Some of America's biggest expected stars for the Milan Cortina Olympics recorded impactful victories in the busiest winter sports weekend so far this season on the road to February’s Games.
Americans won top-level international events in figure skating (Alysa Liu, Madison Chock/Evan Bates), Alpine skiing (Mikaela Shiffrin) and speed skating (Jordan Stolz, plus a world record in men’s team pursuit).
The multi-sport success is a carryover from the 2024-25 season, when Americans won 15 world titles in events that are on the Winter Olympic program. The U.S. record for gold medals at a single Winter Games is 10 from 2002.
Alysa Liu, Madison Chock and Evan Bates seize Skate America
Liu, who last year ended a two-year retirement and then became the first U.S. women’s figure skating world champion since 2006, claimed her first victory of the Olympic season at Skate America.
Liu had jumping flaws in her short and free programs, but she had the highest artistic scores in both to win the biggest annual international competition that is held in the United States.
“I thought all my jumps were horrible, terrible, but maybe they weren’t, and also I forget spins, my footwork and choreography. That all has a part in my score,” she said. “I forget it’s not just jumps. I’ll have to rewatch my performance, then I’ll see how I feel.”
Liu, with first- and second-place finishes on the fall Grand Prix Series, qualified for December’s Grand Prix Final, which is expected to be a preview of the Olympics.
The world’s top skaters are scattered in different events like Skate America on the Grand Prix Series. The top performers over the six-event series then gather for the Grand Prix Final, which is in Japan this year.
Through five of six Grand Prix regular season events, Liu ranks sixth in the world by best total score, with three-time world champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan leading the way. Recall that in March, Liu went into the World Championships seeded eighth by best total score for the season before she earned the surprise title.
No American women’s singles skater has won an Olympic medal since 2006 (Sasha Cohen’s silver), but the United States has three strong candidates in Liu, two-time national champion Amber Glenn and 2024 World silver medalist Isabeau Levito. The three-woman Olympic team will be named after January’s national championships.
Fellow Americans Chock and Bates earned a record-tying fifth Skate America ice dance title. The married couple are also headed to the Grand Prix Final, which they won each of the last two years, to go along with world titles in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Chock and Bates recorded the world’s best score this season, but their dominance throughout this Olympic cycle is expected to be tested at the Final.
That’s because of France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron, who rank second this season by best score, just 1.56 points behind Chock and Bates (though comparing scores between different competitions is not apples to apples). Cizeron, the 2022 Olympic gold medalist with Gabriella Papadakis, came out of retirement for this season and coupled with Fournier Beaudry, who formerly competed for Canada.
Chock and Bates and Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron train at the same rink and share coaches in Montreal and have yet to face off in direct competition this season.
Mikaela Shiffrin completes her reindeer sleigh
In Alpine skiing, the two-time Olympic gold medalist Shiffrin won the first World Cup slalom of the season with her largest margin of victory since December 2023 in her best event.
Shiffrin prevailed by 1.66 seconds Saturday, combining times from two runs in Levi, Finland, which is 100 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Her margin of victory was greater than the margin that separated second place from 10th place.
“There’s always relief to get the first [slalom] race finished,” said Shiffrin, who was fourth in the season-opening giant slalom on Oct. 25 and may also compete in super-G this season. “This year, it’s exciting, because I feel like my slalom’s in a good place. So that opens the opportunity to train other events, as well.”
Winners of the annual Levi slalom are presented with a reindeer by Santa Claus. Shiffrin now has nine of them — a full sleigh. Over the years, she named them Rudolph, Sven, Mr. Gru, Ingemar, Sunny, Lorax, Grogu, Rori and now Winkie, her mom’s childhood nickname. The reindeer remain in Finland on a farm that Shiffrin can visit.
Shiffrin upped her career records to 102 Alpine World Cup victories, 65 in slalom alone.
Last fall, she won the first two World Cup slaloms, then missed two months after a giant slalom race crash. She came back to win two of the last three World Cup slaloms of last season.
At the Milan Cortina Games, Shiffrin can become the first American across all skiing disciplines to win a third Olympic gold medal after her titles in 2014 (slalom) and 2018 (giant slalom). She won zero medals in 2022.
Shiffrin’s slalom form will also be key for the new team combined event: Two athletes from the same nation pair up, with one taking a downhill run and then the other taking a slalom run. The times from the two runs are combined, and the team with the fastest aggregate time is the winner. Shiffrin and world downhill champion Breezy Johnson won the team combined for the United States at February’s World Championships.
Slovakian Petra Vlhová, the 2022 Olympic slalom gold medalist and Shiffrin’s primary rival for most of the last decade, has not competed since she injured her right knee in a January 2024 race crash and underwent surgery. Vlhová returned to skiing in early October and needs at least 50 quality days of on-snow training before she races again, her manager reportedly said last month.
In the men’s slalom in Levi, Lucas Pinheiro Braathen became the first person representing Brazil to win a World Cup event in any Winter Olympic sport.
Pinheiro Braathen previously represented Norway, winning five World Cup races before he retired in October 2023 at age 23. Norwegian media reported he had a long-standing conflict with the Norwegian ski federation over athlete marketing rights.
He ended that retirement a year ago and switched nationality. Pinheiro Braathen was born in Oslo to a Brazilian mother and a Norwegian father and spent most of his childhood in Norway.
No South American nation has won a Winter Olympic medal in any sport.
Jordan Stolz scares speed skating world records
Stolz, bidding to become the second American to win three golds at a single Winter Olympics after fellow Wisconsin speed skater Eric Heiden, opened his World Cup season by recording the second-fastest times in history in both the 1000m and the 1500m.
Stolz, already the world record holder in the 1000m, won three of his four races across his primary events (500m, 1000m, 1500m) at the Utah Olympic Oval. He swept all three at the World Championships in 2023 and 2024.
Stolz was dealt a rare defeat in the 500m, placing fourth Sunday (after having won a 500m on Saturday) in the event in which he is most vulnerable. Rival Jenning de Boo of the Netherlands won in the second-fastest time in history. Stolz was bumped from being the second-fastest man in history to fourth-fastest.
The U.S. men’s team pursuit — made up of Casey Dawson, Ethan Cepuran and Emery Lehman — broke its own world record. Three world records total were broken in Utah, where most records are skated because of the high altitude and thin air.
John Shuster’s bid for 6th Winter Olympics in curling ends
Shuster, who won a storybook gold medal in 2018, saw his reign atop U.S. curling end at the Olympic Trials in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In a changing of the guard, a team led by 24-year-old Danny Casper beat the 43-year-old Shuster’s team 2-1 in a best-of-three championship series. Casper is not yet qualified for the Olympics. His team must finish in the top two of a last-chance global tournament in Canada next month.
Shuster was bidding to tie the U.S. record of six Winter Olympic appearances, held by Nordic combined skier Todd Lodwick (1994-2014).
A team led by two-time Olympian Tabitha Peterson won the women’s trials, also advancing to the last-chance qualifier.
