The Olympics begin this week. Unless you live in northern Italy or obsessively follow snow sports, though, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that. The Winter Games are low-key.
That’s what makes them fun. The Summer Olympics, with track and swimming, showcase the strongest and fastest. The Winter Games are more about artistry. They have athletes clad in spandex sliding down ice tubes. They have curling.
Today, I’ll help you get ready for the 19-day extravaganza and point you toward some great stories in The Times and The Athletic.
Let’s begin with the basics: Where are the games? When do they start? How do I watch?
Officially, it’s called the Milan Cortina Games. But there are actually events throughout northern Italy — skiing and snowboarding spread across the Alps, hockey and figure skating in Milan.
The opening ceremony is Friday and will feature performances by Mariah Carey and the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. But there are a handful of events before that, including curling on Wednesday and snowboarding on Thursday.
The Games are being broadcast by NBC, as usual, and Peacock will stream every event live. Italy is six hours ahead of New York and nine ahead of California, so if you need to know what’s happening as it happens, you might have to sneak some peeks during the workday.
I’ve heard of Milan. What is this Cortina?
The full name is Cortina d’Ampezzo. It’s a gem of a village in the Dolomites, a mountain range in the country’s north. Our travel writer described it as a “snow playground for the conspicuously wealthy.” I’m not wealthy, conspicuously or inconspicuously, so no surprise that I hadn’t heard of the place, but the photos make it look pretty incredible.
And it will be home to some of the most exciting events of the Games. It has the Sliding Center, which hosts bobsled, luge and skeleton. And it has the Curling Stadium, where, naturally, curling happens.
Why do you keep bringing up curling?
It’s just the best. There is no sport that more quickly converts a person from “this looks silly” to “I am extremely invested.” It helps that the competitors are entirely ordinary-looking — that could be you or me out there, if only we had been better at sweeping in our youth — and that the rules are easy to understand.
It’s like a game you might play on a lawn or in a pub. Competitors try to slide heavy stones (they call them rocks, and they weigh around 40 pounds) closer to the target than the other team’s. There’s shouting and bumping and, of course, the aforementioned sweeping. Here’s a guide.
You said these Olympics were low-key. Has the lead-up been boring?
Anything but! For one, the building of the hockey rink in Milan has been a debacle. Times reporters attended test games a few weeks ago and found a construction site:
The Trump administration stirred some controversy when the Department of Homeland Security announced that ICE agents would accompany the U.S. delegation to the Games. Italian politicians were outraged. A spokeswoman for the agency said ICE was going only to “vet and mitigate risks,” not to carry out immigration actions.
And then, of course, there’s the crotch-stitching controversy.
The what controversy?
This scandal has rocked Norway, a country that takes great pride in its winter-sports prowess. Officials on its national ski-jumping team were caught modifying the crotches of their jumpers’ suits at last year’s world championships, thanks to a secret video that was posted anonymously to YouTube.
Matthew Futterman, who has covered every Olympics since 2010, says the modifications are a simple matter of physics: “Ski jumpers want to fly through the air as far as possible. A bigger suit provides more lift, like a larger sail catches more wind.” And the easiest place to enlarge, he notes, “is in the crotch.”
OK, enough of that. Who are the athletes on Team U.S.A. I should know about?
There are 232 of them, but I’ll highlight a few.
In Alpine skiing, Mikaela Shiffrin, the sport’s most decorated athlete, had a nightmare Olympics in 2022 — three crashes, no medals. But she has excelled since then, and so has the rest of the U.S. squad, which enters these Games as the sport’s dominant team. Watch also for Lindsey Vonn, 41, who is trying to complete a comeback after five years of retirement, a partial knee replacement and a crash on Friday.
In speedskating, the headliner is Jordan Stolz, who is 21 and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. He’s favored to win gold in all four events he’s competing in.
And in figure skating, the U.S. hasn’t won a women’s individual medal in 20 years. Amber Glenn and Alysa Liu have a real shot at changing that. On the men’s side, Ilia Malinin, nicknamed the “Quad God” for his quadruple jumps, is a favorite to win gold. And you have to cheer for Maxim Naumov. This is his first Olympics, and it comes just over a year after his parents — both former Olympians, and also his coaches — were killed in the horrific midair plane collision over Washington.
We’ll have daily Olympics highlights in The Morning. And you can sign up to the Games Briefing to get a full recap in your inbox from The Athletic.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: Tom Wright-Piersanti
