Still, Ligety’s fifth place was the only top 10 result by an American man here. That’s a long way from the eight medals the Olympic men’s team won at the 2010 Vancouver Games.

“We don’t have all cylinders firing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn it around in a two- to four-year cycle,” said Tiger Shaw, the chief executive of U.S. Ski and Snowboard, the umbrella group overseeing the ski team. “We have a lot of young talent. I think you need to look at potential, and when I look at the potential, I’m not worried.”

It is true that there were flashes of an improved future for the American men. Ryan Cochran-Siegle, who is the son of the 1972 American Olympic gold medalist Barbara Cochran, had the third fastest time in the field in the second run of the giant slalom. Cochran-Siegle was participating in his first Olympics, and finished 11th, but even one blistering run on a big stage can propel a budding career. Cochran-Siegle was also 14th in the super-G.

Bryce Bennett, another Olympic rookie and an intriguing prospect because he is 6 feet 7 inches, was 16th in the downhill and 17th in the Alpine combined. Bennett and Cochran-Siegle are each 25 years old.

Buried for now deep on the United States ski team’s roster are other American men with impressive junior racing pedigrees who were simply too untested on the World Cup level to qualify for the trip to Pyeongchang. Included in that group is River Radamus, the son of two high-level, Colorado-based, ski racing coaches. Radamus, 19, has been near the top of the overall standings on what amounts to ski racing’s minor league circuit for most of this winter. In 2017, at the Youth Olympic Games, Radamus won three races, which was unprecedented at the event.

Two years older than Radamus is his teammate Sam Morse, who won the downhill at the junior world championships last year (Merryweather won the women’s downhill).