By Beau Dure /The Guardian

 
Can we schedule another Olympics this year?  That’s the question a lot of US women in winter sports have to be asking now. Like the 60 and 70F weather sweeping the north-east in December, American women in skiing and sliding sports - household names and unknown youngsters - are having an atypical winter.
Start with Lindsey Vonn. Her resumé - four World Cup titles in five years from 2008 to 2012 - is unmatched. But in recent years, she has been better known for her relationship with Tiger Woods and an unfortunate string of injuries. She had a horrible crash in the 2013 World Championships, tearing two ligaments in her right knee and breaking a bone, then re-injured the knee late in 2013 and missed the 2014 Olympics.
She had a solid 2014-15 World Cup season, winning eight events and taking the season downhill and super-G globes, but lingering knee problems contributed to a disappointing World Championship on home snow in Vail - a bronze in the super-G was consolation for an otherwise difficult event. This year, she suffered a small fracture in her left ankle in August and skipped the season opener in October.
We see plenty of athletes come back from all this to be competitive after age 30. We do not usually see them do things they weren’t doing before all the injuries. That’s what Vonn has done.
She swept the speed races at Lake Louise - two downhills and a super-G - matching her accomplishments at the Alberta venue from 2011 and 2012. Then she went to Are, Sweden, and won her first giant slalom since 2013 - her first giant slalom since her knee was torn apart.
Four straight wins, pushing her career total to 71. Add in two slalom wins for prodigy Mikaela Shiffrin, and that’s six straight wins for US women.
Vonn’s competition is diminished this year, with previous World Cup champions Anna Fenninger and Tina Maze out. Shiffrin has also suffered an injury that may derail her chances of challenging for the overall title. But winning four races in a row, not all of them in her favored disciplines, is a monumental feat.
Meanwhile, US women are tearing up the sliding tracks, not just in their usual strong suit of bobsled but also in luge, where the podium is usually full of German names.
Erin Hamlin has had a couple of breakthroughs in her career - world champion in 2009, bronze medalist in the 2014 Olympics - but had a typical World Cup season last year, finishing fifth behind four German sliders. This year, most of those German sliders and other top competitors are still around, but Hamlin has climbed up to second place in the World Cup standings after four races.
First place? Summer Britcher, a 21-year-old from Baltimore.
Hamlin, Emily Sweeney and Britcher swept the podium in Lake Placid. In Park City, Britcher and Hamlin went 1-2 in two races, building up a lead in the standings ahead of Germany’s Dajana Eitberger and Natalie Geisenberger. Sweeney is fifth. (It’s a good year for USA Luge in general - Chris Mazdzer has two wins and the World Cup lead, with Tucker West standing fifth after a 1-2 finish with Mazdzer in Lake Placid.)
But the champions of 1-2 US finishes are still on speedskating ovals, where Heather Richardson-Bergsma and Brittany Bowe have taken the top two places in seven of the eight 1,000m and 1,500m races this season.  The only variant was in Salt Lake City, where Richardson-Bergsma no longer trains and finished third behind Bowe and China’s Zhang Hong.
The speedy US women are also second (Richardson-Bergsma) and fourth (Bowe) at 500m.
Back on the sliding tracks, the USA also had a 1-2 finish in women’s bobsled December 5 in Winterberg, Germany, but Elana Meyers Taylor had to sit out the next race due to lingering concussion issues. Jamie Greubel Poser, who won in Winterberg, is a close second in the World Cup standings behind Canada’s Kaillie Humphries.
It’s not all great news for US winter women. Americans aren’t contending in former strongholds skeleton, short-track skating and ski jumping, with former ski jumping world champion Sarah Hendrickson out for the season with a knee injury. The cross-country ski team is missing pregnant sprint star Kikkan Randall, though they notched a rare third-place relay finish in Lillehammer. Figure skaters Ashley Wagner and Gracie Gold had some promising Grand Prix performances but missed the podium in the Grand Prix Final.
But a few more US women have wins in the young World Cup seasons - Mikaela Matthews (dual moguls), Devin Logan (ski halfpipe), Jamie Anderson (snowboard slopestyle). Resilient snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis was second in the season’s first snowboardcross.
So if Russia wants to get a bit more use out of the Olympic venues and do it all again, a few Americans would be thrilled to compete for gold.