Tag: sochi olympics
No Reason For Shame In Olympic Performance Of Team USA Men’s Hockey

No Reason For Shame In Olympic Performance Of Team USA Men’s Hockey

By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Just a week ago, he was the toast of the hockey world, Dan Bylsma, commanding Team USA through four consecutive victories at the Sochi Olympics by a combined score of 20-6, escaping from the medal-mad Russians on their home stage, sitting for an appreciative profile by veteran Sports Illustrated hockey ace Michael Farber.

Then, within 72 stunning hours, he was just toast. Chewed up ravenously by ever-demanding, never-satisfied angry Americans, his charred crusts cast into the waiting maw of hockey cyber mutts the world over.

The only guy on that curve of the planet who had a worse Olympics was probably Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, routed from his opulent palace after weeks of unspeakable violence in Kiev’s public square and still on the lam.

At least nobody died on the ice at Sochi, but you wouldn’t know it from the scorching disappointment within too big a segment of the Team USA fan base.

Back inside the Consol Energy Center after two weeks by the Black Sea, Bylsma on Tuesday recalled the hurt from disappointment’s ground zero.

“We had played four games and we end up with the Canadians in the semifinal game, and maybe the biggest disappointment of the tournament was that that wasn’t the gold-medal game,” Bylsma said. “You play the Canadians in a semifinal game, you play a 1-0 game, and what you came there for really, to win a gold medal, is gone.

“And we had to deal with that disappointment going into the next game, and I don’t think you get rid of the disappointment. I don’t think you can say, ‘Hey, you can put this game behind you, and let’s move on.’?”

That was pretty obvious in the 5-0 belly-flop before the Finns with the bronze medal still within reach, but the critics who’ll point to America’s 137 consecutive scoreless minutes to end the tournament as damningly analogous to the Penguins’ feeble exit from the Eastern Conference Final in June against Boston aren’t much for cause on effect on this one.

They’d rather have those 137 minutes as the final proof that Bylsma can’t adjust, runs a flawed system, should likely have his name rubbed off the Stanley Cup and doesn’t always match the right tie to the right suit.

This ignores the near-suffocating intensity of the semifinal, an ice war that flowed end-to-end for 60 minutes in which but one puck crossed a goal line that just happened to be the one behind Jonathan Quick. It could as easily been the one behind Carey Price; it just wasn’t.

There’s no shame in that.

The shame is in thinking there is.

“Carey Price and Jonathan Quick played fantastic, the way they did throughout the tournament,” said general manager Ray Shero, who was in Sochi as one of the architects of Team USA. “Looking back, shots were 37-31; they had the better opportunities, but we had our chances.

“You want to play a certain way, but, when the puck drops, it’s different a lot of times. The game was really fast, and it seems in the four or five days since that game the message is always how the U.S. didn’t play. Well, I think the credit has got to go to Canada. Those guys were really, really good. There’s no denying that fact. That might be the greatest Olympic hockey team ever.

“To look at how they played the game, their defense was fantastic. They were big. They were strong. They were mobile. And they were just deep, deep, deep.

“I thought we had a great group of players, a great group of caring guys who were leaders on their own teams, NHL captains. A lot should be said about that and not so much about how the Americans didn’t score. Canada scored one goal. They did not score a lot of goals in the tournament (17 in six games). It was one game and it was a good game. It was nothing to be ashamed of.

“The only thing is you’ve got to come back the next day against the Finns. We talked about it and we talked about it as a team. We had a good first period, but inside of 11 seconds we were down, 2-0, in second period and couldn’t recover for some reason. That’s the game you wish you could do over, but, obviously, we can’t.”

I don’t see how all of this puts Bylsma anywhere but where he was a week ago, the winningest Penguins coach, the winningest Penguins coach in the NHL playoffs, and, but for a bouncing puck this way or that, a Penguins coach with a gold medal around his neck.

Not exactly the kind of leader that gets routed from the palace.

Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Minneapolis Star Tribune/MCT

U.S. Teen Star Mikaela Shiffrin Soaks In First Olympic Experience, Skis To Fifth In Giant Slalom

U.S. Teen Star Mikaela Shiffrin Soaks In First Olympic Experience, Skis To Fifth In Giant Slalom

By Michelle Kaufman, The Miami Herald

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia – The sleet and hail were getting heavier, rain-drenched fans scurried for cover at the Rosa Khutor Alpine Center Tuesday afternoon, but Jeff Shiffrin, peeking out from his sopping wet jacket, didn’t seem in any hurry to leave.

His daughter, 18-year-old Mikaela, had just placed fifth in her Olympic giant slalom debut. She finished a half-second behind Slovenian gold medalist Tina Maze (2:36.87) and .23 of a second from a bronze medal. Anna Fenninger of Austria won silver and defending champion Viktoria Rebensburg of Germany took bronze.

Considering Shiffin’s strongest event is the slalom, which is yet to come on Friday, her father had nothing but praise for her. He greeted her Tuesday morning no differently than he had before any other race of her life: “Good morning, Mikaela. Have fun today. Bye. That’s it.”

He delighted in watching his daughter come down an Olympic slope (well, what he could see of it, anyway, with the bad weather).

“I’m sticking with the same old line from the last 20 years, what it’s about is seeing her come through with a smile and do the best job she can do,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s here or the training hill. When it goes really well here – and it went almost really well today, it’s super exciting. Those are the magical moments that take your breath away.”

Shiffrin was still smiling as she met with reporters after her two runs.

“It was a pretty spectacular day,” she said. “It’s not sunny, but on the other hand, who gets to race their first Olympics in rain this bad when there’s still snow on the ground, right?”

She said the messy conditions reminded her of Vermont, where she attended Burke Mountain Academy, a school for elite skiers.

“It’s pretty much exactly what I can remember from Vermont, which isn’t fair because there were also a lot of nice days,” she said. “But you remember the worst days. This wasn’t necessarily the worst case scenario. The visibility was better than I thought it was going to be and the conditions were really good for how much it’s precipitating. It was a pretty fair race. I’m really in awe of the top three girls.”

Driving snow and freezing rain delayed the second run for 15 minutes and course workers spread salt over the course to firm up the snow, which was already a bit slushy from last week’s warm, sunny weather.

“These are the kinds of conditions that years of experience help you with,” Jeff Shiffrin said. “All sorts of different conditions, raining and fog. I think some of the older ladies were able to turn that a little to their advantage.”

Shiffrin arrived to high expectations here as Team USA’s alpine “It Girl.” With the absence of injured Lindsey Vonn, the spotlight turned to Shiffrin, who has had remarkable success for a skier her age. She was one of the featured athletes on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Olympic preview.

She is already famous and known simply as “Mika” in Europe, where last February in Schladming, Austria, her career truly took off. At 17, she became the youngest female world ski champion since 1985 and the youngest American ever to hold a world title.

This season, she won three of five World Cup slalom races and finished second once, making her a bona-fide favorite in Sochi. Through five giant slalom races she had a second-place finish and a third-place finish.

Asked if she was thinking about a medal as she left the starting gate for her second run, Shiffin smiled and said: “I’m thinking gold medal.”

But she kept the result in perspective.

“I wanted a gold, but I also think this was meant to happen,” she said. “I’ll learn from it. The next Olympics I go to, I’m sure as heck not finishing fifth. I thought my first GS win would be at the Olympics. But it’s something I accept. I got fifth at the Olympics, Four girls skied better than I did and I’m really excited to analyze their skiing and mine and learn from it.”

Her father, surrounded by reporters, said perhaps it is “a silver lining” that Mikaela won’t have to deal with media distractions over the next 48 hours leading into her strongest event.

Meanwhile, Maze earned her second gold medal of these Olympics. She celebrated by plopping belly first into the snow and pretending to swim (which made some sense, considering how much it was raining by that point). She tied for gold in the downhill last week on a bright, sunny day.

“The weather was playing games with us, but I don’t care if it is raining, sunny because I won the gold medal,” Maze said. “We had two weeks of sun and I know it couldn’t hold on. Even though it wasn’t perfect weather, it was perfect racing. I’m a little wet, but it’s OK.”

American Julia Mancuso, the GS winner at the 2006 Turin Olympics and bronze medalist in Super Combined here, skied off course midway through her first run and didn’t finish.

“It’s the Olympics and you have to go for it, and I caught a really soft spot and it twisted me,” she said. “With the snow surface not being consistent, you can’t really see it, so it’s hard with the timing and I was losing that a few times.”

Finishing 67th of the 67 women who completed the race was British pop violinist Vanessa (Mae) Vanakorn, who competed for Thailand.

“It was cool,” she said. “I nearly crashed three times, but I made it down and that was the main thing. Just the experience of being here is amazing. I was worried I was going to get lost, but I just about managed it.”

AFP Photo/Loic Venance

Pussy Riot Band Members Detained In Sochi Suburb

Pussy Riot Band Members Detained In Sochi Suburb

By William Douglas, McClatchy Washington Bureau

SOCHI, Russia — Two members of the controversial Russian punk band Pussy Riot were detained for three hours Tuesday and questioned by Russian police about an alleged theft near the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Band members Nadezha Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, and at least seven activists and journalists, were picked up at a McDonald’s in the Sochi suburb of Adler around 2 p.m. by plainclothes officers, according to Amnesty International’s Moscow office.

The group collectively was accused of a theft that allegedly occurred in a nearby hotel, said Damely Aitkhozhina, an Amnesty International researcher in Moscow. She said Tuesday’s detention was the third time in three days that the band members, migrant and environmental rights activists and journalists from Russia’s independent Rain TV, were held by Russian authorities.

“We were detained on the 16th at 7:00, spent 10 hours with FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service) on the 17th, and today (we are) in a paddy wagon, accused of theft,” Tolokonnikova wrote on her Twitter account.

Pussy Riot was in Sochi to shoot a video for a song they wrote for the Winter Olympics called “Putin Will Teach You to Love Your Motherland.”

“Police claimed that in the hotel there was a theft. They were detained in connection with the theft,” Amnesty’s Aithozhina said. “We don’t know if they will be charged with anything, but the theft gave them (police) cause for detention.”

The Pussy Riot members were freed from prison in January under amnesty granted by Putin prior to the start of the Winter Games. The Russian president had been under fire from international activist groups for alleged free speech, labor, and environmental abuses surrounding the construction of venues for the games.

The band members had been serving two-year terms for “hooliganism” related to an anti-Putin song performed in February 2012 at Moscow’s main cathedral.

Tuesday’s detention comes on the heels of Russian officials ejecting a transgender former member of Italy’s parliament after she demonstrated against a law Putin signed last June that prohibits individuals from promoting “homosexual behavior” and “spreading propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” among minors.

Vladimir Luxuria, an ex-politician-turned television host, was held by police on Sunday and briefly held on Monday after she walked around Olympic Park in a rainbow-colored outfit, loudly declared that it’s “Okay to be gay,” and tried to enter a women’s hockey game.

Police escorted Luxuria outside the Olympic security zone and took away her spectator’s identification pass. International Olympic Committee officials defended the action Tuesday.

“I understand that she was in the park for a good hour, maybe even two hours, walking around, talking to spectators,” said Mark Adams, an IOC spokesman. “Some people were pro, some people were against, some people were very against, but I know her stated aim was to demonstrate in a venue.”

Adams added that the Olympic venues aren’t “the place for demonstrations, whether sympathetic or not, and this one does split opinions around the world.”

“We would ask anyone to make their case somewhere else and not in the Olympic Park and the Olympic venues,” Adams said.

AFP Photo/Yevgeny Feldman

Photo Of The Day — February 15

Photo Of The Day — February 15

Austria defenseman Andre Lakos (64) and Canada forward Jonathan Toews (16) crash into the glass while battling for the puck during the second period in a men’s hockey game at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Friday, February 14, 2014. Canada defeated Austria 6-0. (Harry E. Walker/MCT)