Day 7 preview: Ladies first on skates, slopes

Ladies first on skates, slopes, snowboards
U.S. women's hockey, Kildow, Jacobellis highlight action on Day 7

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U.S. goalie Chanda Gunn celebrates her team's 7-3 victory over Finland on Feb. 14.


The Americans play Friday in the Olympics semifinals for a third straight Winter Games, with Canada in the other bracket and a gold medal showdown between the two North American powers seemingly assured. But not everything feels the same for the U.S. squad.

For the first time since women’s hockey joined the Olympics in 1998, the U.S. team will be without Cammi Granato, who had 10 goals and 18 points in Winter Games’ play. She was dropped as part of the team’s youth movement last year and no longer speaks with coach Ben Smith.

This team instead relies on youngsters like 18-year-old Sarah Parsons. And this year’s edition is the defending silver medalist; the 2002 version was coming off a Nagano gold medal. The hockey team is favored to defeat Sweden on Friday, when the U.S. women Olympians take center stage in Turin.

The women’s hockey game is a late breakfast special, airing live on the USA network at 11 a.m. The United States swept its first three games by a combined score of 18-3, coming back from a two-goal deficit in their third game to post a 7-3 victory over Finland.

Fairly impressive — except Canada’s margin of victory in three games was 36-1. The defending gold medalists face off against Finland in the other semifinal, with live coverage set for 3 p.m. on MSNBC.

Lindsey Kildow continues her remarkable return from a frightening crash on the ski slopes, and the exhilarating madness of the snowboardcross competition returns with the first women’s competition.

There’s plenty to say about Kildow, who’s walking the line between courageous and a little crazy. It was just last Monday when the 21-year-old survived a wreck of Olympic proportions, sailing 15 feet through the air before skidding to a crumpled halt during a practice run. A helicopter was summoned for an airlift to Turin, where she was hospitalized overnight with — incredibly — nothing worse than a bruised hip.

Two days later, she was back on the same course for the downhill. And on Friday, she returns for another attempt at a gold in the combined — an event where she was considered a likely medalist before her spill.

Her biggest competition comes from another skier battling back from bad health: Croatia’s Janica Kostelic, a triple gold medalist in 2002. She’s fighting a fever that kept her out of the downhill.

Kildow’s comeback is one of the main attractions on NBC’s Friday prime-time schedule, along with the ever-popular ice dancing, the snowboardcross, the men’s skeleton and the large hill individual ski jumping. Programming runs from 8 p.m.-11:30 p.m. EST.

The network’s hour-long afternoon show, beginning at 4 p.m., is devoted to the men’s cross-country 15-kilometer gold medal.

The ice dancing competition, one of the Olympics’ big television draws since Torvill and Dean performed to “Bolero” back in 1984, airs Friday night with the compulsory competition. Each team will skate two more programs before the gold medal is awarded.

For the United States, shut out of a medal in this event since 1976, the team of Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto arrived in Turin as the silver medalists from last year’s World Championships. Belbin, a native Canadian, only became an American citizen on New Year’s Eve, just 41 days before the Turin Games began.

Although she had competed for the U.S. in other competitions, citizenship is a requirement for Olympic athletes.

One day after U.S. snowboarder Seth Wescott captured the gold in the first-ever Olympic snowboardcross, the women’s version of the rumble on snowboards makes its debut. The men’s event featured an assortment of crashes, smashes and pileups along the tricky course; expect more of the same.

Lindsey Jacobellis is world champion in the event, and hopes to give the United States a gold medal sweep in the snowboardcross.

Every bit as daunting is the men’s skeleton, where U.S. riders Chris Soule, Eric Bernotas and Kevin Ellis hope to duplicate the gold medal run of Jim Shea Jr. from 2002. The team was dogged with bad news leading up to the Olympics; its coach was dumped after sexual harassment allegations.

If that wasn’t enough to make skeleton fans pull out their hair, balding rider Zach Lund tested positive for a drug that can be used as a steroid-masking agent. Except he was using it to help grow hair on his increasingly shiny pate.

While unintentional, the follicle faux pas sidelined the top U.S. skeleton rider.

The Associated Press