Well, another good day for the United States, capped off by Evan Lysacek’s razor-thin win in men’s figure skating, which none of the nine forecasters that we tracked had predicted (although most had him taking the silver). The only downer was the U.S.’s failure to win gold in women’s halfpipe, although we still took both the silver and the bronze.
Still, while the U.S. currently has an impressive 11-medal lead against host Canada, that’s going to get much narrower, as most of the canucks’ best sports are still ahead. We have Canada winning 5-6 more medals in speed skating, 4 medals or so in short track, 3-4 in freestyle skiing, and 4 between hockey and curling.
Germany, on the other hand, is in a little bit of trouble. As compared with the United States and Canada, they rely on completely dominating just a couple of sports — particularly, the sliding sports (luge, bobsled, skeleton) and biathlon/cross-country — and they’ve failed to pick up quite as many medals there as expected. I just don’t know that they have enough spots where they can pick up medals to make up for the places where they’ve underperformed — and so it looks quite likely that the medals title will go to a North American country for the first time since 1932.
Canada still leads the United States in the gold medals projection, with Norway slipping past Germany into third place. There’s a good chance that the gold medals title will come down to women’s hockey and ice dancing, where the U.S. and the Canadians are projected to finish 1-2.
p.s. Speaking of women’s hockey, these highlights of Slovakia’s 82-0 win over Bulgaria in the qualifying tournament are entertaining on a number of levels.