Once every four years countries from all over the world attend the Olympics. In the 41 games of the Olympics that have ever been put on the United States has attended 40 of them. In each of those Olympics our country has been winning medals and sometimes we begin to estimate how many should be won. This year at the 2018 Winter Olympics many Americans were disappointed with the outcome of US Olympians.

In all events combined the United States left the Olympics with just 23 medals, coming up with the fourth highest medal count in the Olympics trailing behind Norway with 43, Germany with 31 and Canada with 29. During the last Olympics in Sochi the US came away with 28 medals. Many people were disappointed with this outcome as it was the fewest medals that the US has obtained since the 1998 Olympics when we walked away with only 13 medals.

While the overall medal count was lower than Americans would’ve liked the US still came away with nine gold medals in the 2018 Olympics which is the same amount of gold medals obtained in the 2014 Sochi Olympics. On top of the nine gold the US had eight silver and six bronze medals making the Olympic games still remotely successful for the US.

Out of the 23 medals the United States did win 11 of those came from an event on the snow, including snowboarding and skiing. Even more impressive was five of those medals were gold medals, allowing the snow event to really steal the show and a lot of the glory. However, there was still plenty of recognition for the efforts of other event winners.

While it is impressive that 11 medals were won by snow events it is also impressive that 12 medals were won by US women. The American women haven’t won more medals than the men in an Olympics in 20 years so this was a big accomplishment especially since the males outnumbered the females 134 to 107.

Even though there were only 23 medals won the US had athletes place either fourth, fifth or six a total of 35 times which truly shows how much a fraction of a second or even a hundredth of a point can make a world of a difference.

Although sometimes we don’t always achieve as much as we would like Americans should still be proud of all those who participated in this years Olympic games and expect many athletes to be back for more in 2022.