Sulking at silver: Canadian hockey player refused to wear medal
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea (KXAN) – It’s hard to face silver when your team was one point away from gold, but one Canadian hockey team defense player went further than merely feeling glum. She initially refused to even wear the second-place medal.
The U.S. women’s hockey team edged out Canada 3-2 during a tiebreaker shootout Thursday – and that’s only after battling out their intense rivalry for 60 minutes of regulation play and 20 of sudden-death overtime.
Both teams lined up to shake hands afterward, but during the medal ceremony, Canada’s #3 Jocelyn Larocque removed her medal within seconds of it being placed around her neck.
Larocque addressed the reason she refused to wear it with reporters.
“Just hard,” Larocque said. “We were going for gold.”
Although she didn’t wear it during the ceremony or in interviews afterward, Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported an official from the Olympic Ice Hockey Federation talked to her and explained she can’t “legally” refuse to wear the medal.
This was the U.S. women’s first gold since 1998. During the last Winter Olympics in Sochi, it was the reverse situation, in which Canada edged out the U.S. for gold. Larocque was on that winning team, so she does at least have a gold medal from those games in her cabinet.