Austria wins team Nordic combined; US has silver

WHISTLER, British Columbia (AP) For the second straight race, the American Nordic combined team had a gold medal in its grasp only to watch it slip away on the stadium straightaway at Whistler Olympic Park.

Ten days after Johnny Spillane was unable to hold off Jason Lamy Chappuis of France in the normal hill 10-kilometer race, Billy Demong was done in by skis too slow for snowfall and watched Mario Stecher zoom past to give Austria the victory in the 4x5-kilometer team relay Tuesday.

The Americans were satisfied with silver, however.

"To be second is fine with us because the only reason you can be disappointed with second is if you didn't give your all," Spillane said. "And every single one of us gave 100 percent effort today."

Before these games, the Americans hadn't reached the podium in 86 years in Nordic combined - a ski jump followed by a brutal race of speed around a cross-country track.

"To put yourself in a position to win a gold, to win a medal anyway, that's what you come to the Olympics for," U.S. coach Dave Jarrett said. "So, we have no regrets."

Coming into Canada, the only medals won by the Americans in Nordic sports - biathlon, ski jumping, Nordic combined and cross-country skiing - were a silver by cross-country skier Bill Koch in 1976 and a bronze by ski jumper Anders Haugen in 1924 - and even he had to wait 50 years to receive it after a historian discovered a scoring error that had put him in fourth place.

But the Americans were emboldened by their dominance of the world championships last year, when they won three titles.

"We came here to be one of the best in the world and two events, two medals," said Todd Lodwick, the only five-time Olympic U.S. skier, who came out of retirement for these moments.

"Of course, after the jumping we thought we had a chance at gold - and we did. We pushed the pace, and we kept it high and kept everybody else away. All my teammates and myself left everything out there."

Now, the U.S. has silver medals in each of the two Nordic combined events held so far, and Spillane, Demong and Todd Lodwick are all threats to win Thursday's finale, another 10K race that will follow a jump off the large hill.

Stecher and his teammates, Felix Gottwald, David Kreiner and Bernhard Gruber, defended Austria's title from the Turin Games with a winning time of 49 minutes, 31.6 seconds, 5.2 seconds ahead of the U.S. Germany won bronze, finishing 19.5 seconds back.

"I had a little bit more speed," Stecher said, "and the skis were a little bit better, too."

Demong erased a 14.1-second deficit he inherited from Spillane on the final exchange, but it took a lot out of him and he knew he didn't have the right skis to win unless he could shake Stecher on the final uphill.

He couldn't.

"At the beginning of the second lap I realized I had the better skis," said Stecher, who stayed in Demong's slipstream until the last downhill into the stadium, when he easily overtook him.

"I picked my skis based on the assumption that it was not going to snow," Demong said.

Indeed, the forecast called for flurries after the race, not during.

"It looked like it was going to snow, but I made a decision to go with one of my best pairs, the pair I raced on the other day. That would have been better had it not snowed. There's some linear structure in the ski that when it does snow, it kind of fills up a little bit with that snow. So, that was my decision.

"They were good enough. I had the fastest time in the last leg and finished in the medals. But that was my bad over picking one say that was a little better that didn't have the linear structure in it."

Demong said he had his pick of three pairs of skis Tuesday, which he had narrowed down from 40 over the last week.

They were the same ones he used 10 days earlier when he shaved a minute off his deficit and finished sixth in the normal hill 10K after starting off in 24th.

Brett Camerota started things off, giving the Americans a 2.6-second lead over Finland on the exchange with Austria just 3.7 seconds behind. Lodwick went nest and gave Spillane a lead of .3 seconds over Gottwald for the third leg.

Gottwald broke away from Spillane to give Stecher a big cushion on the anchor leg. That meant Demong had to expend energy catching up, and on slow skis that taxed him too much.

"I picked them an hour before the race," Demong said. "And they had better glide before it started snowing."

Still, he and his teammates held their heads high as they received their silver medals.

"We all did our jobs," Camerota said. "We jumped far and skied fast."

And least until the very end they did.

Copyright 2012 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited.