Winter Olympics 2022: US Women's Hockey Set to Defend Gold Medal

Kendall Coyne Schofield and Hilary Knight of Team USA — John E. Sokolowski/USA TODAY Sports

BLAINE, Minn. — One day in early December, two months before the 2022 Winter Olympics, the U.S. women’s national hockey team hits the ice to practice with a purpose. A playlist of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” “Jingle Bell Rock” and other holiday classics blasts from the track’s speakers. A camera crew from NBC is on hand to capture the scene, as are several GoPros mounted on Team USA’s helmets. During a 3-on-0 drill, players who don’t score must stop, dive and roll like a pseudo-punishment, after which everyone inevitably appears covered in snow and smiling.

This is also not an anomaly. Pressure is sure to greet the defending gold medalists in Beijing when their repeat attempt begins on February 3 against World No. 3 Finland. It’s just that Team USA’s plan to fight back involves some pokechecks to the bone fun. “We’ve tried to create a spirit of excitement, of joy, of getting it done without taking ourselves too seriously,” coach Joel Johnson says after practice, sitting in a hallway at the national team’s Twin Cities training house. “Our goals are obvious. They will measure us according to the color of our medal. But we will not be defined by that.”

The success of the Americans will most likely be defined by the eight Olympic debutants in the list of 23 women—and how this group will rise to the challenge of replacing retired stalwarts like twins Monique Lamoureux-Morando and Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson, scorers of the regulation equalizing goal and penalty shootout winner against Canada at the 2018 final. Says Johnson: “That’s the unknown that this band lives in, the awkwardness that certain people have been here when they won gold, and certain people: I played some songs today that came out when they hadn’t even born”.

There are many ways to measure the age gap of Team USA, ranging from 19-year-old Caroline Harvey and Abbey Murphy to 32-year-old Hilary Knight, the only four-time Olympian on the team. For example, Harvey lists his childhood idols as three current teammates: Knight, Kendall Coyne Schofield, and Brianna Decker, who coached Harvey to two U-18 world championships as part of the US staff.

“I remember my first senior team camp, sitting in a locker room with these girls,” says Harvey, a University of Wisconsin student who vowed to postpone her enrollment to look for some shiny hardware that would certainly make a sweet bedroom decor. . “I was like, ‘Wow. I am here with them. That’s crazy'”.

But the new guard goes beyond the long trip to Beijing; It will feature rising stars like forward Abby Roque, who Knight predicted was destined to become “the best player in the world, plain and simple,” to take on heavy loads at the Wukesong Sport Center against Canada, Finland and other rivals. . “Our team has definitely reset since the last Olympics, different player-wise, and it’s been a good reset,” says Decker. “We have some younger girls who are incredibly talented.”

Equally impressive have been his abilities to fit in with the holdovers from 2018, both on and off the ice. “It’s a good balance,” says Decker. “The younger players bring that excitement, and I think it’s important that we older girls continue to do so as well. I’m someone who really gets into it before games, but I’ve definitely loosened up. It’s probably the best team I’ve ever been on, as far as having fun.”

knight-coyne — David E. Klutho/USA TODAY Sports

As Knight sees it, the resulting chemistry is downright electric. “I think we have that lightning-in-a-bottle thing,” says the right winger. “We have an extremely motivated group that is unapologetic about how they are going to approach the future. That is what is intoxicating about this environment and what is so rare. You have all these phenomenal people in a room, working toward a common goal.”

The road has not been easy. There was the abrupt resignation last April of former bank chief Bob Corkum, who explained the decision as a matter of feeling “uncomfortable” with the team’s pandemic protocols, and the subsequent rise of Johnson. (“Bob is a great coach,” Johnson says. “It wasn’t me who filled the void, it was our group.”) And the 2021 world championships, which the US is a month behind schedule and a relocation before finally take place in a strict bubble. “The challenge in Calgary was that we didn’t have Wi-Fi bandwidth, so we couldn’t even meet on Zoom,” says Knight. “In addition, we had to quarantine longer than the men for the world juniors, five days against three. That is a big difference. We were able to figure it out. I don’t think anything really prepares you for those environments because they’re so unnatural.”

But after back-to-back losses at home to rival canada Kicking off the My Why Tour, a series of frontier tournaments leading up to the Olympics, Team USA had what Knight calls a “breakthrough” with back-to-back victories in Kingston, Ontario and Ottawa before Action Day. thanks. “Sweeping Canada was important to us,” agrees Harvey. “We were connecting much better.” (The later omicron variant caused the cancellation of the last three games of the tour, after the Canadians bounced back with two overtime wins in St. Louis in mid-December).

The hope, of course, is that this lightning bolt will spark another gold medal run. No country outside the US and Canada has won since women’s hockey was added to the Olympic program in 1998, with the Americans winning that year in Nagano and their rivals posting four straight before PyeongChang; the two have also combined to capture five of six silvers. And while Finland will be looking to mar this North American dominance, building on their “Miracle in Espoo” triumph at the 2019 world championships, a rematch of the 2018 PyeongChang final no less, and that of the most recent worlds in Calgary, where Canada captain Marie-Philip Poulin scored the extra-time winner, expected next month.

In the meantime, Knight says, the key is to “cherish those moments” together as the Games draw closer. “It’s hard,” she says. “Especially during COVID, I feel like we lost a lot of time building that chemistry. So we’re just making up for lost time.” Moments like when a cheeky prankster player hid a Timbits donut hole in the plate of spaghetti and meatballs at the team hotel in Ottawa. “It looked exactly like a meatball,” says Harvey. “Our assistant coach, Courtney Kennedy, ate it, made a face, kept eating it and swallowed it. I guess she just assumed it was bad. They were all dying.”

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