Ice hockey: US men suffer shootout defeat to Slovakia at Winter Olympics

The United States’ improbable, unbeaten run through the Olympic men’s ice hockey tournament came to a devastating halt at the quarter-final stage on Wednesday with a 3-2 penalty shootout defeat to Slovakia.

The youngest US men’s Olympic team in decades appeared bound for the semi-finals after coming from behind for a third straight contest to lead 2-1 with under a minute remaining. But Slovakian captain Marek Hrivic scored a game-tying goal with 43.7 seconds left and Peter Cehlarik broke a stalemate in the decisive shootout that followed a scoreless overtime period.

Slovakian goaltender Patrik Rybar, who made 33 saves in the match, was mobbed by his teammates in front of the goal after turning away Andy Miele’s final attempt in the shootout as the US team looked on in stunned silence.

“It’s the medal round and you’re going to get every team’s best,” said Miele, the USA captain who fought through tears while fielding questions in the mixed zone. “They put up a lot of shots and he made a lot of big saves. We didn’t find a way to score more goals. It just comes down to that.”

The Americans arrived in Beijing with the youngest roster in the 12-team tournament, a group including 15 college students and five teenagers hastily assembled after the NHL withdrew from Olympic participation in December due to the spread of the Omicron variant, and a team who didn’t skate together until a few weeks ago.

But the US team upended expectations by winning all three of their preliminary-round games to earn top seeding in the quarter-finals, stirring up the echoes of the ragtag group of fuzzy-faced amateurs who stormed through the Olympic tournament in 1980, upsetting the heavily favoured Soviet Union along the way in the storied Miracle on