Closing Thoughts

The Olympics have been over for more than a week...And it seems much longer, seeing as how Russia just invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea as its own...But since I did quite a bit of opining about the Olymics while they were happening, part of me feels like it would be an incomplete effort if I didn't share a few final observations about them before moving on to weightier topics.


The Medal Count

The United States finished at #2 in the medical count and with our second-highest tally of all time. Despite a dismal showing in some sports at which we are usually good (speedskating, figure skating) and despite seeing our highest profile gold medal favorite (Shaun White) finish with no medals at all.

It's hard to complain about that, especially when we were once a bit of a non-factor in the winter games, and when you consider that we earned multiple medals in the "sliding sports" (bobsled, luge, skeleton) that have traditionally been a major weakness. I am competitive by nature and have a hard time not thinking about what might have been, but I know I am largely wrong to think that way.

Hockey - U.S.

There is never any shame in losing to Canada, especially when the margin is only one goal, nor is there any shame in losing to Finland. One of those nations is the game's birthplace and continues to produce a plurality of NHL players, while the other is a wellspring of talent that has churned out such luminaries as Teemu Selanne, Esa Tikkanen, and Jari Kurri.

Of course, now it is time for the but, for there is shame in ending the Olympic tournament not merely by losing to Canada and Finland, but by failing to score a single goal against either of them. Especially when you enter the semifinals red hot and playing like a juggernaut, and especially after you go undefeated in the preliminary round and crush the Czechs in the quarterfinal.

In the end, Team Canada and Team Finland were simply better than Team USA, but the way Team USA finished out of the medals -- more so than the fact it finished out of them -- will gnaw at our players for a while.


But hey...
...at least our men's team didn't go down the way our women's team did. It is brutal to blow a two-goal lead in the last four minutes against anybody. It is soul-crushing to do it against your arch nemesis, when the sole reason many of your players returned to the Olympics this year was to beat that nemesis.

For our women, it would have been better to win no medal at all than to "win" silver yet again and fall to Canada yet again. I guarantee you that every time one of our women looks at her 2014 silver medal, she will look at is as a symbol of her biggest failure. That sucks, and that might not be fair, but that is reality; and if it ever ceases to be reality, it will mean that competitiveness (and therefore excellence) have ceased to exist.

Hockey - International

American hockey is light years ahead of where it was when the Miracle On Ice took place. In the 34 years since then, U.S.-born players have won multiple Conn Smythes and multiple Vezinas and had their names engraved on Lord Stanley's Cup in numbers that were once unimaginable. It was not until 15 years after the miracle that Joe Mullen became the first American to reach the 1,000-point mark, and now seven more have joined him.

Yet in all this time, Team USA has won only two medals and neither of them were gold, and that says a lot about the quality of depth in international play.

Something else that says a lot about that quality of depth is this: Russia has not appeared in a gold medal game since five Olympics ago, and lost that one.

Something else which says a lot is that whenever the Olympics are held, at least one of hockey's "second tier" nations always puts dents in the "big seven" nations. Belarus shocking Sweden in Salt Lake is the most famous example, but Slovenia upending Slovakia this year was noteworthy, as was Switzerland blanking the Czechs.

Still, perhaps the main takeaway from Sochi is this: Anyone who ever doubted that Canada is king of the hockey hill should be averting their eyes. I remember a time, two decades back, when some folks fretted that the influx of non-Canadian talent into the NHL suggested that Canada was losing its game; when people were unhappy about Scotty Bowman fielding an all-Russian line for the Red Wings; when people squinted about the "Yank Owns The Canucks" symbolism of a Seattle businessman buying a controlling interest in Vancouver's hockey club.

Over the last couple weeks, however, Team Canada marched through the Olympics not only without losing a game, but without ever trailing in a game. After medaling just once in the first three Olympics that included NHL'ers, Team Canada has won two straight gold; and although Finland has won more medals than Canada during this era, all of Canada's have been gold compared to none of Finland's.

Where from here?
The next Winter Olympics will return to the Far East for the first time in two decades. Exactly 20 years after Nagano, Japan hosted the games in 1998, Pyeongchang, South Korea will host them in 2018. This will mark a kind of "return to roots" because Pyeongchang, unlike the last two hosts, is a smallish city with frigid winters. Its population is roughly 8 percent of Vancouver's and its February temperatures average 30 degrees colder than Sochi's.

For those reasons, I love the choice. A lot is riding on Pyeongchang, because how well it does will go a long way toward determining whether traditional sites such as itself get chosen on into the future. I, for one, hope it does a helluva job.

When it comes to 2022, however, you might want to cringe. Neither the U.S. nor Canada is placing a bid. Meanwhile, Munich and Saint Moritz declined to bid and Stockholm surprised everyone by withdrawing its name from consideration.

For Europe, that leaves Oslo and Krakow. The former sounds perfect, except for the fact that most Norwegians are not supportive of the bid. As for the latter, I find it to be especially intriguing because Poland has never hosted an Olympics, and doing so would do a great deal of good for that tough but often put-open nation; however, the dearth of ski resorts in Poland leaves the Krakow bid in the awkward position of suggesting that a spot in an entirely different country (Slovakia) be the site of its snow events, and I doubt that will fly with the Olympic Committee.

Technically, there is a third potential European host submitting a bid, but I don't think Lviv, Ukraine has much of a chance since that country is in the throes of revolution by its own citizens (good, but not stable) and invasion by Russia (bad).

That leaves us with two non-European bids. One is from Almaty, Kazakhstan and the other from Beijing, China. The first is Borat's country. It is pretty, but third-world and populated by lots of nomads. The second city recentlty staged a Summer Olympics so why go back there so soon? Plus, it is home to one of the most repressive regimes on Earth and that has gotta count against you sometime.

So it's all yours Oslo, whether your citizens want it or not!

Thoughts Midway Through

Semi-random thoughts now that the Olympics are a little more than half over:

The High Profile Disappointments

So much attention was given to the attempts by Shaun White and Shani Davis to win gold for the third straight Olympics -- and so little given to the fact that each of them was only one of many world class competitors gunning for the gold in their respective events -- that I had a hunch they would fail. Years of watching sports have taught me that when fans and media act like an outcome is preordained, said outcome usually does not materialize. Call it the "That's Why They Play The Games Effect."

Still, I never would have predicted that neither of them would earn any medal at all. Though their Olympic careers have been great, this was a very disappointing way for them to end. Perhaps one or both of them will make another run four years from now, but Old Man Time's merciless nature makes it unlikely.


A Less Obvious Disappointment
This one has nothing to do with the performance of any one athlete or team. Instead, it has to do with the reaction of our country's fans to our hockey team's preliminary round win over Russia. There is nothing wrong with trumpeting the stellar, four-goal performance of T.J. Oshie in the shootout. There is, however, quite a bit wrong with the way lots of people are trumpeting the win without acknowledging that there was something dubious about it.

Technically, the refs were correct to wave off Russia's third period goal that would have won the game for them in regulation. The refs were correct because the peg lodging the left goalpost to the ground was bent, resulting in the goal cage being microscopically off its moorings. Check out the picture below, which was taken several seconds before the disallowed goal, to see how insignificant it was. If you look close, you can see that the left post is a whisker back from the goal line compared to the right post:



Keep in mind that the post was still fastened to the ground and never became dislodged. The goal would have stood in the NHL, but international rules do not permit discretion in this instance, and therefore do not permit common sense. If Team USA had lost a game because of such a small and unimportant technicality, we would be screaming that we got robbed and agitating for the rule to be changed, and we would be right to do so.

A dumb rule does not suddenly become a good one when it delivers a benefit to your team. It remains a dumb rule all the same. If we are the paragons of sporting ethics that we claim to be, our reaction to Saturday's game should be nothing other than: "We caught a lucky break and then Oshie was brilliant and inspiring in the shootout, but it would be a crime if a game in the medal round gets decided by something like that."


Alpine Skiing
Overall, our results in the events collectively known as alpine skiing have been below expectations, but I don't see that as a reason to gnash our teeth. Every one of those events amounts to barreling recklessly down a steep mountainside with life and limb at risk, knowing full well that something as capricious as touching a two-inch area of differently compacted snow might slow you down by a mere fraction of a second that somehow drops you from first place to fifth.

When a country's alpiners make fewer trips to the podium than expected, that tends to be a function of the sport's nature as opposed to the skiers having choked under pressure. And it is not as if our guys and gals have given us nothing to cheer about, as evidenced by 36-year-old Bode Miller becoming the oldest person (by two years!) ever to medal in an alpine event.


Beware the Finns
Obviously I want Team USA to bring home the hockey gold. And I am fully aware that most people consider Canada to be the favorite because of its depth, while many others expect Russia to triumph because they are on home ice. Regardless, if I had to wager money on who will win gold, I would put my eggs in Finland's basket.

Like I pointed out in my previous post, it is Finland, not Canada, that has won the most hockey medals since NHL players started participating. The Finns have always been able to put a plethora of snipers and superb skaters on the ice; but with Tuukka Rask, Kari Lehtonen, and Antti Niemii between the pipes this year, they now have what I think is the strongest goaltending contingent at these games.

It baffles me that none of the sportswriters and sports anchors are talking about the Finns as gold medal contenders. I, for one, will not be the least bit surprised if they finish atop the podium.

The Greatest Competition

I have written before about why I love hockey.

And NHL players participating in the Olympics, which they have done since 1998, is a reason to love it even more.

Although invented and first perfected in Canada, hockey is an international sport in which multiple countries invest a great deal of pride. The Olympic teams of the "big seven" hockey nations (Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, the USA, and the Czech Republic) are all loaded not only with NHL players, but NHL stars.

And those are not the only countries whose Olympic rosters include NHL'ers. Team Slovenia features Anze Kopitar, who led the LA Kings to their first ever Stanley Cup championship by tallying 20 points during the 2012 postseason. Team Latvia includes Buffalo Sabers winger Zemgus Girgensons, and counts retired goalie Arturs Irbe (13 seasons in the NHL) as an assistant coach.

The "excellence parity" among the sport's international leaders is illustrated by the fact that in the first three Olympics that included NHL players, six different nations reached the gold medal game and a different champion was crowned each time. It is also illustrated by the fact that despite all the focus on Canada, Russia, and the USA, it is Finland that has won the most medals in the "NHL Era" of the Olympics.

In a touch of cosmic perfection, every gold medal game during this era has pitted rival nations against each other, kicking off with the Czechs upsetting the Russians in 1998. That outcome triggered a wave of national pride among Czechs who resented the larger country for having held theirs under its thumb during the Cold War. Throngs gathered in Prague for a victory ceremony, with some people holding "Hasek is God" signs in honor of goaltender Dominik Hasek.

In 2006, when Arctic Circle neighbors Sweden and Finland met for the whole ball of wax, it was such a big deal that the two countries practically shut down so their citizens could watch the game and cheer for their warriors on skates to beat the guys from next door.

And when our country's team faced Canada's in 2002 and 2010, it represented not just a duel between countries that share the longest border on Earth, but a duel of pride in which Canada desperately wanted to stop its yappy southern neighbors from staking a claim to Canada's game, while the USA desperately wanted to show its preening northern neighbors that they do not have a divine right to hockey supremacy just because.

Perhaps the biggest testament to hockey's greatness is that NHL players (most of them stars) have an insatiable desire to play in the Olympics, practically for free and undoubtedly at risk of career-ending injury. They do it because of their passion for the game and their love of their homelands.

So many of us criticize professional athletes for being all about themselves; for having no loyalty to anything bigger than their own personal bubble; for continuing to play only so they can line their wallets -- yet too few of us appreciate the fact that hundreds of professional hockey players routinely give us a reason to free our minds of that cynicism.

The only discouraging thing is that 16 years after the NHL started allowing its players to play in the Olympics, so many NHL management types are openly disdainful of Olympic participation and are making noise about doing away with it after this year's games come to a close. They drone on about how NHL players should realize that playing in the Olympics is "not their job" -- as if it were some petty whimsy akin to your high school son wanting to play video games instead of study for his geometry test.

Well, pardon my faux Quebecois French, but fuck that. Those management types should be ashamed of themselves. They should realize that the "higher purpose" aspirations of their players (I'm sorry, their "employees") is the precise attribute that draws fans to the game of hockey and thereby allows the league to prosper, which in turn allows those very same management types to work in dream jobs and dwell in nice big homes in the suburbs.

For decades hockey has been the Winter Olympics' marquee event. For 16 years it has been even more marquee than before, because the players lacing up have been indubitably the best in the world. It might be hard to quantify how much the NHL gains from allowing its charges to participate in the Olympics every four years, but I have no doubt that the losses it would experience if it denies their future participation would be obvious. And impossible to deny.

The league's leaders should stop their grumbling and announce that they will never try to deny their players' God-given right to play for their countries and for their love of the game. This game is great for a reason, and the Olympics exemplify that reason. May it ever be so.