America's Surprise Olympic Romp

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America is delivering an Olympics beating that nobody saw coming.

The U.S. won as many medals on Wednesday—six—as it won during the entirety of the 1988 Games in Calgary, Alberta.

The 20 medals that America had won through Friday afternoon at the Vancouver Games represent far more than half of its greatest Winter Olympics haul ever—the 34 that it garnered during the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.

Once the poor sisters of the Winter Games, once pressed to explain why a country with so much money and the greatest snow on earth couldn't dominate the slipping-and-sliding sports, America is on the verge of turning Vancouver into a romp.

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Bode Miller of the U.S. after competing in the men's alpine skiing Super-G on Friday.

To be sure, fortunes could change. Only seven of 16 days of competition have been completed. As of Friday afternoon, nearly 60% of medals at these Games remained to be won. But several events remain in which Americans are podium favorites, including six more in alpine skiing, three in bobsled, and nearly a dozen more in speedskating.

Leaders of the U.S. Olympic Committee are already taking a victory lap. In a statement, released after the U.S. set a Winter Games record winning six medals in a single day, newly hired chief executive Scott Blackmun said he was "incredibly proud of the American Olympians participating in these magnificent Games, and I can't wait to see what happens next."

Perhaps most impressive is that America is winning medals in traditional sports often dominated by Europeans, such as alpine skiing, figure skating and long-course speedskating. Noting that the number of Winter Olympics events has risen to 86 from 46 in Calgary, Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said, "We're expected to do well in new events like freestyle skiing and snowboarding. But this week is not just a new-event phenomenon for the U.S."

Indeed, ground zero for the beat-down has been Whistler's Creekside ski area, site of the alpine skiing events. On Friday, the Americans continued to morph into the 21st-century versions of Swiss and Austrian skiers. Bode Miller took the silver and Andrew Weibrecht took the bronze in a Super-G race filled with high-speed crashes and skiers careening on and off the twisting course on the Dave Murray slope.

When it was over, the powerful Swiss and Austrian teams, led by veteran superstars Carlo Janka and Michael Walchhofer, still had just two alpine medals between them through four races, and only one in the men's competition, compared with six for the U.S., surpassing the team's previous record of five in Sarajevo in 1984.

Meanwhile, Canadian Manuel Osborne-Paradis, who was supposed to exploit his home-slope advantage in a discipline where familiarity with a course can make a huge difference, hit an unexpected jump in the upper portion of the course and skittered out of bounds.

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Mr. Weibrecht, competing in his first Winter Games and ranked just 18th in the world in Super-G, set the tone early, as the third skier down the mountain on a sun-splashed day that softened the snow just enough to allow the skiers to take chances. Mr. Weibrecht has never won on the World Cup circuit, but his run of 130.65 gave him a brief 0.65-of-a-second lead he held until his teammate Mr. Miller bolted through the gate eight starters later.

Skiing with a scary determination, Mr. Miller turned in one of his trademark chin-first runs, searing through the dangerous turns at the top of the course mostly on the edges of his skis. Dancing from side to side, Mr. Miller grazed many of the gates that mark the edge of the course, and looked as if he might fly out of his boots during his quick shifts in direction.

As he crossed the finish line, Mr. Miller looked at the timing board that put him in first place by three one-hundredths of a second, allowed a Cheshire-cat grin and beat his chest.

Only Aksel Lund Svindal, skiing a masterful run that balanced aggressiveness and control, topped Mr. Miller.

Mr. Miller said the team's success is due to a new commitment to skiing on the edge. He said he quit in 2007 because he thought the team was too timid.

"I didn't think this was the kind of skiing we should be doing," Mr Miller said. "I didn't think people were taking the risk or skiing with the heart that skiing needs. That's why I didn't want to be a part of it."

Now, Mr. Miller said, "the inspiration level is climbing. They see teammates on the podium and they want that, too. It's not necessarily the result, but they want to be smiling, they want to ski inspired. You're seeing a result you haven't seen from the U.S. in a long time, or ever."

Sasha Rearick, the head coach of the U.S. ski team, said that despite the victory and the weak showing of the Swiss and Austrians, those teams would be back. "The Austrians are a strong team," he said. "They didn't bring their best skiing today by any means."

The U.S. performance comes as a surprise in part because America has never won the medal count at a Winter Olympics Games. The closest it came was Salt Lake City, where it took second in total medals (behind Germany) and third in the gold-medal count (behind Germany and Norway).

But the performance is also a surprise because USOC officials had adamantly refused to speculate about America's performance in Vancouver. While Canadian officials boasted of their $120 million own-the-podium program and predicted a total medal count of 35, officials of the USOC remained silent. A year before the Games, the USOC targeted $16 million mainly toward events where the U.S. had the best chances for medals rather than equally across the board, said Alan Ashley, chief of sport performance for the USOC.

"We'll let the chips fall where they fall," Mr. Ashley said in an interview ahead of the 2010 Games. Pressed to make a medal-count prediction, he said, "I think we have the potential to have a very experienced team that will go there with great performances."

The global recession also hurt U.S. Olympians more than those from countries where athletes rely almost entirely on government funding. When the U.S. speedskating team lost a primary sponsor to the recession, comedian Stephen Colbert managed to get his name on their uniforms while spending barely a dime of his own. In an episode that gave the U.S. Olympic team a bargain-basement image, Colbert Nation gained major-sponsor status on the roughly $350,000 that his viewers kicked in.

Yet this week, the joke has been on the competition. U.S. athletes have performed well even in events like Nordic combined, in which America traditionally has stunk. Johnny Spillane was a ski length away from the gold in Nordic combined when he settled for the silver, the first-ever medal for the U.S. in the sport.

But most encouraging is that America's dominance has been widespread. In figure skating Evan Lysacek put the hammer to Russia's defending gold medalist, Evgeni Plushenko. Lindsey Vonn and Julia Mancuso made a mockery of the women's downhill, as Ms. Vonn finished an absurd 1.46 seconds ahead of the bronze medalist Elisabeth Görgl.

Not everyone is convinced that the success will last indefinitely. Wolfgang Maier, chief of the German ski team, said everything has come together for the Americans in a way that might be hard to duplicate in the future.

"They are almost as good as the Austrians once were," Mr. Maier said. "But you have generational talents in Vonn and Miller, and Miller is already getting old. It might not last."

Tim Cafe, a New Zealand skiier who spends five months a year in Austria training, said it's too early to write off the Austrians. "They'll be back for sure, but for the Americans to step in like this and fill that role, it shows they're doing something right."

Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com, Ian Johnson at ian.johnson@wsj.com and Kevin Helliker at kevin.helliker@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications:

The U.S. had the highest medal count at the 1932 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. This article about America's dominance at the Vancouver Games incorrectly said that the U.S. had never won the medal count at a Winter Olympics.
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