Category: Olympics (Page 1 of 2)

Coaching, Pre-Olympic Power and More: The Many Layers of the US Women’s Hockey Team’s Protest

20 March, 2017 / Kat

I don’t have a ton of time, but I needed to get some thoughts out about the dispute between USA Hockey and the US Women’s National Team. My unfinished take below is based on covering the sport here and there since 2011. I will try to finish it and edit it better eventually, but for now, I just wanted to get it out there.

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Although it is not an Olympic year, the U.S. Women’s National team has harnessed the weight of Olympic competition in their World Championships holdout against USA Hockey.

An Olympic hopeful in any sport can tell you about the importance of the pre-Olympic year. Major competitions are often held in Olympic venues (although they aren’t in women’s hockey), teams start to gel in a certain way that will influence selection in the Olympic year and individuals try to put the final flourish on credentials that will earn them an Olympic spot.

For national organizing bodies like USA Hockey, pre-Olympic years are key for evaluation and marketing purposes. They are looking at an athlete’s recent competition performances with a magnifying glass, seeing how they meet the pressure to perform and how they fare against the world’s best. It’s also a key year to getting faces out in front of the American public, giving mainstream fans a taste of who they will be rooting for next February.

Holding out of a U.S. hosted World Championships during a pre-Olympic year, exactly what the U.S. Women’s National Team is doing, disrupts that finely tuned machine, making it the most effective form of protest. The pre-Olympic machine has ground to a halt for U.S. women’s hockey.

While the Women’s National Team has been clear in all of what they are fighting for – proper compensation for devoting themselves to the sport for a four-year span, equal recognition by USA Hockey properties, equipment equality, and a better development system for women’s hockey – USA Hockey is taking an interesting PR turn. Their statements in response to the National Team’s coordinated protest only address the compensation piece of the complaint, and do so in great detail. They’re trying to turn public opinion by making the protest all about money, repeating endlessly that they are not in the “business of paying athletes.”

But the Women’s National Team consider compensation a small part of the protest. Building a development program structure would make great strides in checking off the rest of the National Team’s wants. Marketing opportunities would grow from having a group of athletes “in-house” and representing USA Hockey from an early age. It works on the men’s side, where we have heard about Auston Matthews from way before his NHL Draft Date. His residency within the US Under 18 Team wasn’t the only reason he was so visible, but it sure helped USA Hockey promote his abilities better.

A better women’s hockey development structure would might also create coaching jobs for members of the current National Team, and coaching is an underlying issue and cause of this protest that no one seems to have touched upon. Members of the National Team approached ESPNW and other outlets a few weeks prior to their protest with claims that they currently were coachless, with previous coach Ken Klee ousted quietly after the 2016 Four Nations Cup. USA Hockey swiftly released a statement saying that Robb Stauber who led the US team for a few games against Canada at the start of 2017, would lead the team at the upcoming Worlds. Was the coaching situation the tipping point for the National Team’s protest, or was approaching the media about it a test case for a future protest?

Also along coaching lines, why hasn’t the National Team addressed the lack of women’s coaches in the current system? They went from an Olympic Team led by Harvard’s Katey Stone in 2014 to only having female coaching on the World Juniors team (where Boston University’s Katie Lachapelle and Boston College’s Courtney Kennedy have received several opportunities over the years as assistants.) Why haven’t Kennedy and Lachapelle gotten more senior team chances? If it is due their college coaching demands, how can we make these national team coaching positions just as enticing as their assistant positions on D1 programs?

The most underrated U.S. Olympic moment (and why we should take a moment to remember it today)

23 April, 2015 / Kat

Every person who ever considers a career in sports media has those moments that steer them down that path. I talk often about the one that sent me full steam ahead in that direction – Super Bowl XXIX, with Steve Young finally lifting “the monkey off his back” and leading the San Francisco 49ers to their fifth Super Bowl win – but there was a moment three years prior that made me take the initial step.

It was February 1992. Ten year old me was deep in the throws of the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. It was that wonderful first Saturday of February school vacation, day one of my being able to watch as much of the Olympics as I could find without school, dance or Girl Scouts getting in the way.

I was over at my aunt’s split level ranch in East Irondequoit, NY, walking through the kitchen when I caught the 6pm news sports report on her tiny TV in the corner.

“A major shocker in the men’s figure skating tonight,” said the anchor. “If you don’t want to be spoiled, turn away from the TV now.” A way of life of an Olympic obsessed child in the pre-internet age, I would cover my eyes in an effort to convince others I wasn’t watching the TV flash the results, but spread my fingers apart on my right hand so I could see the screen.

Through the fingers on my right hand, I saw that Paul Wylie had won the silver medal. I broke rule #1: I admitted I saw the results. “MOM! The U.S. won the silver medal!”

“Don’t spoil us!” someone yelled.

“Which one?” my mom asked.

“Paul Wylie!” I exclaimed.

“Who?” my aunt asked.

“The third guy!” I explained.

“The third guy?” my mom said in amazement. “He wasn’t even supposed to be on the team!”

Later that night, we gathered around my aunt’s TV in the den and watched Wylie’s long program earn him an Olympic silver medal. Scott Hamilton commentated, and during the wait for Wylie’s scores, he deemed the performance “one of the biggest surprises in figure skating history.”

Wylie had skated on the senior level since the early 1980s. After winning the World Junior title in 1981, he placed fifth four times on the senior level until leaping to second in 1988 and making the 1988 Olympic team. In Calgary, he finished tenth. He earned the journeyman moniker soon after, making three World Championships and finishing 9th, 10th and 11th, all while attending Harvard.

As the 1992 Olympics neared and younger skaters (like Todd Eldredge, who would turn out really defining the term journeyman) began to threaten, Wylie seemed to be the odd man out for a second Olympic team. He finished second at Nationals that year and made the team by placement, but critics called for him to be booted for the younger Mark Mitchell or for reigning World bronze medalist Eldredge, who was petitioning onto the team after being unable to compete at Nationals.

Wylie, Eldredge and Christopher Bowman (a two-time World medalist) ended up making the U.S. squad in Albertville’s men’s figure skating event. Of the three, Bowman and Eldredge looked to be the medal contenders, and Wylie was largely forgotten about. He was so disregarded that he was preliminarily left off the post-Olympics World Championships team in the place of Mitchell.

And then Wylie finished third in the Olympic original (now called short) program. Bowman was seventh, Eldredge ninth.

Wylie skated second to last in the long program and delivered a fantastic performance that had the audience on their feet. He turned out of two jumps, but otherwise skated cleanly and with better spins and edge work than the skater immediately preceding him, the Unified Team’s Viktor Petrenko. The judges marks for Wylie varied greatly, with the Czech judge handing him marks only good enough for fifth and the Unified judge placing him fourth. The remainder of the judging panel had Wylie on the medal stand. Petr Barna, the last skater in the competition, represented Czechoslovakia, and it was clear that his home country’s judge was saving room to keep him on the medal stand by scoring Wylie extremely low.

Political shimmying may have torpedoed some of Wylie’s marks, but at the end of the night of February 15, 1992, he won the silver medal, a shocking finish to an Olympics some within the U.S. skating community didn’t think he should compete at.

Watching the entire story unfold on CBS’ Olympic coverage that evening had young me enamored, and it was one of the first times I thought, “There are people who get to tell about this amazing story. Wouldn’t it be neat to be one of them?”

Twenty-three years later, Wylie’s Olympic story is largely forgotten by the general public, which is a shame. As news broke Wednesday that the now 50 year old Wylie had been hospitalized with a heart issue, those in figure skating shared on social media how impactful his ’92 performance and career has been. The incredible Wylie story has been grossly underrated over the past two decades, and it’s time again to remind the general sports community of one of the most remarkable U.S. Olympic moments of the last fifty years.

Train Thoughts: Jordyn Wieber, The Arbitrary Nature of Gymnastics and The Biased Nature of Media Coverage

30 July, 2012 / Kat

Train Thoughts are long sports related rambles I write on my commute into my full-time job. They aren’t the most concise pieces of writing I’ll ever write, but hey, at least I’m writing.

Jordyn Wieber’s failure to make the Olympic women’s gymnastics all-around has dominated the last 24 hours or so of Olympic gymnastics coverage. The reigning World All-Around champion had the fourth best All-Around score of Sunday’s meet, but had two US teammates finish above her (Boston’s Aly Raisman in second and recent phenom Gabrielle Douglas in third,) bouncing her out due to an two gymnast per country rule.

Said rule also came to the detriment of the Russian team, who also had to drop a high ranking All-Around gymnast (Anastasia Grishina.) A version of this rule has been around for a while – before it was two gymnasts, it was three, and it was in place to keep one country from dominating competition too much (Russia and China, the rulemakers were looking in your direction.)

The rule may not pass the smell test, but it is not unique to gymnastics. Countries are limited to a certain amount of participants in a variety of events – U.S. swimming has a boatload of strong swimmers who leave their international counterparts in the water, but they’re left home because they’re only third in their own country. Such rules work against countries with an embarssament of athletic riches, but for nations who don’t have the economic climates to produce such a bounty. Continue reading

90s Girl Problems: Why Verne Lundquist’s Voice Always Takes Me Back To 1992

23 March, 2012 / Kat

Veteran sports broadcaster Verne Lundquist is calling NCAA Tournament basketball games for CBS this weekend. I don’t know about you, but even fourteen years after CBS broadcast its last Winter Olympics, Lundquist’s voice will still always be associated with Olympic coverage for me.

If you grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was high probability that one of your childhood dreams was to be a well-trained, calm and composed figure skater representing the United States at the Olympics. Part of that dream included Lundquist narrating your life story – or at least pertinent biographical information – to the masses. And then when Scott Hamilton, his color analyst, would flip out and talk nonsensical about your performance, Lundquist would bring him back from spaz-ville.

“She landed a triple loop,” Hamilton would comment, then start shrieking like someone turned his personal energy throttle up to Micro Machine Man. “OH MY GOODNESS, THIS IS THE BEST MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA. NO MANKIND. NO, ALL OF THE UNIVERSE.”

Lundquist would cut through the energy and translate Hamilton’s insanity to the masses. “I think what you’re trying to say, Scott, is that she’s doing quite well.”

Childhood Olympics junkies, like myself, would take to the nearest tiled floor in my house during Olympic coverage commercials and “skate” around in our footy pajamas. When I did so, I always could hear Lundquist’s voice right before I manically started jumping around in my tiny kitchen. “The first to skate, the ten year old from Rochester, New York, Katie Hasenauer.”

You wanted Lundquist to tell America your own personal story of adversity, you wanted Hamilton to over-caffeinatedly swoon over your jumps and artistry, and you wanted to skate like Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi. That was life as a ten year old girl in 1992, back when the Olympics were the national equivalent of the Super Bowl, March Madness, a Mad Men season premiere and a Harry Potter film opening all in one. (Or at least, that is what it felt like.)

When I had Syracuse-Wisconsin and Ohio State-Cincinnati basketball on my television Thursday night and heard the now 71 year old Lundquist calling the game, I was instantly taken back to those days where I spent my entire February school vacation glued to the television watching Olympics coverage and hanging on to his every word. For me, there are few childhood memories clearer or fonder than that.

Here’s Lundquist calling one of 1992 Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi’s programs.

The Olympics of Slacking

3 March, 2010 / Kat

Photo: tkellyphoto from Flickr

For the fourth Olympics in a row, I intended on blogging the Olympics. I’ve been an Olympic junkie since age two, thus writing about the Olympics for my blog or others seems like a no-brainer. I have Winter Olympic encyclopedias on my bookshelf, and my parents currently hold my collection of taped from TV Olympic coverage VHS tapes.

Athens came and went. I was in grad school and was not able to watch until the last night of gymnastics. Turin, I was in a blogging hiatus, with lack of inspiration and an arena of writer’s block. Beijing, I was on a two week trip for my full-time job.

Vancouver was going to change this. I was going to blog. Maybe not every night, maybe not every event, but I was going to blog. My encyclopedic knowledge of figure skating would be on display. My endless search for blog topics would be over.

I settled onto the couch each night to watch the Vancouver Olympics, computer fired up, notebook next to me. Despite NBC’s lacking coverage, I was memorized as only a lifelong Olympics junkie could be. Turn to MSNBC, there’s hockey. Turn to CNBC, there’s curling. Then all of the skiing aerial events, which are just enough on the edge to be exciting, but don’t feature those hoodlum snowboarders with the long hair and iPods. Then, although the coverage couldn’t touch the hours upon hours I remember from my CBS Olympics childhood, there was the figure skating.

The Olympics are just one of those events where you can’t look away, no matter how magnificently manicured the coverage is, how sweetly sappy the fluff profiles are, or how unethically un-amateur the athletes are. It’s a spectacle of sport, the two weeks every two years where sitcoms that have overstayed their welcome and seventeen versions of the same dramatic series are replaced with hours upon prime-time hours of sports. Weird sports. Popular sports. Unpopular sports. Fallen sports. Growing sports. Sports that only Scandinavian nations play. Sports that Russians rule. Sports that only the US and Canada can compete in. Sports that you have to be under five-foot-three to be successful in. Sports that combine two sports into one. Sports that are just competitive, greased up versions of sledding in Uncle Eddie’s backyard in Ontario.

Writing didn’t happen. I sat, dazed at the television screen, and when the delayed late evening news finally began, I would immediately fall asleep wherever I was. The 7 News logo provoked an a Pavlovian response – when it appeared on screen, my eyes shut without effort and asleep I was. I would wake up in the morning, and realize for yet another night, I didn’t blog. I would resolve that that night would be the night when I finally did.

And through two weeks of the Olympics, that never happened. While I didn’t blog, and thus was a gold medal example of how not to grow or maintain your blog readership, I enjoyed. If you don’t take that time to sit back and enjoy a sporting event every once and a while, without the blogging, Tweeting and analysis, you begin to lose why you even love sports in the first place.

Vancouver, thanks for the refresh.