Feeling 22, and everything is so all right

The American racer Mikaela Shiffrin on Friday clinched enough points to win the fancy crystal globe that goes to the alpine World Cup tour’s best overall female skier.

She becomes just the third American to win the season title. Tamara McKinney won it in 1983. Lindsey Vonn has won four big globes, as they like to call it on the tour, most recently in 2012. Now comes Mikaela Shiffrin, who just this past Monday turned 22.

Taylor Swift could not have put it any better. Everything will be so all right.

This is the stuff of compelling cross-over stardom.

Mikaela Shiffrin is already an Olympic champion, the heavy favorite to win again at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea in not just one but perhaps three events — slalom, giant slalom and combined — and already so much more, the rare athlete who not only has a calm and a presence about her but, at 22, understands who she is, what she is doing and why.

It’s elemental.

Mikaela Shiffrin is who she is because she loves it, and passionately.

She loves every bit of it. She can take that passion and distill it into a killer work ethic and uncompromising want-to.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you forge the sort of great champion who, come Winter Games-time, makes for must-see TV.

Unlike the schedule at most Winter Olympics, at Sochi in 2014, for instance, when the so-called technical events ran near the back end of the 17 days, in Pyeongchang next February, guess what goes off on Day 2? Women’s giant slalom. Day 4? Women’s slalom.

Why? This missive from the Department of the Obvious: Mikaela Shiffrin.

Here is the thing that separates someone like Shiffrin from the rest of almost everyone else on skis.

For her, the racing is the fun part. For real. In the start gate, the mission is not just to see if she can be good but to see how good she can be.

Nervous? Like, why?

Why be nervous, why have a thought bubble full of anxious reminders cluttering your mind, when you have done everything you can possibly do to put yourself in the best position you can be?

For Mikaela Shiffrin, there are no shortcuts. She loves the training, the hours upon hours in the gym, the repetitions in the weight room and on the icy snow, the attention to detail, all the stuff that doesn’t get reflected in the photo snaps, what our 24/7 what-now culture demands, the pics that flash across the globe in milliseconds of a winning smile and a fancy crystal globe.

“I am always at my best,” she said, calmly, evenly, “when I get good preparation and I feel strong.”

That simple, that elemental, and Mikaela Shiffrin’s 2017 overall win marks an intriguing moment if, like most Americans, you are just checking in on what’s what in alpine skiing.

Alpine racing is, generally speaking, divided into two kinds — the technical events and the speed races.

When most casual fans think alpine, they think speed, something like Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer,” which goes all the way back to 1969. (Warren Miller's love sonnets on film to the sport do not count for the casual fan.)

Making this easy:

The speed events are the downhill and the super-G.

Downhill: spitballing it here, you see how fast you can get down the mountain. There are gates, but whatever— the main thing is the speed, like 80 miles per hour, which is a lot on a freeway in a car made significantly of metal and other durable parts, much less on skis chattering down a river of ice. A world-class course runs to two minutes. Try to imagine it: ice (it's ice, not fluffy snow), 80 mph, two minutes, skis, yikes.

Super-G, same general idea but some widely set gates and the course is set lower down the mountain, meaning it's shorter.

The tech events, on the other hand, are the twisty, turning ones, the ones with all the gates close together.

Making this easy, again:

Per someone clever, those tech events, the giant slalom and slalom, will be coming to your living room early in the 2018 Olympic run.

A fifth alpine event, the combined, is just what it sounds like, one speed event and one tech, say a super-G and a slalom. You add the times of those two races together, lowest total wins.

On the men’s side, an Austrian racer, Marcel Hirscher, has won the World Cup overall title six seasons running — 2012 through 2017.

Hirscher is a tech specialist, the king of slalom and in the 2015 and 2017 seasons, giant slalom, too.

Compare that to the American standout Bode Miller, a five-event skier who won the overall title in 2005 and 2008.

Shiffrin is a tech specialist, too. She is the Sochi 2014 slalom gold medalist. She is the World Cup slalom winner for the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017 seasons. (She spent two months away from racing during the 2016 season after a fall.)

Compare that to Vonn, the German Maria Höfl-Riesch (2011 overall winner), the Slovenian Tina Maze (Sochi 2014 downhill and giant slalom champ, showing her versatility, and 2013 World Cup overall winner with an otherworldly 2,414 points, breaking the legendary Austrian hammer Hermann Maier’s record of 2,000, set in 2000).

All three of these women: four- or five-event racers.

Would Shiffrin this season have been competing in more speed events if the Swiss racer Lara Gut, the 2016 overall champ, had not, in a Feb. 10 warm-up at the world championships, torn an ACL?

If, similarly, the Austrian Anna Veith was not coming back from injury? Before she got married, she was Anna Fenninger — the name by which she won Olympic gold in 2014 in the super-G and, moreover, won the big globe in 2015 and 2014.

Heading into the weekend’s racing in Aspen, Shiffrin stood at 1,523 points. No matter what happens, she can’t come within a canyon of Maze’s 2,414. Does that matter, even a little? Gut had 1,522 in winning last season. Shiffrin already is better. Again, does that matter, even remotely?

Questions without answers and, anyway, it’s not as if Shiffrin can’t ski speed.

Shiffrin did, after all, win a combined this season, in late February, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, and it’s for sure the case that as she goes and grows, all involved expect Shiffrin will do more speed.

A comparison: when Michael Phelps was a much younger swimmer, his coach, Bob Bowman, would allow him only to swim distance. As he grew into his ability, Bowman saw to it that Phelps broadened his repertoire.

Same general idea with Shiffrin.

The thing is, she and her team have a plan, and what Shiffrin and her team do, and exceedingly well, is develop and execute that plan.

As Julia Mancuso, the American skier who is herself a four-time Olympic medalist, including a gold from the Torino 2006 Games, said, “If it isn’t broke, why fix it? That’s their mindset.”

Mancuso added, “It takes a lot of strength to not deviate from that plan as well.”

Ski racing is full of numbers — so many it can become numbing — but just consider a handful.

Before this weekend’s races, Shiffrin had stood in the start gate 103 times. She had produced 31 wins and 43 podiums.

As Patrick Riml, the U.S. Ski Team’s alpine director, put it, “Her strike rate is unbelievable.”

It is often said that hitting a major-league curve ball is the hardest thing to do in sports. Those who say that have never stood in the start gate of a World Cup course and looked at the gates and the ice. Shiffrin’s win rate would make her, in baseball terms, an All-Star, a .300 hitter. Her podium rate puts her in Rogers Hornsby or Ted Williams category.

Long-range: Vonn has 77 World Cup victories. Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark has the most, 86.

“Kudos to [parents] Jeff and Eileen for teaching Mikaela what it takes,” Riml said.

“Look,” he said, “everyone who skis the World Cup has talent. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be there.

“Who wants it? Who wants it bad enough? Who wants it bad enough on race day?

“You can see it,” he said, “from the start gate,” and indeed you can.

Mikaela Shiffrin wants it. And she is feeling every bit of 22.

Lindsey Vonn's first next chapter

It was long ago the case that Lindsey Vonn became the best alpine skier the United States ever produced. Now, as this season’s racing draws to a close, with Vonn on a not-really-100 percent right knee, she has written a fascinating first next chapter to the ongoing story that is her singular career.

The day after clinching this season’s World Cup downhill title, Vonn won the super-G crystal globe, too. In all, she now has 19 globes, the same as Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark.

“I am honored to even be in the same sentence as him,” she said afterward in Meribel, France.

Vonn won the super-G title after finishing Thursday’s race 49-hundredths of a second ahead of Austria’s Anna Fenninger.

Fenninger, racing with bib 15, had come down into first place with a time of 1:08.19.

Vonn raced 19th. By the second interval, it was clear she was on her game, up 41-hundredths. By the finish line, after navigating a tricky jump, the margin was up to that 49-hundredths.

The downhill win Wednesday was Vonn’s 66th career victory, the super-G her 67th. Stenmark has 86. Vonn’s plan is to race through the 2018 season, and the Winter Games in South Korea.

Vonn also said, “It’s nice to know I can still win titles,” particularly when there were so many doubters this season, and of course there were.

Vonn blew out the right knee in a super-G at the 2013 world championships in Schladming, Austria. Trying to make the Sochi Olympics, she hurt the same knee again; she did not ski in the 2014 Games.

By the time she came back to the tour, as she recounted Thursday, she had maybe five days of downhill training, perhaps 20 days of training overall.

There were doubters, but only because those who doubt don’t understand that even when Lindsey Vonn is not 100 percent physically right she is 110 percent mentally tough.

She belongs to a special category of athlete.

It is always risky to go here, to say that so-and-so is different from someone — or everyone — else.

But the evidence is irrefutable.

Vonn’s knee is still not, well, right. You saw it at the world championships last month in Beaver Creek, Colorado, when the course was ridiculously hard and icy, and — for her — she struggled, managing “only” to win one medal, a bronze in the super-G.

She alluded to that Thursday, saying that she now will have all summer to get stronger and that the spring snow conditions in Europe the past couple weeks have been easier on her body:

“The soft snow is really nice. It’s really forgiving on my knee. It feels good. It haven’t had any problems since Beaver Creek. It’s only when it’s icy that I run into problems.”

Where you really heard her open up, meanwhile, is in the way she talked about attacking the course in the way that many racers say they do but she actually then does consistently:

“I am going to risk it all every time I am in the starting gate. That is what makes me fast.”

This is why Lindsey Vonn is the greatest of all time. In response to a question Thursday about whether she was still as fearless as she was before wrecking her knee, she said, yes, and that some of her “poor results” this year were because she “risked too much” or didn’t ski with “the same strength and power.”

She is self-reflective enough to know what can be seen at the bottom of the hill, too: her super-G is probably better now but her downhill, even for her, can be better. “I’m not building pressure at the top of the turn like I can,” she said of her downhilling.

All that, obviously, can and will change with a full summer of training.

What’s also going to change is that she is going to get even better — tougher still — mentally.

The best athletes do this, and she will.

She said Thursday that chasing records has been one of her faults.

Everyone in ski circles, especially Vonn, knew that Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Pröll held the record for most World Cup wins by a female racer, 62, until Vonn broke it earlier this season.

Now Vonn is being asked about 86. The math says that if she keeps winning eight races per season, like she did this year, it’s a done deal.

But. as she said on a call with reporters, “”That’s a lot easier said than done,” adding, “I don’t really look at that as a goal right now. My goal is to keep winning races and keep getting as many titles as I can.”

Her mom, Linda, was on that call, and said at the end of it, “It seems like old times, Lindsey.”

Yes, but there’s a lot more yet to be written.

“I’ll call you later,” Lindsey said to her mom. “I love you.”

Kobe, Tiger, Lindsey, Rita, First Amendment and more

A quick quiz. How are Kobe Bryant and I alike? For starters, let’s count the ways in which we’re not: he makes $25 million a year, has a cool nickname — Black Mamba — along with a way better jump shot and can dunk. The world has to be different for people who can dunk. I wouldn’t know. That two-handed dunk Wednesday night, in the second quarter of the Los Angeles Lakers’ loss (another loss) to the New Orleans Pelicans, apparently proved too much. Like me -- aha! -- he has a bad right shoulder. Him: torn rotator cuff. Me: torn labrum. Me: surgery last Thursday (thank you, Dr. Keith Feder). Kobe: got examined Friday, and now will be examined again Monday, probably out for the season if he, too, needs surgery.

Kobe, I feel your pain.

I can also recommend many excellent prescription drugs.

So many interesting things have been going on while I have been lying low. Tiger Woods flies to Italy, where he appears with a skeleton-patterned scarf and then a gap tooth. The Kenyan marathoner Rita Jeptoo shows up in Boston 2024 bid committee documents. Then there’s a crazy First Amendment issue in those same Boston documents.

And I’m the one who was on prescription meds?

Let’s start with Woods and significant other Lindsey Vonn. He flew to Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, to “surprise” her on the occasion of her winning her 63rd World Cup victory, most-ever by a female alpine skier.

To be clear: Lindsey Vonn is an amazing athlete. She deserves rounds of applause for this accomplishment, especially coming back from two knee injuries that kept her out of last year’s Sochi Olympics.

Vonn had recorded career win 62, tying Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Pröll, in Sunday’s downhill at Cortina. Victory 63 came in Monday’s super-G.

Cortina has always been one of Vonn’s favorite spots, along with Lake Louise, Canada. Nothing — repeat, nothing — is a given in alpine skiing. But it was hardly a surprise that she would win there.

Vonn’s family, in anticipation, had come to Cortina to share in her success.

It would have been kind of weird if Woods hadn’t been there, too, wouldn’t it?

Here's the thing: Woods doesn’t go anywhere without a security presence.

So he shows up. "Surprise"! But only on Monday, and trying to be all incognito-like, but then with the look-at-me skeleton scarf.

Strange, strange, strange.

Then, somehow the scarf drops, and there’s an Associated Press photo of him with the gap tooth.

“No way!” Vonn exclaimed when she saw him, according to press accounts. She also said, “I knew it was him immediately. He loves that stupid mask.”

Immediately, the gap tooth took virtually all the attention away from Vonn, and her accomplishment. The spotlight shifted to Woods.

His agent issued a statement that, in its entirety, read like this:

“During a crush of photographers at the awards’ podium at the World Cup event in Italy, a media member with a shoulder-mounted video camera pushed and surged towards the stage, turned and hit Tiger Woods in the mouth. Woods’s tooth was knocked out by the incident.”

Seriously?

We are to believe that Tiger Woods showed up at an event jam-packed with cameras and videographers and no one — not one single lens — captured this riveting action? It hasn’t yet shown up on TMZ? For real?

What is this, Cortina by Zapruder? A gap in the teeth but are there holes in the story? What?

As the expert alpine ski writer Brian Pinelli wrote in USA Today, quoting race secretary general Nicola Colli, “If you look at the pictures, there was no blood, nothing of pain in his face. He was calm, he was quiet.”

As for the statement itself from Woods’ agent — that’s it? You go to the effort of issuing a statement to the hungry press but there are no words of congratulations from Woods to Vonn? Just: some cameraman knocked out my tooth?

Further, and more to the point: it might be understandable why Woods — or Woods’ people — would want to villainize the media.

But Lindsey Vonn? What’s in that sort of play for her? Or U.S. Skiing?

She is the one cross-over star in winter sports. She is the one who, after all, got hurt and seized the opportunity to make a documentary out of it, which is showing Sunday on NBC. Football players get knee injuries all the time. Do they make documentaries out of their rehab? Of course not. Lindsey Vonn? Why not?

So what’s really going on here?

Very strange.

As was the decision by Boston 2024 organizers to include the photo of the marathoner Jeptoo in their bid presentation, the one that purportedly wowed the U.S. Olympic Committee board of directors.

Timeline: that presentation was made in December. Jeptoo, winner of the 2013 and 2014 Boston Marathons, among other major races, had tested positive in November for the banned blood-booster EPO.

Hard to understand how the USOC board could have been so wowed when her picture came up. Was anyone seriously paying attention?

Why didn’t Boston 2024 just go with Meb Keflezighi on that very same page, for goodness’ sake? After all, he’s an American, the 2014 Boston Marathon winner as well and the 2004 Athens marathon silver medalist.

Very strange.

The Boston 2024 documents, moreover, repeatedly observe that the city itself will be “Olympic Park” — for instance, “at the heart of the city, at its reinvented waterfront and in its cherished parks.”

It is understood that these documents are a “plan” and not a finished product. Even so, there is a real reason that in recent editions the International Olympic Committee has opted for real Olympic Parks.

The IOC has said time and again that security is priority No. 1. Olympic Parks are more easily, in a word, secure-able.

Think back to the last Summer Olympics in the United States, which featured tremendous open space in a major American city. Within the IOC, Atlanta 1996 is remembered mostly for its transport and technology woes, and for the bomb that went off in Centennial Park.

The less said here about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings the better. Just this: at this very preliminary stage, has anyone stopped seriously to think about the security implications of making the city of Boston “Olympic Park”?

Switching gears:

The provision that caused such controversy mid-week, when it was discovered that the USOC had included in its contract with Boston a non-disparagement provision — that is, city workers would not criticize the Games during the bid process -- this is very serious stuff.

Think back a year ago, before the Sochi 2014 Games, when much of the West was up in arms about a Russian law targeting “propaganda” aimed at gays.

Now the USOC writes into its deal with its chosen bid city a clause that would appear to fairly directly contravene not only the letter but the spirit of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights? The fundamental thing that makes the United States different from so many places around the world?

This is not, despite anyone’s best efforts to explain it away as “boilerplate,” anything of the sort. This is a deliberate attempt to chill speech. It is not, in any way, acceptable.

Granted, the parallels are hardly precise -- but if you were Mr. Putin, wouldn't you find some ironic comedy in this episode, in the effort by the U.S. Olympic Committee, of all parties, to restrict free speech? Wouldn't that seem to him a little bit like a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

The Boston Globe was absolutely right in an editorial to insist that Mayor Marty Walsh and the bid committee drop that ban. The mayor has since seemingly been backtracking.

While that gets sorted out, mark your calendars: IOC president Thomas Bach is due to attend the Super Bowl next weekend in Arizona.

It will be fascinating to see whether he meets with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — assuming, of course, the NFL doesn’t do what it should do, which is disqualify the Patriots for deflategate. If this were the Olympics, there's a very good argument to be made that the Patriots should be out and the Indianapolis Colts in. The evidence would seem manifest that the Patriots cheated.

At any rate, it was always understood that while the USOC was always in 2024 for one thing only, and that was to win, at the same time any American bid for 2024 was going to travel a long road. In that spirit, Bach met Wednesday — at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — with the head of the Italian Olympic Committee, Giovanni Malago, and the Italian premier, Matteo Renzi, to discuss Rome’s bid for the 2024 Games.

Renzi: “We can say that after this meeting the bid for the 2024 Olympic Games can continue with more enthusiasm.”

Very interesting.

For the record, and with enthusiasm: Kobe has more gold medals than I do. He also speaks way better Italian.

Second race back: Lindsey Vonn wins

Lindsey Vonn won Saturday. Improbably, maybe, but only if you don’t know Lindsey Vonn, who is as mentally tough as they come. That she won is good -- obviously -- for her. Better, it’s good for the U.S. team, for alpine skiing and for Olympic sports, because the Olympic world needs stars and Lindsey Vonn is a big star, arguably the biggest in all of winter sports, even though she didn’t even ski at the Sochi Olympics.

For her to be back — it’s just good all around. That’s reality.

Vonn won a World Cup downhill in Lake Louise, Canada — a course on which she has won so many times in recent seasons it has been dubbed “Lake Lindsey.”

Her victory capped a 1-2-3 U.S. finish, with Stacey Cook taking second and Julia Mancuso third, the first-ever U.S. Ski Team podium sweep, men’s or women’s. It marked the best finish in two seasons for all three.

The last nation to sweep a women’s World Cup podium: Austria, 2009.

For Vonn, Saturday’s race was only her second start since knee surgery last January knocked her out of the Sochi Games.

Every day has gotten better here,” she said after winning by 49-hundredths of a second. Mancuso finished 57-hundredths back.

“Today,” Vonn added, “I went a little bit more aggressive than I did yesterday and took some more chances. I’m finally feeling confident again going fast. I’m pushing the limits and I want more speed. I haven’t had that yet until today.”

Vonn’s victory was her 60th on the World Cup tour. She moves within two of the women’s record, held by retired Austrian Annemarie Moser-Pröll. She has said she not only wants to break that mark but is thinking about the men’s mark — 86, held by Ingemark Stenmark of Sweden — and wants to keep racing through the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games.

Fifteen of Vonn’s 60 victories have come at Lake Louise. She won seven races in a row there from 2010 to 2012.

For most of the past year, Vonn has been in ski limbo.

At the February 2013 world championships, she shredded her right knee in a crash. She underwent surgery.

In November 2013, in a training crash, she injured the knee again.

Last December, trying to suck it up for Sochi, she skied at Lake Louise, finishing 40th, 11th and fifth. In a fourth World Cup race last Dec. 21, she aggravated the knee in a race in Val d’Isere, France. Another knee surgery in January meant no Sochi Games.

Her comeback since has been well-chronicled. She said Saturday evening in a brief teleconference with reporters that the knee feels great; she has to wear a brace when she skis but that's it. No restrictions, she said.

Vonn finished eighth in Friday’s downhill, a race that, for the first time in two seasons, saw four American women land in the top 10, Laurenne Ross in fourth, Mancuso seventh and Cook ninth.

Saturday’s downhill saw the same, the 1-2-3 and then Ross in sixth.

“I always thought this was something possible with our team,” Cook, who made her first World Cup podium since Dec. 1, 2012, said. “I really wanted to be a part of it when it happened. It’s a good day to step up. I’m so excited for Lindsey too. It’s a cool day.”

Mancuso, who has four Olympic medals but hadn’t been on a World Cup podium since March 3, 2013, said, “It’s cool because both of the girls on the podium with me are my age. We’re all the same age—born in ’84—and we’re veterans of the World Cup. We’ve all been working very hard and I’ve grown up with both of them. It’s an awesome day!”

Vonn, in that 10-minute teleconference Saturday evening with reporters, said this:

"I definitely think I shocked a few people. Yesterday I think everyone was, you know, genuinely happy for me and they thought it was a really great start to my season. But I don’t think really anyone expected me to win today. And I could definitely see that on a few of the girls’ faces.

"I could see that my teammates knew it was coming. They know me very well. They were extremely supportive and happy.

"Like I said in the finish, I am not expecting this to happen all the time. I am still, you know, kind of getting a feel for things and building my confidence and getting used to racing again. But, you know, I feel a lot better after the win today. My confidence is definitely a lot -- a lot -- better.

"I just hope to keep the ball rolling and keep improving."

How to view 28 medals

There are lots of ways to look at the performance of the U.S. team at the just-concluded Sochi 2014 Winter Games. The American team won 28 medals, nine gold.

The optimist says that’s great.

The realist says the U.S. not only could have done better but almost surely should have. The International Olympic Committee added 12 new events to the 2014 program, mostly in the so-called action sports, and in those 12 Americans won nine medals. So — what happened around so much of the rest of the team?

Starting with the optimist’s view:

Sochi marked the best U.S. performance at a non-North American Winter Games. Those 28 medals were second only to the host Russians, who won the overall count with 33. Nine tied the mark set in Vancouver four years ago for most-ever gold medals at a non-domestic Games. The U.S. team won 10 in Salt Lake City in 2002.

Mikaela Shiffrin, just 18, won the first gold medal in women’s slalom skiing in 42 years. Ted Ligety won the men’s giant slalom under extraordinary pressure.

The two-man bobsled team, Steve Holcomb and Steve Langton, won the first medal of any color — in this instance, bronze — in 62 years. Holcomb would later drive the four-man sled to another bronze.

Joss Christensen, Gus Kenworthy and Nick Goepper swept the Olympic debut of slopestyle skiing. That marked only the third time U.S. men have swept the podium at the Winter Games. The prior occasions: figure skating 1956, snowboard halfpipe 2002.

Alan Ashley, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief of sport performance, declared last Saturday at a news conference at the Sochi 2014 main press center that, overall, the American team had done a “fantastic job.”

The realist’s extrapolation:

Starting from the exact same place: 28 medals, nine golds, and comparing that with Vancouver: 37 medals, nine golds.

Should going to Russia instead of just across the border to Canada make so much difference?

If before the Games Americans would have been a known lock for nine medals in the 12 new events, experts in some circles would not have found it unreasonable to have predicted 40 medals overall for Team USA.

How, then, to appropriately assess 28?

The entire U.S. Olympic Winter team did not win as many medals as the U.S. track and field team did in London in 2012. The track team won 29.

For that matter, the U.S. 2012 swim team won 31.

Overall, there were 98 medal events at the Sochi Games. One potentially very useful metric is how many medal opportunities there were — that is, available spots for Americans to earn a medal.

It’s not a simple case of multiplying 98 times three (the number of medals per event). In some events there might only be one American available to earn a medal; in others, several.

Bottom-line: there were, by the end of the Games, 255 medal opportunities. Again, American athletes earned 28 medals. That’s a return rate of 10.98 percent.

Perhaps this, then, might offer the best measure of the 2014 U.S. team’s performance: is a return rate of 10.98 percent good, or can it — or better yet, ought to be — improved upon?

For comparison, the London track team’s return rate: 29 of 143, or 20.3 percent.

The gold standard is the 2012 U.S. swim team: 31 of 62, or 50 percent.

Of the nine gold medals, five came from new events; four from events that had been on the program before 2014.

As pointed out by Law Murray, a graduate student at the Annenberg journalism school at the University of Southern California who was a credentialed reporter at the Games, all nine of the gold medalists are under age 30.

Much of the pre-Games media attention focused on veterans such as snowboarder Shaun White and speedskater Shani Davis. Neither medaled. As Murray also noted, of the 20 individual medalists, 14 won medals for the first time in Sochi. Only the 20 new medalists from the 2002 Salt Lake Games exceeded that number.

The USOC looks at all these kinds of things, and more. It has two fundamental priorities. One, win medals. Two, inspire the American public. The inspiring depends on the medals. This is the mission. And the mission, so it’s clearly understood, can involve some serious money.

Strictly speaking, the USOC does not, in the manner of a traditional American business, seek ROI, or return on investment. But — when you are laying out $2,724,345 to US Speedskating, as the USOC did in 2012, the year for which disbursements are most recently available, according to the USOC’s tax returns, and the long-track team goes oh-for-Sochi, it’s reasonable to launch a far-reaching inquiry.

As first pointed out by Gary D’Amato of the Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel, the U.S. long-track team’s medal count since 2002 has gone like this: eight, seven, four, zero. That belies an institutional problem that, finally, exploded into the public domain in 2014.

USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun said last Saturday, “If you look at the speedskating results, we weren’t the only nation that got smoked,” the Dutch taking a torch to the rest of the world.

Echoed Ashley: “Our job now is to say, ‘What went wrong, what went right and how do we improve?’ “

Another program that figures to invite scrutiny: the figure skaters won a bronze in the new team event, true, but left Sochi without a medal in men’s or ladies’ singles for the first time since 1936. That is, in a word, unacceptable.

The USOC, according to its tax statements, gave the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. $842,486 in 2012; $866,966 in 2011; $1,023,025 in 2010.

The United States produced the men’s gold medalist in 2010, the women’s silver medalist in 2006 and gold medalist in 2002. Now?

The last U.S. woman to medal at an Olympics or world championships — in an Olympic year, the worlds come after a Games — is Kimmie Meissner, who won the world championship in 2006.

Since 2010, no U.S. man has finished higher than seventh at the Olympics or the worlds.

Figure skating’s scoring system is opaque, surely. But last Thursday, on a night when Americans Gracie Gold and Ashley Wagner were talked up big-time by many of figure skating’s most traditional U.S. supporters — Gold would ultimately would finish fourth, Wagner seventh — the TV ratings underscored the challenge:

The ladies’ free skate, traditionally a highlight of the Games, attracted 20.3 million viewers, as Russia’s Adelina Sotnikova won gold over South Korea’s Yuna Kim amid controversy. The comparable night in Torino, when American Sasha Cohen won silver, drew 25.7 million. That is 5.4 million fewer people, a drop of 21 percent.

The U.S. men’s hockey team came to Sochi proclaiming “gold or bust,” beat the Russians in one of the Games’ most dramatic moments and then, in a 5-0 bronze-medal loss to Finland, proved they really meant it — it really was gold or time to go into the tank. “We didn’t show up. We let our country down. That’s it,” forward Max Pacioretty was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times.

There were high hopes this might be the breakthrough year for both cross-country skiing (no medals since 1976) and biathlon (no medals, ever). Didn’t happen.

It’s easy to see how the U.S. team could have more than made up the medals it won four years ago:

Lindsey Vonn did not ski in Sochi because she was hurt. In 2010, she won two.

The Nordic combined team, altogether, won four in 2010. In Sochi, zero.

The long-track team, in Vancouver, four. In Sochi, zero.

Add those together and you get 10. Add 10 to 28 and 38 is almost the 40 that figured to come with the new additions to the program.

Of course, sports — particularly at the Olympics — can often prove a matter of woulda, coulda, shoulda.

For every medal the United States didn’t win, there’s one it surprisingly did — such as Andrew Weibrecht’s silver in the super-G, a reprise of his 2010 bronze in the same event.

Some would suggest that the move to 28 from 37 is also tied to the increasing globalization of the Winter Games. In the men’s snowboard halfpipe, for instance, traditionally the province of White and other Americans, no U.S. man medaled; two Japanese and a Swiss rocked the podium.

Then again, in Vancouver, 26 national Olympic committees won medals. In Sochi, exactly the same number, 26 NOCs, won medals.

“Things don’t always shake out the way you want to,” Ashley, ever diplomatic, said last Saturday. “The surprises are sometimes way more exciting than the disappointments.”

U.S. alpine: five is plenty fine

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — There were a couple hours Saturday evening when it seemed possible the U.S. alpine ski team — already with a performance here at the Sochi 2014 Olympics that history will judge as fine, indeed— might, just might, sneak away with what would amount to a bonus medal. After Run 1 of the men’s slalom, Ted Ligety, winner three days ago of the giant slalom, had put himself in position for a medal. He was only 11-hundredths back of third.

The U.S. alpine team went into Saturday night with five medals, tied for its second-best performance ever at a Winter Games, with the Sarajevo 1984 team. Only the Vancouver 2010 team, which racked up eight, had done better.

Tantalizingly, six suddenly seemed within reach. Because he already had the GS gold, Ligety was skiing the slalom with no expectation, no pressure. The buzz started building — remember those two killer slalom runs Ligety put down to win his first Olympic gold, the combined, in Torino in 2006?

And then came the buzzkill.

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