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The Olympics are not just about America, never have been, never will be (should be), but considering that we’re the one making a mess of things in the international order, I admired so many American athletes in Milan and in Cortina d’Ampezzo for the 2026 Winter Olympics wrestling with those mixed emotions, like curler Rich Ruohonen and freestyle skier Hunter Hess. The latter stoked the ire of our know nothing President who in his third-grade syntax deemed Hess a real loser and hard to root for, contradicting his own Vice President’s self-congratulatory banalities about rooting for all Americans despite political affiliation. Hess’s teammate Chloe Kim might be right that we should lead with love and compassion, but occasionally it’s refreshing to hear the candor of someone like Greenland biathlete Ukaleq Slettemark who said of the American President: “I hate him.” Thankfully, Hess did not require a humanitarian visa a la Krystsina Tsimanouskaya at the 2021 Summer Olympics after she criticized her native Belarus, though the President would undoubtedly prefer America to be a place that imprisoned people for being mean to him. It’s an extension of his T*ump brand totalitarianism, described by Thomas Friedman as a Me First policy, an inescapable thirst to infect every aspect of everyone’s daily life, as The Onion once put it. He’s a joy-taker, in other words, that woman in the bar recast as the chief executive of the federal government. And you know what, after waiting 20 years for an Italian Winter Olympic do-over, I decided that I would not let him take my joy.
Joy is virtually inseparable from wonder and wonder is what Dana Milbank of The Washington Post argued in December we all need more of in our lives. His search for wonder was framed through the visual arts and, more specifically, through a program at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. titled Finding Awe. I find plenty of awe in the visual arts – this is chiefly a movie blog, after all – but upon experiencing my first Olympics 38 years ago this month, I innately recognized the quadrennial sporting spectacle as a fount for wonder. And though their all-encompassing nature might seem at odds with slowing down, which Milbank wrote was a crucial ingredient in finding awe, well, I have always viewed those two weeks when the Olympic torch is lit as a chance to slow down, to disengage from the larger world and to center myself, like my favorite snowboarder Maddie Mastro taking a few extra breaths before her next descent into the halfpipe.
I have developed true fondness for snowboarding, not least because its competitors seem to seek wonder as much as medals, and though most of the sport’s terminology eludes me, I don’t really need to understand it to know when it fires my neurons. Indeed, it goes so to show how a “lack of knowledge can be helpful, as National Gallery of Art Director Kaywin Feldman told Milbank. “That moment of ‘oh my goodness’ is part of wonder.” The Norwegian cross-country skier Johannes Klæbo so empathetically broke away from the pack on the last uphill climb in the men’s cross-country sprint in Cortina that the skiers behind him looked like little kids trying to keep up with dad made me say oh my goodness – well, “oh my God.” In his last race, the revered 50k, Klæbo and his two fellow Norwegians Martin Loewstroem Nyenget and Emil Iversen surged to the lead and spent most of the race skiing by themselves. Milbank wrote about visual art opening portals to our past, and in these images, I felt connected to mine through a painting on our living room wall of three cross-country skiers alone amid the trees, which I always imagined as my dad, my grandpa, and my dad’s best friend. I was transported, watching these three Norsemen ski, even if I knew the idyll belied the coming Klæbo storm. I did not feel tension so much as anticipation, waiting for him to make his move, which he finally did on the same hill as in the men’s sprint, just this time after 2 hours of skiing. In earning victory, he won his sixth gold medal, the most of any one person at any single Winter Olympics ever, though more than that, I will always remember three Norwegians in the middle of an Olympic race looking like they were out for a ski through the woods.
When I was an impatient kid, I preferred the sprints in long track speed skating, but over time, I have come to love the longer distances so much more and how the skaters’ cool, composed faces at the start gradually become unmasked with each lap of the oval. In the women’s 5,000m, though, the mask of Italy’s Francesca Lollobrigida did not just come down, no, the burden of the last few laps became so palpable in her face and in her form that American commentator Joey Cheek spent the last few laps insisting she could not possibly hold her lead, until she did. The whole thing reminded me of the reaction of Switzerland’s Marianne Fatton in the wake of becoming the first woman to win gold in the inaugural ski mountaineering competition: she looked into the camera, smiled, and shrugged, wonder rendered as the inexplicable.
As much as the first Summer Olympics were made in the image of Athens, the first Winter Olympics were made in the image of the Alps, and though the view from on the ground rather than from my couch suggests the experience in Cortina was fraught, the pollyannish parts of my heart yearn for the IOC to work out a way for more such places to host without being ridden roughshod over because these Games benefitted from an infusion of alpine wonder missing from so many recent entries. That wonder was exemplified in the women’s giant slalom, one that for a time suggested my favorite ski race ever, with Norway’s Thea Louise Stjernesund and Sweden’s Sara Hector tied for first, their arms around one another in the leader’s box as if they were just trying to hang on. They needn’t have worried, however, because Italy’s Federica Brignone made the host country proud by making like the tiger on her helmet and roaring to victory by six-tenths of a second in a sport where six-tenths of a second is like an epoch. It was so resounding that the silver medalists did their finest Wayne and Garth – “We’re not worthy!” – by literally and amusingly bowing to Brignone before the jubilant trio had the time of their lives on the medal stand. Everybody wins!
If wonder is inextricable from joy, well, in a competitive arena like the Olympics, so, too, is it inextricable from agony. When American Lindsey Vonn ruptured her ACL just before Milano Cortina, she chose to compete in the downhill race anyway, and then crashed 13 seconds in, breaking her leg and getting airlifted off the mountain. If some thought it reckless, or vainglorious, I was awestruck. I thought she infused the jejune phrase the glory of sport, the one in the Olympic creed, with more blood, muscle, and bone than just about anyone. Vivre sa vie. For most of the women’s gold medal hockey game, I did not feel joy or agony, just tension, so much so that I kept involuntarily giggling. Canada led most of the way 1-0, trying to hold off theretofore ultra-dominant Team USA until their captain Hilary Knight read the stage direction in the screenplay and tied it with a couple minutes left, setting the stage for teammate Megan Keller to win the game in sudden death on a dipsy do goal that blew even this hockey agnostic’s mind. And though I will remember Team USA singing our national anthem on the podium, I will also remember Team Canada’s Daryl Watts looking at the stuffed mascot she was handed along with her silver medal with incredulous agony, like she wanted to hurl that stoat all the way to Switzerland. Respect.
The color of your medal is relative though. Curling in Milan Cortina became mired in minor controversy, but you will have to read it about that elsewhere; I just want to talk about America’s all-Duluth, Minnesota mixed doubles curling team of Cory Thiesse (pronounced: Tee-see) and Korey Dropkin, my favorite team since the 2022 Chicago Sky, and only the third American curling team ever to win a medal. (Thiesse became the first American woman to win a medal in curling.) In advancing to the medal round, they found themselves tied with defending champ Italy late in the semi-final with a chance to play conservatively for one point or aim higher and try to score two. The Duluthians opted for a Vegas mentality, played for two, got it, and that proved the difference in a 9-8 win. In the gold medal match, they found themselves in a similar situation, went big, and poetically, went bust. My oh my goodness became an uff-da. Afterwards, Dropkin remarked, “Obviously would have loved to come home with a gold medal, but Sweden earned that.” The power of the negative in that statement was so purely How to Talk Minnesotan that it brought a tear to my eye. And though some knuckleheads in this country think it’s all about winners and losers, that’s what makes the Olympics so wonderful – the silver lining is baked right in there.
What I have come to love so much about biathlon is how its design, cross-country skiing combined with rifle shooting that yields a penalty lap for each missed shot, can allow for races to be totally upended right in the middle of themselves. That’s what happened in the women’s 12.5km mass start when at the last shooting target, almost everyone who was anyone started missing shots left and right, and suddenly Czechia’s Tereza Voborníková, who had never finished on the podium on the Biathlon World Cup circuit, never mind at the Olympics, so unheralded the NBC announcers confessed they had not mentioned or thought about her once during the race, found herself in the lead with a couple kilometers to ski. And that is how I found myself in the middle of the truest Olympic experience: fervently rooting for a Czech I had never heard of 17 seconds earlier. Alas, she could not hang on for gold or silver, passed by France’s Oceane Michelon and Julia Simon, earning bronze instead. And though biathletes typically splay exhausted on the ground upon crossing the finish line, Voborníková looked less exhausted than still high on wonderment. “It was incredible to lead the race for a while,” she said afterwards. “This bronze medal means everything to me. It definitely tastes like gold.” I submit to you, no one went home from Cortina happier than Tereza Voborníková. Well, on second thought, there was one person that might have gone home happier.
20-year-old U.S. Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu said that in coming to Milan, she did not need a medal, and though that sounds like off the rack athlete-speak, the thing was, to see her skate in the long program, which she entered in third place, was to believe it. I have been watching figure skaters crack under pressure all my life. I watched the self-dubbed quad god Ilia Malinin crack one week earlier. Liu, however, did not skate like someone overcoming pressure or ignoring it; she skated like someone who was completely at peace; she skated her competitive program the way you typically see people skate their exhibition programs in the Olympic-ending gala. In that way of overbearing youth sports, Liu had essentially already lived a whole life, retiring from the sport at the ripe old age of 16 because she had tired of it only to eventually return after uncovering a true sense of self. Coaches are always talking about breaking down athletes to build them back up, but in stepping away, Liu broke herself down to build herself back up as the person she wanted to be. And so, she became the first person with a frenulum piercing to win a gold medal (editor: plz fact check) and quite possibly the first gold medalist with a healthy work/life balance. When she left the ice after her triumphant long program, the one that would ultimately lift her from third to first, and broke the fourth wall by looking right into the camera, she effused, if you will permit me to honor the spirit of the f-bomb she dropped on the whole world, nothing less than pure fucking joy.
Olympic greatness in the genuine Faster Higher Stronger sense is not merely measuring up to your own sense of excellence, but reorienting what is possible for your sport. Ever since I first watched a figure skating competition, the fabled Battle of the Carmens in Calgary, I understood on some level that the sport was about toil, tears, surrender coded as sacrifice, and conceding your own identity to your coach and choreographer. Alysia Liu came along and reoriented the sport as one of joyful, mindful self-expression. Imagine if the whole sports world had the courage to follow her lead.
