Canada captain Sidney Crosby proved his mettle yet again by snapping a tournament-long scoring drought that gave his team some much-needed breathing room in a gold-medal clinching win on the last day of the Sochi Games.
Crosby, who scored the gold-medal winning overtime goal at the 2010 Vancouver Games, finally broke his scoreless streak late in the second period to give Canada a 2-0 lead over Sweden in a game they went on to win 3-0.
“It’s great. The chances were there all tournament long and you just have to trust that eventually it will go in,” Crosby told reporters. “Knowing that it’s 1-0 and you have a big chance like that, you want to put it in.”
Crosby’s goal followed a turnover outside the Canadian end of the ice. He pulled away from the Swedish defenders before breaking in alone and beating goalie Henrik Lundqvist with a nifty move to the backhand.
While the goal was not nearly as dramatic as the one he scored in Vancouver, it was enough to sap the wind out of Swedish sails and send Canada into the final period with a relatively comfortable lead.
The goal followed the first of the tournament for Jonathan Toews, who opened the scoring when he re-directed a Jeff Carter pass through Lundqvist’s legs 13 minutes into the game.
“You knew those guys weren’t going to be able to be held off the entire tournament,” said Canadian defenseman Duncan Keith. “That’s what great players do, they try to elevate their game. We were playing for the gold medal.”
Despite not having a goal going into the gold medal game, Crosby never panicked and was a picture of calm with the media all along, saying he was getting chances and eventually things would turn his way.
For Crosby, considered by many to be the world’s greatest player, staying true to his approach proved a success as he helped Canada become the first country to successfully defend their ice hockey gold medal since the Soviet Union triumphed at the 1984 and 1988 Games.
“You always want to score. The chances were there. There wasn’t much I wanted to change. I felt like the line as a whole was generating them, the team was generating chances,” Crosby told reporters.
“You just have to trust that the puck is going to go in eventually, and luckily today it did.”
Banned substance
Sweden's Nicklas Backstrom missed the final at the Sochi Winter Games after testing positive for a banned substance.
“I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide,” assistant captain Backstrom told reporters. “It was shocking to me and at the same time I’m here right now and I have to deal it. I haven’t done anything differently in the past seven years and I’ve been playing internationally all that time.
“I was watching the game at the village. I was ready to play probably the biggest game of my career then two and a half hours before the game I get pulled aside. I was tested after the quarter-final against Slovakia.”
Team doctor Bjoern Waldeback said the substance he tested positive for was pseudoephedrine, a stimulant, contained in a pill had been taking for many years. “It’s a permitted drug. We told them he had one pill per day as he has for past seven years,” Waldeback said.
Elsewhere Russian Alexander Zubkov secured a golden finale for the Sochi Games hosts by adding the Olympic four-man bobsleigh crown to his two-man title.
Zubkov, watched by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, held on to his slim overnight lead to take gold by nine hundredths of a second ahead of Latvia’s Oskars Melbardis. American Steve Holcomb, the 2010 champion, won bronze, three hundredths of a second ahead of Russian Alexander Kasjanov in the RUS-2 sled. Holcomb also secured bronze in the two-man.
“We did the impossible,” Zubkov said. “We proved that we are the best in the two-man bobsleigh and the four-man bobsleigh.”
His double success helped Russia top the medals table with 13 golds. “The country believed in us,” he said. “But nobody believed that Russia would even be in the top three in total medals but we have won.”
