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I am proud to see that the Dutch athletes have now obtained Gold, Silver and Bronze for one event, and that even twice.
When trying to figure out whether this happened before, I found several occurrences of a country getting all medals for an event during the Summer Olympics. But has this ever happened before in the winter games? And has it ever happened twice in the same games?
At the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, the Netherlands won gold, silver, and bronze in 4 different speed skating events:
Clearly, the Netherlands were a powerhouse in speed skating this year. Out of 36 medals total awarded in men's and women's (long track) speed skating, Dutch skaters took home 23 of them. They won at least one medal in every speed skating event, and won gold in both the men's and women's team pursuit events.
It is not all that unusual for one country to sweep gold, silver, and bronze in a single event. It happens on average perhaps once or twice per Winter Olympics. In addition to the four events listed above at Sochi 2014, the USA swept men's slopestyle skiing, and France swept men's ski cross. No country did it at Vancouver 2010, but it happened twice in Torino 2006, when the Austrians swept the men's slalom medals and the Germans took every medal in the women's singles luge.
It is also not unheard of for one country to sweep two events in a single year. The last time this happened was at Nagano 1998, when Germany took every medal in both women's combined alpine skiing and women's 3000m speed skating.
The Netherlands, however, is the first country to sweep four events in a single Winter Olympics.
I verified what Ben said using a database (http://webscraping.com/data/default/database/54/winter-olympic-medal-count and then cross-referencing the events at http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/winter/) and his recent answers are correct.
Before the Dutch multisweep listed, the last multisweeps by one country were:
Germany in 84 (speed skating & luge)
USSR in 64 (skiing and speed skating)
Norway in 32 (nordic and ski jumping)
Norway in 28 (nordic and cross country ski)
Norway in 24 (nordic and cross country... same 3 guys in both)
So it dates back to at least 1932 for two sweep by one country in related sports , and I'm not sure even those are truly considered the same discipline. So while sweeps and even double sweeps happen... this is the most dominating a team has been at a certain skill in at least the modern era.
There is a full overview of all the sweeps in the Winter Olympics at this site: http://www.bsports.com/iotd/sochi-winter-olympics-sweeping-history. However, it hasn't updated (yet) for the latest 2 sweeps of The Netherlands. Based on this, for The Winter Olympics.
Total sweeps: 41
2 sweeps by 1 country: 3 Norway, 1 West Germany, 1 Sovjet Union, 1 Germany
3 sweeps by 1 country: none
4 sweeps by 1 country: 1 The Netherlands (of which one Sweep Plus, having placed 1, 2, 3 and 4)
Unfortunately, I've not found any record of Sweep Pluses, however at least in Speed Skating, it has never happened before.
It is nice to mention that the Dutch speed skaters also had a "single sweep" before, in Nagano 1998, 10K men, with gold for Gianni Romme, Silver for Bob De Jong, and bronze for Rintje Ritsma. De Jong may well take his fourth 10K medal this Olympics, 16(!) years after his first. In a sense he also has a sweep, since his previous three 10K medals are gold (2006), silver (1998) and bronze (2010).
See this link. Four times at winter only done by Netherlands. Maximum of other country is 2. http://olympstats.com/2014/02/13/medal-sweeps-at-the-winter-olympics/
