Washington Capitals player Alex "Ovechloss" Ovechkin apologized for Russia's poor performance at the Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia. In front of their home crowd, Russia found a way not to medal. Russian hockey fans were bitterly disappointed and that's an understatement.
Russian hockey fans should have seen this coming. Anyone who's followed the biggest choke artist in sports knows that Alex can put up great numbers in the regular season but unlike the best hockey player in the world, Sidney Crosby, the guy under performs when it counts.
Sidney Crosby has won a Stanley Cup and two gold medals at the Olympics. Alex Ovechkin has won...absolutely nothing (at the Olympics and NHL). It put a huge smile on my face to see the Russians end up without a medal in the Men's Ice Hockey Tournament.
I'm not an Ovechkin fan. Washington Capitals fans have witnessed their team coming up on the short end of the stick in the playoffs. It's baffling that Ovechkin can be one of the best players in the NHL during the regular season but can't find a way to take his team deep into the playoffs.
Alex Ovechkin's Capitals haven't even made it to a Stanley Cup, so it wasn't a huge surprise that Russia had a terrible tournament in Sochi.
Russian sports fans would have been happy if the only medal at the Olympics would have been a gold medal in ice hockey. They could have lived with that. Hockey was the premiere event for the country in Sochi. It would have been unimaginable at the start of the Winter Olympics that the Russians wouldn't win a medal.
To say that Ovechkin and his team were a failure would be an understatement but in reality it shouldn't have been unexpected. Ovechkin will have another crack at winning a gold medal in 2018 if the NHL allows their players to participate in the games.
I'm sure the result for Ovechkin will be the same. While it's nice that Alex apologized for his team's poor performance, I'm sure Russian hockey fans don't really care. They wanted a gold medal and they had to settle for watching the greatest hockey team in the world (Canada) win it all on their ice.
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