Why USA will win Sochi Olympics medal count. (It's not what you think.)

Team USA is favored to top the Sochi Olympics medal count in large part because America has innovated a unique Olympic ecosystem that thrives without a penny of federal money.

By Mark Sappenfield, Staff writer / February 7, 2014

The formal press conference for the US short track speedskating team has ended, and Jordan Malone is sitting to the side of a stage, completely at ease, chatting with the journalists who have huddled around him like freezing men before a fire.

At the moment, he's talking about how his aunt Dina has to buy his blades ($500 a set), because he frankly doesn't have that much money to spare. It is the archetypal tale of the American Olympian: passionate, supremely talented, and nearly broke.

Yet the scene unfolding in Dostoyevsky Hall on the Tuesday before the Sochi Olympics opened echoes in ways deeper than the obvious. What Malone says, how he is acting, and the fact that he is even here – paraded before the media when he would almost certainly rather be doing anything else – speaks to what has made the United States unique in the global Olympic movement.

Arguably no other nation's Olympic team is so intimately intertwined with the people of the nation it represents, because no other Olympic team is so dependent upon those people for its success. 

Among top Olympic nations, the United States is alone in providing no government funding. This, as Malone will tell you, can create its challenges. Malone's competitors from South Korea probably don't need their aunts to buy their blades.

Yet beneath the very real narrative of hardship this creates among many American Olympic athletes is an equally profound narrative of success. The United States is expected to top the overall medal table in Sochi, and, ironically, the very lack of government funding could in some ways be cited as a driving cause.

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Without government largess upon which to depend, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) has been forced to run itself like a business, accounting for every dollar and constantly reanalyzing itself to make sure those dollars are spent in the most effective way.

In striving to act like an accountable business, the USOC has excelled at selling itself to sponsors, marketing its team, and establishing spending mechanisms that target the most successful and promising athletes.

And in struggling to make a living playing the sports they love, American athletes have received a clear (if at times brutal) message: The winners get the money, and with no golden parachute of government-funded stipends to fall back on, success becomes a sort of Olympic Darwinism – a natural selection of the best team the nation can produce.

Here in Dostoyevsky Hall, that entire process culminates in a slight, soft-spoken short track skater who had to claw his way back from injury and the related time away from the sport (and the harsh funding cut that came with it) to make it to Sochi.

Along the way, Malone has had to turn to the Internet to ask strangers for money for rent, food, and skating boots. And now that he's made it here, the USOC has pushed him before a crowd of American journalists to tell his story, because it knows the more Malone and his teammates inspire the American public, the more money will flow to the organization from sponsors and donors.

Malone, after all, has a great story to tell.

Follow Mark Sappenfield @sappenfieldm live in Sochi! http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Olympics/2014/0207/Why-USA-will-win-Sochi-Olympics-medal-count.-It-s-not-what-you-think.-video