Team USA wasn’t expected to get many medals Thursday. But the events it was in contention for were important ones. The U.S. came into Thursday still third in overall medals, still trailing Norway and Italy.

Men's ice hockey, women's curling and speed skating highlight Team USA''s chances to medal in Day 14 of the Milan Cortina Games.

A national Deseret News-Hinckley Institute poll showed a slightly smaller U.S. audience for the Winter Games in Italy. That poll, also conducted by Morning Consult but from Feb. 10-13, found 60% of Americans are either watching the Olympics or planning to, and 32% skipping the event.

Russian ski mountaineer Nikita Filippov became the first individual neutral athlete (AIN) of these Winter Games to win a medal on Thursday, when he secured silver in the first-ever "SkiMo" men’s sprint event at an Olympics.

Wednesday marked the 13 th consecutive day that NBCU’s Milan Cortina Winter Olympic audience has topped 20 million viewers, according to official Nielsen Big Data + Panel viewership and preliminary data from Nielsen, and digital data from Adobe Analytics.

At 4-2, Team USA is in a three-way tie with Switzerland and Korea for second in the round-robin standings. Sweden is in front with a 6-0 record. The top four teams qualify for the semifinals. The U.S. has two more matches in the round-robin session, facing Denmark on Tuesday and Great Britain on Wednesday.

Four years after she stepped away from her sport saying she had lost her love for it, American Alysa Liu skated on Thursday night as though she had flicked the light back on in a long-darkened disco,

A sprawling world-class city and a small mountain village with a rich Olympic history, separated by about five or six hours, collaborate and play host to a truly dual-host Winter Games. Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo pulled it off.

Snow does not fall the way it once did. In northern Italy’s alpine valleys, winter still draws skiers to Bormio and cross-country athletes to Val di Fiemme.