BEIJING — Andrea Braendli, a Swiss goaltender, had no delusions of an Olympic gold medal.
“If we play for a gold medal,” she said ahead of the Beijing Games, “it’s going to be a miracle on ice.”
Her assessment was as cleareyed as any about the women’s hockey tournament. For all of the talk about, and hope for, parity in women’s hockey, the tournament will conclude like all but one other at an Olympics: with Canada and the United States dueling for gold, and two others — this time, Finland and Switzerland — seeking bronze.
Measured by the average victory margins of the Americans and Canadians when they played any team besides one another, the tournament is the most lopsided at a Games since 2010, when there was open talk over whether to keep women’s hockey as an Olympic sport.