That being said...shouldn't our athletes be trained to win? Vince Lomarbdi said, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."
Sure, the medal count is not what the Olympics is all about. However....we're speaking about national pride. Some countries show their national pride just by sending a team. Other countries show their pride by fielding athletes that should be able to win. That's how I see the US. We should be able to win a ton of medals. And, subsequently....when we don't win in events that we should have been able to win....that shows there's a problem.
Notice I said NAZI Germany, Hitler thought medal count was very important.
Sure we train our athletes to win. And so do the other countries.
My national pride has never been tied to athletes. My sense of pride has never been tied to nouns or accidents of fate. The fact that some Olympic athlete was born in the same country as me, especially with a country this big, just really says nothing about me. My sense of self worth is tied to active first person verbs, things I did.
“We” can’t win a ton of medals in the Winter Games because they’re made up of sports we just plain aren’t interested in, so our top athletes don’t play them. The fact is the athletes we’re sending to these games are in our second and third tier, our first tier primarily play football and basketball, some land in baseball, a few in hockey, and we tend to get a smattering scattered through the Summer Games (especially swimming, which really helps our medal count). But skiing and skating just don’t draw our top people. We only do as well as we do because we’re huge and a lot of countries top tier isn’t as good as our second and third.
The only “problem” is that American only pay attention to these sports every 4 years. As long as that’s the case we will continue to be so-so in these games. Nothing you can do about it, unless you want to start forcing our top athletes into different sports.