Here’s Who to Watch (and Root For) at the Olympics

It’s time to fire up Peacock and start doing time-zone math: The Olympics are back. This year’s Winter Olympics start next week across Northern Italy, and athletes will soon be descending on both Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, a ski town in the Italian Alps. Even though these are slightly less sexy than the Summer Olympics (I’ll refrain from calling them the “regular” ones), there is a lot to be excited for. Guys are doing backflips on ice skates, history is being made by Black and queer athletes, and, if you can believe it, there’s at least one lesbian Heated Rivalry situation going on. Here are some of the highlights you should be paying attention to.

Alysa Liu and Amber Glenn are leading U.S. women’s figure skating to a comeback.

Did you know that an American woman hasn’t won a gold medal in singles figure skating since 2002? The last time we even medaled was in 2006, when Sasha Cohen took home a silver medal. After a 20-year slump, it looks like the U.S. might finally be getting back up on the podium in 2026. The two names you are going to want to remember are Alysa Liu and Amber Glenn.

Liu, a 20-year-old with a smiley piercing and chunky, bleached-blonde halos throughout her hair, has quickly emerged as the star of Team USA. In 2022, Liu announced she was retiring from skating at 16. By then, she had already become the youngest U.S. champion in history and had just gone to the Olympics in Beijing, where she placed seventh. After a break to be a normal teenager for a little bit, Liu is back on the ice, skating to Laufey and Lady Gaga. In 2025, she won the gold medal at the World Championships.

In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Liu said that she was coming back on her own terms. “If I feel like I’m skating too much, I’ll back down. If I feel like I’m not skating enough, I’ll ramp it up. No one’s going to starve me, tell me what I can and can’t eat,” she said. I wish I had been that self-assured at 20 years old.

As for Glenn, she’s on the way to making Olympics history. She’s going to be the first out LGBTQ+ women’s figure skater to ever compete in the Games, a stat that is almost impossible to believe. Glenn is also 26 years old, making her essentially a senior citizen in the figure-skating world. She’s still one of the best, having won the U.S. Championships three years in a row. She also has a really good TikTok.

But the best skater might be on the men’s team …

… and he goes by “Quad God.” Ilia Malinin is arguably the best male figure skater in the world right now. In December, he beat his own world record at the Grand Prix final with a program that included a mind-boggling seven quad jumps (hence the nickname). While that is obviously impressive, I feel it should be noted that he can also do a backflip on the ice. Did you really let that sink in? He skates backward, does a backflip, and then lands perfectly. It’s unreal.

Perhaps you’re really into hockey now, for some reason.

There’s not a ton of long-running illicit affairs that we know of, but the Olympics’ ice-hockey scene will still have plenty going on. For the first time since 2014, NHL players are allowed to participate in the Games, meaning stars like Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid, and Macklin Celebrini will all be hitting the ice in Italy. (For the hockey newbies: In the past two Olympics, Team USA has been made up of players who play either in Europe or for the American Hockey League.)

While that will certainly make the men’s Games more exciting, there’s good stuff happening with the women as well. Laila Edwards, who made history in 2023 as the first Black woman to join the U.S. women’s national team, is heading to Milan, where she’ll be the first Black women’s hockey player to ever compete for the U.S. at the Olympics. While that is exciting enough on its own, Edwards also comes with a fun celebrity angle — she hails from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, hometown of Travis and Jason Kelce. The brothers, who previously shouted Edwards out on their podcast for making the U.S. national team, recently donated to her family’s GoFundMe to help cover the expenses of traveling to the Olympics. This means that if you tune in to the U.S. women, you and Taylor Swift will probably be watching the same hockey match.

Speaking of Heated Rivalry…

Okay, so while sexy-rivals stuff isn’t happening on the hockey side of things, it is happening in skeleton. I assume your first question is, What is skeleton? It’s the sport where athletes shoot down an icy track headfirst at about 80 miles per hour. As if that weren’t enough pressure, imagine you’re also competing against your wife.

Belgium’s Kim Meylemans and Brazil’s Nicole Silveira met at the 2019 Skeleton World Cup but kept their relationship under wraps for years, eventually hard launching on Instagram in 2021.

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“I think from the beginning I wasn’t 100 percent sure that’s who I was and what I wanted. So it took me a while to finally be okay with it, I guess,” Silveira told Today in 2022, when they first competed in the Olympics as girlfriends. “So for a moment there, it was me hiding a lot of who I was and hiding Kim essentially from a lot of people.” So she’s sort of the Shane in this situation.

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The couple got legally married last January but are having their “big dream beach wedding” this summer after the Olympics. “We really love heading into this huge season, and possibly last Olympic games, as spouses,” they wrote in a joint Instagram post announcing their marriage. “No matter what curve balls this year and the challenges ahead will throw at us, our love comes first.” Are you crying yet?

There’s a new sport.

Have you ever been watching people ski and thought, Damn, I wish I had just watched them run up a flight of stairs? I have good news for you! Ski mountaineering is making its debut at the Winter Olympics this year, combining the thrill of downhill skiing with whatever feeling is evoked by watching the skiers have to get up the hill first. If you want to act like you know what you’re talking about, call it skimo.

Does it look goofy to run in skis? Yes. Is there any universe in which I could do any of this? No. Will I be tuning in from my couch to yell at these elite athletes to pick up the pace? Absolutely.

A skier has the Italian comeback story of the year.

Last year, Federica Brignone was on top of the world. At the 2025 World Championships in February, the 35-year-old skier took home the gold medal in giant slalom and the silver medal in super-G. She was basically a shoo-in to be one of Italy’s top athletes when the Olympics came to the country. Then, at the Italian ski championships in April, she crashed during the giant slalom and broke her leg in at least three places. Less than a year later, she’s back and ready to compete for Italy. Brignone only just returned to competing in January, where she broke into tears after her second run at the Ski World Cup and ultimately came in sixth in giant slalom. We will probably all be crying along with her at the Olympics.

There will be strict enforcement of crotch fabric for the ski jumpers.

It turns out that if you sew in a couple extra stitches to the crotch region of a ski jumper’s suit, the added surface area can provide athletes with up to five added meters on their jump. We all found that out this year, when a couple of Norwegian coaches received 18-month suspensions after getting caught on-camera allegedly modifying their skiers’ suits. Now, there are new and very strict crotch rules in place for the Olympics, which require more checks on the suits and tamperproof microchips that will be scanned before and after each jump. Out of a pure and true curiosity, I hope NBC has a camera stationed at the checkpoint.

Eileen Gu wants more gold.

Remember this diva? She’s the freestyle skier who attends Stanford full time while also being a Victoria’s Secret model and an Olympic athlete. You might recall the total-nutso 1,620-degree spin she did to secure one of her two gold medals in Beijing. (She also nabbed a silver.) Well, she’s back! Despite her American citizenship, Gu is once again competing for the Chinese team and is on track to win big. Gu suffered a somewhat mysterious “terrible accident” while training in New Zealand over the summer, but it seems like she’s back to full health and ready for Milano Cortina. “I train like I’ve never won,” Gu said in her recent Time cover story. “And I compete like I’ve never lost.” Intense! I like it!

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