The Opening Ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan is that this Friday.
To prepare for this 12 months’s Olympic Video games, this is a take a look at 10 People you might want to know.
Lindsey Vonn (Alpine snowboarding)
For a lot of, a torn ACL would crush Olympic desires. However for Vonn, it is simply one other impediment to her quest for a fourth Olympic medal and first since 2018. The all-time nice retired following the 2019 season as a result of well being points, however returned to the game in December 2024. A 12 months later, she grew to become the oldest downhill World Cup winner at 41.
On Jan. 30, Vonn tore her ACL, however she nonetheless plans to compete within the girls’s downhill.
“I’ll do all the things in my energy to be in that beginning gate,” Vonn advised reporters afterward.
Mikaela Shiffrin (Alpine snowboarding)
Can Shiffrin rebound from a disappointing Beijing 2022? The record-holder for many World Cup wins (108), Shiffrin was shut out of the rostrum at her final Olympics however is coming off her ninth slalom season title, besting runner-up Camille Rast on this planet championships by 1.67 seconds in January.
Madison Chock and Evan Bates (Determine skating)
Probably the most adorned ice dance group in U.S. historical past, Chock and Bates, who married on June 20, 2024, will look to proceed an ideal 2025-26 in Milan after beforehand successful a third consecutive Grand Prix Final on Dec. 6, 2025, and record seventh U.S. championship on Jan. 10, 2026.
Per NBC Sports, Chock, 33, and Bates, 36, are the oldest members of a U.S. Olympic determine skating group since 1932, when Joseph Savage, 52, competed alongside Gertrude Meredith, 39, and finished seventh. William Nagle, 46, additionally made the U.S. group that 12 months, placing 11th within the particular person males’s competitors.
Alysa Liu (Determine skating)
Liu made her grand return to the ice in October 2024 after retiring at simply 16 following a sixth-place finish on the 2022 Winter Video games. In December 2025, Liu grew to become the primary U.S. girl to win a girls’s determine skating world title in 19 years. Sarah Hughes was the final American to win the Olympic girls’s singles gold, doing so at Salt Lake Metropolis 2002.
Ilia Malinin (Determine skating)
After turning into the primary skater to efficiently full a quadruple Axel in competitors on the U.S. Determine Skating Basic in September 2022, all eyes are on what Malinin, 21, can do in Milan. He is set to make his Olympics debut in the course of the males’s quick competitors on Tuesday, Feb. 10, adopted by the lads’s free three days in a while Feb. 13.
Wealthy Ruhonen (Curling)
Ruhonen, a 54-year-old private harm lawyer from Minnesota, might make historical past on the 2026 Video games. Per NBC Sports, the Group Casper alternate would “change into the oldest American to compete in a Winter Olympics in any medal sport ought to he see motion.”
It is a minor miracle his group even reached Milan. Group Casper pulled off an upset over Group Shuster, which is led by 2018 Olympic gold medalist John Shuster, snapping his consecutive run of Olympic appearances courting again to the 2006 Turin Video games.
Group Casper then wanted a win at a December qualifier over Group Xu (China), which it misplaced to in pool play, 9-8, to advance to the Olympics.
Alessandro Barbieri (Snowboarding)
“I say if it is not this Olympics, it is undoubtedly the subsequent one,” legendary U.S. Olympic snowboarder Shaun White advised the “Stifel Snow Present” about Barbieri’s outlook for the Milan Video games, via NBCNews.com.
“I am excited to see what he does,” White continued. “You by no means know.”
At 17, Barbieri has shortly risen within the ranks in snowboarding circles, claiming a silver medal on the 2024 Youth Olympic Video games. In early January, he grew to become the primary American to finish a triple cork 1440 — an aerial maneuver that options three off-axis flips and 1440 levels of rotation — in competitors.
Chloe Kim (Snowboarding)
Kim goals to three-peat in girls’s snowboarding, having first clinched gold at simply 17 in the course of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and efficiently defending her title at Beijing 2022. With one other gold, Kim would change into the primary girl to win three gold medals within the halfpipe and solely the second particular person all time, becoming a member of White.
Jordan Stoltz (speedskating)
The 21-year-old phenom could possibly be certainly one of this 12 months’s greatest winners. He is set to compete within the 500m, 1000m, 1500m and mass begin after making his Olympics debut in 2022, ending thirteenth within the 500m and 14th within the 1000m.
In 2023, Stoltz grew to become the youngest world speedskating champion at 18, taking gold within the 500m and 1000m. His most important competitors, Canadian Laurent Dubreuil, advised reporters afterward, “It is like making an attempt to beat Michael Jordon or one thing, I assume,” via ESPN.
Within the build-up to the 2026 Video games, Stoltz secured a second consecutive 1500m World Cup victory, proving to nonetheless be in his Nineties Chicago Bulls period.
Elana Meyers Taylor (bobsled)
The 2026 Winter Olympics — Taylor’s exceptional fifth — could possibly be her final. She debuted at Vancouver 2010 within the two-woman race alongside Erin Pac and completed third to obtain the bronze.
Taylor’s medaled in all 5 of the Olympic occasions she’s competed in, together with two at Beijing 2022 — the two-woman (bronze) and first-ever girls’s monobob (silver) — making her probably the most adorned Black Winter Olympian ever. Competing as soon as once more in each occasions this 12 months — monobob on Feb. 16 and two-woman on Feb. 21 — Taylor might quickly add to her whole.
