Pragelato, Italy – Todd Lodwick is down to one last chance.
The nordic combined skier from Steamboat Springs will retire without an Olympic medal unless he can get it done Tuesday in the final combined event of the Games, the individual sprint. Lodwick finished eighth in the 15K event last Saturday and the U.S. finished seventh in Thursday’s team competition.
The U.S. team of Lodwick, Steamboat’s Johnny Spillane, Bill Demong and Carl Van Loan was eighth – next to last – after the jumping rounds, which were followed by a 4×5-kilometer relay race.
“After the jumping we were going to use this race as preparation for the next competition,” Spillane said. “I mean, we were all going to do our absolute best, but it was really over after the jumping.”
Lodwick paced himself in the cross country race so he will have something left Tuesday.
“I didn’t want to kill myself,” Lodwick said.
Lodwick did call out a teammate, however, criticizing weak link Van Loan of Webster, N.H., who had the worst jumping results of the competition.
“I believed we should have been fighting for fourth or fifth,” Lodwick said. “We’ve got one guy who’s way out of shape and was picked for the team … I trained really hard all year, and to be dragged down by one person, it hurts.”
Van Loan, 25, conceded he’d performed poorly as a jumper.
“It wasn’t going (well) for us on the jump hill, especially me, I struggled out there,” Van Loan said. “In skiing I gave it everything, so I can walk away saying that I laid it all out there in the cross country.”
Assistant coach Dave Jarrett defended the choice of Van Loan over Lodwick’s preference, 21-year-old Brett Camerota of Park City, Utah. Coaches picked Van Loan because the team nearly won a medal at last year’s world championships with him as the fourth-best skier.
“Hindsight is 20-20,” said Jarrett, a former Olympic teammate of Lodwick’s. “We chose to go with someone who has been in a big competition and who has performed in a big competition.”
Lodwick said he believed all along the sprint would be his best chance for a medal, in part because of Pragelato’s relatively high altitude of 5,020-5,314 feet.
“I live at it and train at it,” Lodwick said of altitude. “You have to pace yourself for this course. It’s going to be a grueling, grueling test.”
