait to see those newly minted gold medals.”