With the Milan Cortina Olympics one year away, here are some Americans who will take center stage
The Milan Cortina Olympics, now one year away, will be among the most picturesque Winter Games, billed as the most widespread ever across Northern Italy.
Competition will be scattered in clusters from Milan to Cortina d'Ampezzo, which are separated by 160 miles.
There will be a record 116 medal events over 16 days sandwiched between the opening ceremony at Milan's famed San Siro Stadium and the closing ceremony at the historic Verona Arena, a Roman amphitheater.
The U.S., which finished in the top five in total medals at the last six Winter Olympics, is loaded with stars, both in returning gold medalists and athletes who broke through since the last Winter Games, in 2022.
Here's a look at some of the biggest names to watch out for.
Mikaela Shiffrin, a gold medalist in 2014 and 2018, entered all six Alpine races at the 2022 Games but did not finish her three best events and ultimately won zero medals.
Since then, she has broken the record for World Cup victories (now up to 99), won two World Cup overall season titles and became the most successful skier in modern world championships history.
She also got engaged to Norwegian Alpine skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, a two-time Olympic medalist who is working toward a comeback of his own from a major race crash in January 2024.
Shiffrin, who turns 30 on March 13, also missed time after race crashes in January 2024 and again last November. She recently returned to competition after being sidelined for two months.
Her best events are slalom, where she has won six of her last seven World Cup starts, and giant slalom.
At the Milan Cortina Games, Shiffrin can become the first American skier to win a third career Olympic gold medal and the oldest U.S. woman to win Olympic Alpine gold. She is already the youngest American to win an Olympic Alpine medal of any color via her slalom gold in 2014 at 18.
Now 40, Lindsey Vonn ended a five-year retirement to race this season, but her ultimate goal is to make a fifth Olympic team and retire for good after the Milan Cortina Games.
Before Shiffrin, Vonn held the record for women's World Cup wins (82). She remains the lone American woman to win Olympic downhill gold in 2010.
She retired in 2019 due to the physical toll of ski racing injuries accumulated over an 18-year career on the sport's highest level.
But Vonn was reinvigorated after partial right knee replacement surgery last April. 'To be able to ski without pain, it's a completely new world for me,' she said before her first World Cup race in December. 'I haven't felt this good in 15 years.'
Vonn should make the 2026 Olympic team if she keeps up the level shown in her first month and a half back. In seven World Cup races this season, her best results are fourth (super-G) and sixth (downhill).
At the world championships last week, she skied out of the super-G after hooking a gate with her arm and then placed 15th in the downhill (won by American Breezy Johnson).
She would be the oldest U.S. Olympic Alpine skier in history by five years.
In 2022, a 17-year-old Ilia Malinin was left off the three-man Olympic team due to his inexperience despite placing second at the U.S. Championships. Now he has the best résumé of any active male figure skater.
Malinin, the son of Olympic skaters from Uzbekistan (who coach him in Virginia), is the two-time reigning world champion. He has won eight competitions in a row dating to December 2023.
He has dominated largely due to his unprecedented arsenal of jumps. In September 2022, he became the first skater to land a clean quadruple axel in competition, the only type of quad jump that had yet to be done.
This season, Malinin continued to live up to his self-given nickname — 'Quad God' — by becoming the first skater to perform all six types of quad jumps in one program (though not all cleanly landed). He also incorporated a backflip into his free skate.
Malinin has filled the void left by Nathan Chen, who stepped away from competing after winning the 2022 Olympic title. He can become the second American to take men's singles gold in his Olympic debut after the late Dick Button in 1948.
Chloe Kim has taken a full season off from competition after each of her Olympic halfpipe titles in 2018 and 2022, and each time quickly returned to the top of snowboarding.
Over the last 16 months, she became the first woman to land a 1260 in a halfpipe competition, the first to land a double cork 1080 in competition, and, her coach asserts, the first to land a 1440 in practice. Though she has taken defeats, she won the biggest annual event in the sport, the X Games, in 2024 and 2025.
'I have to be honest; I was in a bit of a rut. I really did not enjoy snowboarding for a couple of years,' Kim, now 24, said last month. 'I think this year I really wanted to change that and just do runs that felt good to me, do tricks that felt good to me. It kind of has been working out, no complaints.'
Kim, who in 2018 became the youngest Olympic halfpipe champion, is now in position to match the retired Shaun White's record of three Olympic halfpipe gold medals (though his were not consecutive).
As Jordan Stolz raced to gold at the 2023 World Championships, an excited TV commentator from the Netherlands, the world hotbed of speedskating, blurted out 'Straaljager!'
Translation: fighter jet.
Stolz, a 20-year-old from Wisconsin, has taken the sport by storm since an unsatisfying Olympic debut in 2022 (13th- and 14th-place finishes as the youngest skater at the Beijing Games).
Stolz started skating at age 5 on his backyard pond, inspired by watching Apolo Ohno win medals on TV at the 2010 Olympics.
Now Stolz is favored to earn three medals in long track speedskating in 2026, just like Ohno did in short track in 2006 and 2010. Unlike Ohno, Stolz's could all be gold.
He is the two-time reigning world champion in the 500 meter, 1,000 meter and 1,500 meter and the world record holder in the 1,000 meter. He won 18 World Cup races in a row from February 2024 to January 2025.
He can become the second American to win three gold medals at a single Winter Olympics. The first was an athlete to whom Stolz is often compared: Eric Heiden, a fellow Wisconsinite who won all five speedskating events at the 1980 Lake Placid Games in arguably the greatest feat in Winter Olympics history.
To many, Jessie Diggins is best known for clinching the first U.S. Olympic cross-country skiing gold medal — 'Here comes Diggins!' was the famed broadcast call by Chad Salmela at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
In the seven years since, Diggins achieved many more firsts, including the first individual world title for a U.S. cross-country skier and two World Cup overall season titles. She now owns an Olympic medal of every color and two world championship medals of every color.
Diggins has also shared her personal challenges. In June 2018, she published 'the most important blog post I'll ever write,' detailing her experience with an eating disorder when she was a teenager.
Diggins disclosed before last season that she had overcome a relapse. Her medical team, ski team, family and friends helped her through it.
She still races with 'The Emily Program' written on a patch on her headband. As a teen, Diggins checked in to the program, a national leader in eating disorder treatment, in her native Minnesota.
Diggins, who got married in 2022, does not know how much longer she will compete. She has committed at least to a fourth Olympic run in 2026. She can become the first U.S. cross-country skier to win an individual gold medal.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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