After four years of waiting, the Winter Olympics has finally arrived. Torino, Italy is the home of the Olympics for February 10-26th.

The Winter Olympics began Friday February 10th with the Opening Ceremonies. The theme to these Olympics is “Passion Lives Here” and it showed in the ceremony. During the first two days of competition, The United States was represented very well. The U.S. Women’s Hockey Team beat Switzerland 6-0. Then the U.S. beat Germany 5-0 in their second game. It looks like the United States will head to the medal round by outscoring their opponents 11-0.

In speed skating, the Americans were able to take home two gold medals. Joey Cheek won the 500 meters and Chad Hedrick won the 5,000 meters. Chad Hedrick is trying to tie Eric Hieden’s Olympic Record with five gold medals in one Olympics. Chad Hedrick has four more events left to compete in.

The winning streak continued in men’s and women’s half pipe. As the final started on Sunday, there were four Americans poised and ready to make another sweep. But it wasn’t meant to be; Shaun White took Gold, Danny Kass won the silver and Markku Koski of Finland ended the second American sweep of Men’s Half Pipe.

Then the women took to the half pipe. They dominated the first round and going into the finals the Americans held on to the first three spots. As the finals ended, Americans Hannah Teter and Gretchen Beiler took gold and silver. After snowboarding ended Americans took home two gold’s and two silvers.

The Twentieth Olympics have not treated the Americans to kindly either. On the first day of competition, Michelle Kwan dropped out of the Women’s Figure Skating with out even competing. Then on the second day, Apolo Anton Ohno didn’t even make it to the finals of the Men’s 500 meter short track final. Finally, Americans Bode Miller and Daron Rahlves didn’t place in the Men’s Downhill competition.

More mayhem ensued on Monday, when too Americans crashed in their respective sports. Lindsey Kildow crashed during her practice run on Tuesday suffering a hip and pelvic contusion. She will not compete in the women’s downhill this Olympics. Samantha Retrosi crashed into the wall during her second run in the Luge. She came around the turn, lost control and flipped over. She suffered a concussion and a cut under the chin.

After the first week of competition, The American team did not live up to their expectations. Luckily, the Americans have one more week of competition to make up for their mistakes. The people to watch for in the second week of competition are Apolo Anton Ohno in short track, Chad Hedrick who will try to win four more golds in Speed Skating, the US women’s Hockey team, the US men’s hockey team, Bode Miller in the Giant slalom, and the US bobsled team. Hopefully America can come out of their shell and dominate the rest of the Torino Olympics.