Medal tally gives US cold comfort

The US Olympic team will leave Pyeongchang with its fewest medals in 20 years — a number even worse than it looks because of all the new, American-friendly sports that have been added in the past two decades.

The US went into the final day of action yesterday with 23 medals and an outside chance at one more. It was the poorest showing since 1998, four years before a home Olympics led to a renaissance for the country’s winter sports programme.

Alan Ashley, the US 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.

Ashley was joined at the news conference by four US medallists, including Lindsey Vonn, who days earlier gave an impassioned plea to not judge everything by the numbers of medals.

“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 said there was plenty of room for improvement, and vowed to break down what went wrong.

“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 . . . not going to shy away from that.”

He also said he derived hope from the 35 athletes who finished fourth through sixth 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 of 37 medals, with a minimum of 25. Team USA will reach neither number.

Eleven of the US 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. Many of the newer events are skewed toward North American athletes, and it’s no surprise the US started vaulting up the medals table in 2002, when it won 34.

Ashley said he would look at everything, including seeing what the USOC might emulate from countries that had enjoyed more success this year.

Norway had 38 medals heading into yesterday, breaking the Winter Olympics record of 37, set by the United States in 2010. Germany had 30, and Canada, which started its “Own the Podium” programme before the Vancouver Games, had 29.

All are helped with funding from their government. The USOC is not.

“I want to help our athletes achieve everything they’re capable of,” Ashley said. “We come here to compete. Everyone can do predictions. And if we just live with predictions, then I guess we don’t need to go to the Olympics.” — AP