LIVIGNO, Italy — The U.S. Olympic team won its record-breaking 11th gold medal of the Winter Games on Saturday, with at least one more good possibility remaining when its men’s hockey team wraps up the action on closing day with Sunday’s title game against Canada.
The freestyle skiing trio of Connor Curran, Kaila Kuhn and Chris Lillis gave the United States the record by capturing the American team’s second straight title in mixed aerials.
The 11th gold breaks the country’s mark set at the last Olympics on U.S. soil — in Salt Lake City in 2002, which has long stood out as a turning point for a winter sports program that had struggled over the previous decades.
This could end up being another turning point, not so much for the sheer number of medals but the variety of places from which they came: 12 of the 17 sports disciplines represented in the Winter Games produced medals for the U.S.
“Our focus and our strategy has always been about breadth,” said Sarah Hirshland, the CEO of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. “We want to win in everything. We want to make every sport better. Some could argue there are countries that go a mile deep in certain sports and really dominate. Our goal has been to improve winter sport across the board.”
The aerials medal, then a bronze in speed skating from Mia Manganello later in the day, lifted the U.S. to 31 overall for the Olympics with one day left.
That’s second to Norway, which had a record 18 gold medals and 40 overall through Saturday evening. For the Norwegians, 72% of the golds came in the endurance sports of cross country, biathlon and Nordic combined.
The biggest gold-medal hauls for the U.S. came in four disciplines: two each (18%) in Alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, figure skating and speed skating.
There are 38 more medal events on the program this year than there were in 2002. A lot of the new events have come at the snowpark — halfpipe, slopestyle and big air — which used to be America’s domain but has now been taken over by Japan, which, for instance, won nine medals in snowboarding, compared to two for the U.S.
“We stated we wanted to be a podium nation,” Fin Kirwan, the USOPC’s chief of Olympic sport, said of the U.S. goal of being among the top three on the overall medals table. “We said it will likely take 30 medals, and we got after it. The athletes delivered on their potential, and by turn, we hit the record on gold-medal performance, which shows that our very best were able to execute.”