“We're going to be measured based on the color of our medal. But we will not be defined by that.” alex_prewitt catches up with the U.S. women’s hockey team and how they plan to defend their gold medal
As Knight sees it, the resulting chemistry is downright electric. “I think we have that lightning-in-a-bottle thing,” the right winger says. “We've got an extremely motivated group that's unapologetic about how they're going to approach the future. That's what's intoxicating about this environment and what's so rare. You've got all these phenomenal people in one room, working towards a common goal.
The road hasn’t been easy. There was last April’s abrupt resignation of former bench boss Bob Corkum, whowith the team’s pandemic protocols, and Johnson’s subsequent promotion. And the 2021 world championships, at which the U.S. finished second to host Canada, endured a three-month delay and a relocation before finally taking place in a strict bubble. “The challenge in Calgary was that we didn’t have a Wi-Fi bandwidth, so we couldn’t even really meet on Zoom,” Knight says.
The hope, of course, is that this lightning will spark another gold-medal run. No country outside the U.S. 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 peeling off four straight prior to PyeongChang; the two have also combined to capture five of six silvers.
In the meantime, Knight says, the key is to “appreciate those moments” together as the Games near. “It’s difficult,” she says. “Especially during COVID, I feel like we lost a lot of time to build that chemistry. And so we’re just making up for lost time.” Moments like when some daring prankster player hid a Timbits donut hole in the chafing dish of spaghetti and meatballs at the team hotel in Ottawa. “Looked exactly like a meatball,” Harvey says.
Or like a midwinter morning practice full of good vibes and joyful tunes. Then again, the U.S. players know they have a task at hand, too. That’s why, partway through practice, the Christmas music cuts off and gives way to the opening guitar chords of another song of Johnson’s choosing, this one with an even less subtle message: Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business.”
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