Opinion: Team USA in need of a karmic cleanse after rough start to Winter Olympics in Beijing
BEIJING – Anyone in the Olympic bubble have some sage and a smudge pot? Team USA could use a good karmic cleanse.
It has been a suboptimal start to the Beijing Winter Games for the Americans. Their stars aren’t shining, they’re still looking for their first gold medal – medals of any color, really – and they’re losing athletes to injuries and COVID-19.
“Like you can see, anything can happen, and it happens really, really quickly,” Mikaela Shiffrin said after she slid off the course five gates into the first run of the giant slalom Monday. “Nothing is given, and I’m not taking that for granted.”
The two-time Olympic champion was talking about her own fortunes but might as well have been talking about the entire U.S. team.
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This is the first time in Winter Olympic history that the USA has gone without a gold medal through the first 20 events, according to Olympedia. More than 60 medals have been given out in Beijing, and the USA has ... three of them, all silver. A country that technically isn’t even here (ROC) has won twice as many, and the Americans have just one more medal than that winter sport powerhouse of Australia.
More troubling is that the USA is struggling in areas it normally dominates.
Americans pretty much invented the action sports, and they can barely get on the podium. After sweeping the golds in the first two Games where snowboard slopestyle was contested, the Americans didn’t win either the men’s or women’s event. No American man even made the podium.
“Fourth never feels good. One off from being cool,” said Red Gerard, the Olympic champion in 2018.
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The days of being assured a handful of medals in short track speedskating are over. Shiffrin aside, the prospects in Alpine skiing are slim. Although the Americans have made impressive strides in cross-country skiing and biathlon, they have a ways to go until they can challenge the Europeans.
More than that, it just feels like a cloud is hanging over Team USA. A lack of buzz or energy.
Monday was particularly brutal.
The day began ominously: Shiffrin's first DNF in a giant slalom race in more than four years. Then, in the men's downhill, the Americans failed to place anyone in the top 10 for a second Games in a row.
Even worse was the horrific injury to Nina O’Brien, the top U.S. woman in the first run of the giant slalom. She was one gate from the finish and skiing at top speed when she lost her balance and tumbled past the final gate and into the finish area.
Still photographs showed her left ankle facing the opposite direction of how it should be. O’Brien was evaluated by the U.S. Ski Team medical staff after being taken off the course on a stretcher.
At figure skating, the Americans had no sooner wrapped up the silver medal in the team event than it was announced that Vincent Zhou, who’d done the men’s free skate, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Zhou is out of the men’s short program Tuesday night, he announced via an Instagram post Monday night.
Perhaps after two years of nothing going as expected and everything being an effort, it was naïve to think things would be any different at the Beijing Olympics. Athletes are humans, too, and having to be so cautious about how and where they train and whom they see, especially in the past few weeks as they crisscrossed the world trying to get ready for the Games, has to take a toll.
Although it might seem obvious, sports that take place on sheets of ice and layers of snow are inherently unpredictable and often dangerous. Yes, these are world-class athletes, but even they can’t defy physics, gravity and physiology.
Or if they do, they can only do it for so long.
“I just didn’t have the legs there at the end,” U.S. speedskater Brittany Bowe said after finishing 10th in the 1,500 meters.
Disconcerting as the American struggles are, it does not necessarily signal an end to Team USA’s status as an Olympic superpower.
There are more than 80 medals up for grabs in Beijing. Shiffrin, Jessie Diggins, Nathan Chen and the U.S. women’s hockey team are just getting started; Chloe Kim, Kaillie Humphries and Elana Meyers Taylor have yet to begin.
That said, a sage burning couldn’t hurt.
Follow Paste BN Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.