Lots of good local Olympians competing this month

As if you didn’t already know how good New England sports were, the Winter Olympics reaffirms it.

Up in New England, we have an obvious advantage in the winter games. Six of the 15 events are ski-related. Plus there’s snowboard, luge, bobsledding, hockey and curling. Those are all cold weather sports, and New England is cold during the winter. We live in a part of the country where it snows on a regular basis (too much).

That said, it should not be all that surprising that 40 of the 243 Americans competing in the Winter Olympics hail from five of the six New England states (yeah, no Rhode Islanders, as you’d expect). That’s pretty good considering New England has about 15 million people, less than five percent of the country’s population but has about one-sixth of its competitors. Honestly surprised it is not more but hey, it’s pretty good.

If Mikaela Shiffrin counts (she spent five years in New Hampshire as a kid), then we have a gold medalist from the region because she's an amazing Alpine Skier.

None of our other active Winter Olympians have won a gold medal, but we have a handful of women’s competitors who have earned silver medals. These include snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis (Torino 2006), freestyle skier Devin Logan (Sochi 2014) and hockey players Kacey Bellamy and Meghan Duggan (Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014).

That’s great. We need as many medals as we can get to show the rest of the world who’s boss.

MassLive has the complete list of New Englanders who are going for gold in South Korea this month.

Also, snowboarding always looks really cool, so here’s a video of Jacobellis from last year performing really well in that sport.

That looks like a sport I’d be terrible at.

You know what’s a great way to show support for our country’s top athletes? We have a wide array of Olympic gear that’s worth checking out.