USA silences doubters with late gold surge

More than halfway through the Milan Cortina Olympics, there was a story to be written about Team USA's failures on the big stage.

Some of those stories had even been written and published: Ilia Malinin's disastrous free skate, which dropped the "Quad God" out of the medals entirely, Erin Jackson's failure to defend her speedskating crown and Chloe Kim falling just short of making it three straight Olympic golds in snowboard halfpipe.

Then there was Lindsey Vonn, who didn't get her storybook ending but instead crashed in the women's downhill and required multiple surgeries in an Italian hospital before she made it back home.

When some of your biggest stars are having heartbreaking moments, it tends to dampen a team's mood.

But the thing about the Olympics is that they are huge. There is usually time for a narrative to flip. And as the Games draw to a close, the narrative for Team USA has flipped like one of Kim's signature tricks.

The American women's hockey team, as dominant a force as there has been in Milan outside of Norwegian Nordic skiers and German bobsledders, survived a scare from a veteran Canadian team to win gold in an overtime thriller. They even managed the storybook finish that Vonn couldn't quite pull off, with their only goals in the final coming from two veterans, Hilary Knight and Megan Keller, who had been beaten by Canada at the last Olympics.

At right around the same time on Thursday, Alysa Liu was putting down the best free skate of her season to win the gold medal in women's figure skating, the first such win by an American in 24 years in a competition it used to dominate.

More gold medals could still come over the closing days, and medals of some hue certainly will, but Team USA has already surpassed its medal haul from Beijing 2022 and has equalled its gold-medal total from those Games.

The vibes? They are suddenly quite good.

This is the other thing about the Olympics: the margins are so narrow that it doesn't take much for the wrap-up stories to change entirely.

Without the late push that Team USA has had in Milan, there might have been talk about another so-so performance from the Americans, which would carry extra weight as the U.S. will host the next Olympics in Los Angeles two years from now.

One of the staples of the modern Olympics is that the host country spends the preceding years getting everything lined up for a strong showing when the five-ring circus is in town. Canada, Great Britain, Australia, South Korea, China: all nations that had spectacular results in a home Olympics. (Russia did, too, just for the wrong reasons.) And it's no coincidence that Italy has shot up the medal standings - from 13th in Beijing to a top-three spot this year - as the Games landed in the country.

The significant difference in all those situations, relative to Team USA ahead of LA28, is that the big push is backed by government funding. Having committed a boatload of cash to host the Olympics, politicians figure they might as well get their money' worth and then invest even more in the training and development that will give their athletes the best chance at a podium finish on home soil.

The United States doesn't do that. It's essentially alone among big Olympic nations in that the federal government doesn't back the United States Olympic Committee with steady funding. (And this isn't a Donald Trump thing; it has been so for ages.) Instead, Team USA gets its money from broadcast and licensing deals, sponsorships, and private donors. The U.S., of course, has a long history of philanthropic investment in amateur sport through the NCAA system, so this system is more of a natural fit.

But for a time, it looked like rival nations, backed by government largesse, might be passing them by. There was no better example than Canada, barely a tenth of its size but finishing ahead of the U.S. in total medals at the last two Winter Olympics. Canada was still boosted by the government investments in high-performance sport that had been made prior to Vancouver 2010.

But Canada is now showing the downside of that approach, on track for its worst showing at an Olympics in decades. Sport leaders had warned in the build-up to Milan Cortina that government funding hadn't kept up with some of its competitors.

There aren't likely to be many stories coming out of these Olympics asking why the United States is falling behind, or why it can't compete anymore with smaller nations on the world's biggest stage.

Has anything fundamentally changed to the big-picture questions that might have been asked a week ago? Not really. But it's funny what a couple of well-timed Olympic gold medals can do.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.