USOC wanted more medals but still pleased with Team USA’s effort
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – With its top leaders missing from the stage and two burgeoning summer sport scandals awaiting back home, the U.S. Olympic Committee emphasized its depth in trying to explain an Olympic Games performance that did not meet its expectations during a closing news conference Sunday morning.
The USOC projected its athletes to win 37 medals at these Games, according to the Associated Press. It won 23.
“We always want to do better,” said Alan Ashley, the USOC’s chief of sport performance. “I want them to do better because I want that to be a reflection of what they’re capable of. … As I sit here today, the last day of the Games, I’m actually probably more encouraged now than I’ve ever been, because even though people would say, ‘You didn’t get your medal count, you didn’t get to the right level,’ look at the depth of our team.
“You look at the number of individuals who were fourth through sixth. We had 35 individuals that were fourth through sixth. We had some incredibly close calls. I want to basically look at this and say this is an opportunity for us. We have this amazing depth. We have these incredible medalists. And how do we continue to compete even at a higher level and give them what they need going forward?”
Emphasizing close calls has become a theme for the USOC since the middle of these Games, when it became apparent that U.S. athletes were not winning medals at the pace that was expected, but were gobbling up all kinds of nearmiss placements just off the podium.
But embracing near misses is a risky public relations philosophy for a nation accustomed to winning at all costs, and a strategy that barely blunts the tough questions about Team USA’s historically poor performances in figure skating and speedskating in particular, and the big misses by heavily promoted athletes such as Nathan Chen and Lindsey Vonn.
But it’s clearly the strategy the USOC has chosen to employ. “I would say that I feel like there were a lot of really, really close finishes,” Ashley reiterated in answer to another question. “It’s not as though we were in situations where we’re saying, we’re going to do this great achievement and then we were 20th, 40th, 70th, whatever. Instead we had this huge group of athletes that was this far away from being on the podium.”
Ashley did say he expects to be held accountable for the disappointing medal performance by the Americans.
“Absolutely we should be accountable for our outcomes,” he said. “We’ve got to take a hard look and make sure that we’re doing the right job. … I’m accountable for that. I’m not going to shy away from it. I’m really going to look at my leadership and my team’s leadership to decide what we need to do in order to move forward.”
These end-of-the-Games news conferences almost always feature some members of the USOC’s senior leadership team, but not this time. USOC CEO Scott Blackmun missed the Games while recovering from prostate cancer surgery, while board chair Larry Probst was attending the International Olympic Committee session that was going on at the same time.
Still, there are many other USOC leaders at these Games, yet only Ashley, the USOC chef de mission, joined Olympic medalists Vonn, David Wise, Elana Meyers Taylor and Meghan Duggan on stage.
USOC spokesman Mark Jones was asked if the leaders were ducking what would certainly have been pointed questions about the sex abuse scandals in USA Gymnastics and USA Swimming, two of its most popular and successful summer sports.
“No, absolutely not,” Jones said. “Larry (Probst) obviously addressed all of these incredibly important issues at our opening press conference. ... We were very excited to talk about our performance today. Obviously, we’ll have more communications on the serious issues facing sport in the U.S. later this week.”
And with that, the USOC pivoted from the fun and games of winter sports to the very serious reality of the horrors of the gymnastics and swimming scandals waiting back home.