Welcome to The Home Team, VTDigger’s daily Olympic dispatch. Every morning, we’ll feature the highlights of Vermonters competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Check out our full list of Vermont athletes on Team USA, and meet author Kevin O’Connor in our Olympic preview podcast.
Pelkey, U.S. hockey team grab gold
Six players on this year’s U.S. women’s hockey team still remember the heartbreak of losing their 2010 and 2014 Olympic finals to Canada. So when the two countries got ready for yet another rematch Thursday, the sextet gathered Montpelier’s Amanda Pelkey and fellow newcomers to offer a few words of warning.
“We have tried to explain to them what it felt like,” one of the veterans tells TeamUSA.org, “but it is great that they have not felt that.”
That’s because the American women grabbed a gold medal in this year’s concluding game, winning 3-2 in a dramatic sudden-death overtime shootout.
Team USA won the inaugural women’s Olympic hockey final in 1998 and has medaled at each games since, but needed to stop Canada from nabbing its fifth straight gold if it wanted to top the podium 20 years after its first victory.
Shiffrin wins a second medal
Vermont-schooled Mikaela Shiffrin, who won giant slalom gold last week, captured a second medal Thursday in her final 2018 event.
The 22-year-old graduate of Burke Mountain Academy nabbed silver in the alpine combined, in which competitors run a downhill course and later race on a slalom hill.
Shiffrin arrived in South Korea favored to win multiple medals, only to finish fourth in Friday’s slalom and forgo Saturday’s super-G. She was aiming to be the first U.S. skier since 1952 Vermont Olympian Andrea Mead Lawrence to win gold twice in the same games. That said, she’s happy to leave with silver.
“I did everything I needed to do to have a shot for a medal,” Shiffrin tells TeamUSA.org, “and it’s really cool to have that work out.”
Video: “This is what history looks and sounds like,” NBC Olympics tweets of the moment Stratton’s Jessie Diggins helped Team USA win its first-ever cross-country skiing gold medal. “You’ll want your sound up for this.”
Cross-country victory still shines
Jessie Diggins, who trains each summer with Stratton Mountain School’s T2 elite team, collapsed at the finish line of Wednesday’s cross-country ski team sprint.
“Did we just win the Olympics?” Diggins gasped as she fell to the ground.
“Yeah!” screamed teammate Kikkan Randall.
The historic win came four decades after Windham County native Bill Koch snagged the country’s first and only other medal in the sport — a silver in the men’s 30-kilometer in 1976. Koch, now 62 and still skiing in Peru, Vermont, couldn’t be happier for the women.
“It’s really overdue,” he tells USA Today.
Diggins, who finished fifth three times and sixth once at the 2018 Olympics, agrees.
“I really wanted to make this happen for this team,” she tells Vermonter Peggy Shinn, a writer for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s website. “We always said any medal we got was going to belong to the team. It was the team that got us here and gave us this opportunity.”
Looking Ahead: Morrisville’s Emily Dreissigacker and Barton’s Susan Dunklee will shoot for the country’s first-ever Olympic biathlon medal in the women’s 4×6-kilometer biathlon relay Thursday.
