IT IS TIME!
FOR THE GREATEST SPORTING EVENT IN THE WORLD!!!
(Not the Super Bowl, although it’s also almost time for that too)
That’s right…….
THE OLYMPICS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LET ME HEAR THOSE TRUMPETS!!!!!!!!
Damn. I had no idea that would hit EVEN HARDER when it’s being played by cool costume trumpet guys. Unreal.
Now that you’re hyped up: The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina get started tomorrow! The opening ceremony is Friday, but a handful of competitions start beforehand. And I’m here to guide you through all of it.
You are currently reading what I think will be the best Olympics newsletter on the planet over the next two weeks. If you’re subscribed, you’re going to get awesome daily writing about the best things that happened the day before in Italy. I’m an Olympics obsessive, but I’ll make it so you don’t need to be a biathlon or curling expert to understand the cool thing that just happened. And then I’ll tell you what’s on deck for the next day.
If you want these newsletters in your inbox every day, click here to subscribe!
Another note: If you DON’T want daily Olympics newsletters in your inbox (rude), but do like my football writing, you can turn individual sports on or off in your Beehiiv settings via ‘Manage Profile’ in the top-right corner. That way, you’ll get next Monday’s Super Bowl newsletter but not next Tuesday’s Olympics newsletter.
Today, you’re getting a primer about what to expect in Milan. Onto the Sports!
– Rodger Sherman
Olympics stories everyone will talk about
⛸🥇 This could be the best Team USA squad in figure skating ever. They’re favorites to win three of the five Olympic figure skating medals, and they might even win four.
Ilia Malinin might be the single most dominant athlete in the entire Winter Olympics. The Quad God has won back-to-back world championships and hasn’t lost at any event in two years. If you’ve ever doubted the athleticism of figure skaters, watch this man do four rotations in mid-air and then do it six more times in the same routine. AND HE DOES BACKFLIPS!
Madison Chock and Evan Bates are back-to-back-to-back world champs in ice dance … AND THEY GOT MARRIED IN 2024!!!!! OMG OMG OMG. It’s like Straight Heated Rivalry! Honestly, the champs being married takes a lot of the fun out of my favorite part of watching figure skating: Pointing at various figure skating pairs and trying to figure out which ones are in love and which skaters deeply long for their partner but are afraid to say anything.
The women’s competition is totally up in the air. Alysa Liu isn’t the favorite, but after she finished second at U.S. Nationals while skating to Lady Gaga … she’s GOING BACK TO THE MACARTHUR PARK FREE SKATE THAT WON HER LAST YEAR’S WORLD CHAMPS WOOOOOO LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! TURNS OUT SHE DOES HAVE THAT RECIPE AGAIN.
And with some of the best skaters in those aforementioned events, Team USA really should run away with the team event. Simply put, no other country is going to have competitive skaters in all four categories. Japan probably has the best chance of beating Team USA, and its ice dance team was not good enough to qualify for the actual ice dance competition, which will cost them a lot of points.
🏒🥅 The hockey is going to kick SO MUCH ass. Both the men’s and women’s competitions could be all-timers.
THE NHL PLAYERS ARE BACK! Actual best-on-best hockey in the Olympics, for the first time since Sochi 2014. The return of the NHL-ers coincides with what might be the best American roster in decades. Team USA hasn’t won gold since — you guessed it — 1980, but they outscored Canada across two meetings in last year’s Four Nations Face-Off. (Yeah, they lost the championship, but I think aggregate is a more meaningful measure of talent when it supports my argument.)
In women’s hockey, you can just fast forward to the gold medal game between Team USA and Canada. The two teams have played in the championship match of every Winter Olympics ever, and 23 of 24 World Championships. (Finland snuck in and got silver in 2019.) Team USA seems to have the edge. They won last year’s World Championship and swept Canada in last year’s Rivalry Series matchups, outscoring the Canadians 24-7 in four games.
⛷️🏂 America’s golden girls are trying huge comebacks. The three most famous American athletes at these games are all trying to overcome injuries … or the ghosts of Olympics past.
Mikaela Shiffrin is nearly unstoppable in slalom, having won seven of her last eight races. She’s the all-time leader in World Cup wins, and she clinched a ninth overall slalom title this year despite the season still being underway. She has one of the strongest GOAT cases you’ll ever see. BUT! She had a disastrous appearance at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, finishing DNF as a gold-medal favorite in the slalom and giant slalom. So there’s an Olympics Redemption Arc™️ if she pulls it off.
Lindsay Vonn was all set to make a stunning comeback and compete for a medal, but her bid took a bad turn in her final race before the Olympics. After retiring in 2019 to end a brilliant-but-injury-filled career, Vonn got a knee replacement to ease her post-sports life, and realized she finally felt good again. She came back in 2024, vastly outperformed expectations, and was leading the World Cup rankings heading into the Olympics, at age 41, after five years away from the sport … then crashed last week in a race that probably shouldn’t have even been held due to low visibility. She needed to be airlifted off the course and will probably miss the Olympics. If Vonn does compete and medal, it’ll be a miracle on top of a miracle.
Chloe Kim has won back-to-back gold medals in the snowboard halfpipe, along with basically every competition she’s entered since the 2022 Olympics … but Kim also hasn’t competed since tearing her labrum in January. She’s in a race against time to see whether she’ll be ready for the games. (Unlike her event, which is one of the few that is not a race against time.)
Things that MIGHT become a big deal
Photo of the semi-completed Olympic hockey venue on January 11th by Wikimedia user Marcuscalabresus
🇮🇹🍝🧑🍳 Italy has not done a great job prepping these Olympics. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were the Milano-Cortina Olympic venues. In fact, some are still actively under construction with the Games just days away! It may feel like you hear these “Olympics aren’t ready!” storylines every four years and then the games go off fine, but the last few Olympics actually haven’t really had that issue — this is probably the most shoddily organized games since Rio 2016.
The ice hockey arena almost definitely won’t be finished. A BBC News tour of the venue in recent days revealed that the building is still very much under construction. It’s mostly spectator-side stuff, and they should be able to play games … although there was a hole in the ice during a recent test event. The ramshackle hockey venue is particularly damning because it was the only fully new venue that Italy had to build for the Olympics!
Several pieces of infrastructure are still in flux. For example: A cable car meant to transport fans to the women’s alpine skiing venue has not been completed. When asked two weeks ago about the sliding center where bobsled, luge, and skeleton will take place, the IOC said that “a lot” of work is still to be done. NOT IDEAL! We’ll see whether they can pull it off.
Another note: These are the most spread-out Olympics ever. When you see that these are the “Milano Cortina” Olympics, you should know that Milano is in Northwest Italy, while Cortina is in Northeast Italy. It’s about a four-hour drive between the two.
The distance is a bummer for two reasons. We’re less likely to see a “Anthony Edwards befriends the table tennis team” moment. But more importantly, it ruins Czechia’s Ester Ledecka’s chance at repeating history. Ledecka was the first athlete to win gold medals in two different sports at the same games in Beijing, winning skiing and snowboarding. She can’t do that this year because the skiing and snowboarding venues are on different mountains, about a five-hour drive away from each other.
🏔️ There’s a potential speedskating GOAT, and he’s American. Jordan Stolz was the first speedskater to win three gold medals at one World Championships in 2023 … and then he did it again in 2024. He hasn’t lost in the 1,000m or 1,500m this year, and he has the best ever score in the “big combination” events. AND HE’S ONLY 21! He could go supernova at these games, potentially winning three or four golds.
🛷🇺🇸 Is America a sledding country? Team USA greatly overperformed expectations at last year’s World Champs: Kaysha Love won gold in the monobob, the mixed relay skeleton team won gold, and Mystique Ro took silver in skeleton. But a lot of success in sliding sports stems from familiarity with certain tracks … and well, last year’s World Champs were in Lake Placid, the place where many of those athletes train full-time.
The stories only WE are gonna talk about
Photo of the 2017 Ski Mountaineering World Championships by Jorge Millaruelo via Flickr
🏔️ For the first time in decades, there is a NEW WINTER OLYMPIC SPORT!!!
The new sport is SKI MOUNTAINEERING, but the cool kids all call it “SkiMo,” and now you’re one of the cool kids.
Ski mountaineering is … skiing up mountains. Pretty self-explanatory. And once you get to the top you have to ski back down. Historically, the races last about two hours, but the Olympics will feature a sprint event that only lasts about three minutes. Here are some races from a recent World Cup event.
SkiMo is the first new Winter Olympic sport since skeleton in 2002 … but skeleton had previously been an Olympic sport until the 1948 games. Really, the last legit new Winter Olympic sport was snowboarding in 1998, almost 30 years ago! (tbh … there just aren’t that many snow and ice sports.)
Turns out, there are more ways to ski than you ever could have imagined. There are now SEVEN types of skiing in the Olympics: SkiMo (skiing up the hill), alpine skiing (skiing down the hill), cross-country skiing (skiing a long distance with mostly NO hill), ski jumping (skiing off the hill), freestyle skiing (doing tricks on the hill), and biathlon (skiing with GUNS), plus Nordic Combined, which is ski jumping and cross-country skiing in one event.
🥌😬 A new curling rule could hurt Team USA. Just a month before the Olympics, World Curling released a rules policy banning certain sweeping techniques. The statement uses a lot of jargon. Long story short: While sweepers are allowed to sweep in front of stones to make them slide faster, straighter, or curl, they are not supposed to sweep in a way that makes stones slide slower, and these rules ban a bunch of methods for doing so. Why the sudden need to clarify? The American men’s team, skipped by Danny Casper, has been using those stone-slowing techniques at recent events, including the tournament where they qualified for the Olympics. CLEARLY, the world is SCARED of American curling dominance! Cowards!
🔫⛷ We could see the first American biathlon medalist in Olympic history. Campbell Wright, 23, won two silver medals at last year’s World Championships, the first American ever to do so. I should note that Wright isn’t, strictly speaking, American — he was born in New Zealand, but his parents are American, and he switched nationalities in 2023 because the American biathlon federation is significantly better funded than the Kiwi federation. The transfer portal is ruining biathlon!
OK, time for me to be annoying
I’m really excited about the next couple weeks. In fact, I’m so excited about the next few weeks here that …
… I actually turned down a temporary gig from a big media company to help with its Olympics coverage.
The company wasn’t gonna pay for me to go to Italy (tbh I would’ve said yes if any company paid for me to go to Italy.) But it was a cool opportunity to work for a company I respect.
BUT! They also weren’t going to let me create any content outside of their Olympics coverage, including my newsletter. And I really wanted to do my newsletter. I think it’s going to be the best Olympics coverage on the internet.
And I looked back at the numbers from my Paris 2024 coverage, and I realized something: Enough people signed up for paid subscriptions to the newsletter over the course of the 2024 Olympics that I made about as much as this company was going to pay me for the 2026 Olympics.
So, I’m going to do something I don’t usually do around here: Loudly ask for your money. (I know, kinda messed up … but I turned down someone else’s money, and now I’m making it your problem.)
This is a free newsletter, and you can get it every day without paying me a cent. I’ve never put anything behind a paywall, and I don’t intend to. My goal is to gather a large enough audience of Sports! fans here that I don’t have to ask for anyone’s money. (If you want to help with that goal, here’s the link to subscribe for free. Maybe I’ll convince you to upgrade by the end of the Olympics!)
So I’m hoping 100 of you decide to sign up for paid subscriptions between now and the end of the Olympics. (That’s less than 2 percent of you!) Here’s the link to upgrade from a free subscription to a paid one.
And if you’re already a paid subscriber: First of all, THANK YOU! But also please share Sports! with another person in your life who loves the Olympics.
Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, and let’s watch some Sports!
- Rodger
I’m gonna post daily Olympic schedules in these newsletters! (And if I get tired of putting it together, I’ll just link to Mitch Goldich’s daily viewing guides.)
Some quick notes:
The Opening Ceremony is Friday, February 6th. However, a handful of non-medal events will take place before then. (I’ll explain below!)
These are not an ideal Olympics for American fans who want to watch live events. Everything on NBC’s nightly primetime show will be tape delayed. Competition will be over for the day, every day, by the time the show airs.
On most days, competition is going to start between 3-4 a.m. Eastern. Don’t let that scare you, it’s generally prelims and stuff like that. Most of the medal events are going to start between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. You’ve gotta remember, a lot of Winter Olympic sports need to be held during daytime hours because there’s no way to safely light an alpine ski course or a 10km biathlon course. But there’s also a handful of indoor events (or well-lit outdoor events, like the ski jump) that will take place in the early afternoon here, between noon and 3 p.m.
If you work a standard 9-5 job but you love the Olympics and wanna catch a little bit each day, the move is to wake up an hour or two earlier than usual, since a lot of the medal events will take place in the morning here.
The star of the 2024 Olympics is back: NBC/Peacock is running GoldZone again!!!!! The broadcast will start every day at 8 a.m. Eastern, and presumably run through the end of competition in the afternoon. I’ll be glued on that pretty much every day.
With that, here’s a look at the pre-Opening Ceremony activities.
🥌 Mixed Doubles Curling: The first event of the Olympics!!!!! Group play gets underway at 1 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday. This is Team USA’s best chance to medal in curling, as the all-”ko-ree” combo of Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin won the 2023 World Championship and is ranked #1 on Ken Pomeroy’s curling analytics website, Double Takeout. (Yes, that’s a real thing, and you’d better get used to it.) Cory and Korey — I forget which one is the guy and which one is the girl — have four matches before the Opening Ceremony, playing Norway at 4 a.m. Thursday morning, Switzerland at 8 a.m. Thursday morning, Canada at 4 a.m. Friday morning, and Czechia at 8 a.m. Friday morning.
🏒 Women’s Hockey: We have some prelim games … which Team USA and Canada don’t even need to win, since they’re automatically qualified for the knockout rounds due to their world rankings. These games are just for seeding. Team USA gets started against Czechia at 10:30 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, while Canada plays Finland at 3 p.m. Thursday.
⛸ Figure Skating: Easily the biggest event before the Opening Ceremony is the figure skating team event, which as mentioned, should be a runaway for Team USA. The event gets started at 4 a.m. Eastern on Friday with the rhythm dance, the women’s short program, and the pairs’ short program.
I did two podcast appearances about the Winter Olympics!
The first was on Sports Illustrated’s Daily Rings podcast, where I talked about … uh … a few of the things mentioned in here! And I also did an episode of Phantom Island with Ryan Nanni about a fun topic: The push from various Summer Olympic federations to get sports that they can’t squeeze into the Summer Olympic program into the Winter Olympics.
