[A]s the 2018 Olympics draw to a close, three athletes with ties to the Green Mountain State will return home with gold.
Vermont-schooled Mikaela Shiffrin, who became the youngest ever to top the slalom podium in 2014 and arrived in South Korea favored to win multiple events, won gold in the giant slalom, as well as silver in the alpine combined.
“It’s pretty nice to have two more Olympic medals,” the 22-year-old graduate of Burke Mountain Academy tells the New York Times. “And my other big goal was to prove that I could branch out and not just be a slalom skier. For me, it is huge to know that I can now put down fast times in pretty much any event and contend for medals in multiple events.”
Jessie Diggins, a 26-year-old Minnesota native who trains with Stratton Mountain School’s T2 elite team, finished fifth in three cross-country events and sixth in another before winning gold in the ski team sprint. The victory came four decades after Vermonter Bill Koch snagged the country’s only other medal in the sport — a silver in 1976.
“For me it feels like a privilege to help change the culture of (U.S.) skiing to Yes We Can,” Diggins tells the Christian Science Monitor.
(Diggins will start by parading the nation’s colors as the U.S. Olympic team’s closing ceremony flag bearer, TeamUSA.org reports.)
And Amanda Pelkey — a 25-year-old Montpelier native and the University of Vermont’s all-time leader in goals (49), assists (56) and points (105) — joined the women’s hockey team to grab gold in a dramatic 3-2 sudden-death overtime shootout.
“I don’t even know how to speak right now, to be honest with you,” she tells USA Today. “This makes my life up to this point.”
Pelkey capped the game Thursday with an on-ice moment with her mother, who was there with the rest of the family.
“We both started crying,” the athlete recalls. “That was a given.”
Vermont, with some 30 athletes from or schooled in the state, sent the sixth-highest number of Olympians to this year’s games, after Colorado, California, Minnesota, New York and Utah. But with one qualifier for every 48,000 residents, the state boasted the most participants per capita.
“They’re a bunch of hearty, healthy, friendly, small-town outdoors enthusiasts who shun TV and fast food for hiking and skiing and kelp noodles,” USA Today reports. “Because, you know, kale is so 10 years ago in Vermont.”
For confirmation, the newspaper interviewed Gov. Phil Scott.
“It’s not a fluke,” Scott said. “It’s just the whole community spirit here. We’re a little quirky at times.”
And so with the 2018 closing ceremony set for Sunday, Vermonters soon will start planting seeds — for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
“It is just such an invitation to jump onboard and ride this bandwagon,” Koch, who celebrated the nation’s second-ever cross-country medal by skiing himself, tells FasterSkier.com. “Success tends to breed success, and this could just be the start of an era.”
