MILAN — These Winter Olympics were the most spread-out in history, with four venues hosting speedskating, hockey and figure skating in the city’s outskirts while the rest of the Games’ 12 sports were scattered across difficult-to-reach mountain towns hours away.
But those who made the effort to get to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics witnessed a Games remembered for a “King,” crashes, cheating scandals, drones, historic medal hauls and triumphs by the host nation.
U.S. earns record 12 gold medals
Those dozen golds marked the most ever won by the U.S. at a single Winter Olympics. First-time gold medalists included bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor, the 41-year-old who won the monobob by four-hundredths of a second; Jordan Stolz, who won gold medals in long-track speedskating’s 500 and 1000 meters, and Alex Ferreira, the 31-year-old winner of freeski halfpipe.
U.S. hockey sweeps gold
With a sweep of the hockey gold medals, the U.S. men won an Olympic tournament for the first time since 1980, and the women for the first time since 2018.
Trailing archrival Canada, 1-0, with two minutes left in regulation, captain Hilary Knight, playing her fifth and final Olympics, sent the gold-medal game to overtime. Veteran Megan Keller then scored the golden goal in a stirring comeback to earn the U.S. women their third-ever Olympic gold and first since 2018. The win capped a roller-coaster two days for Knight, who had proposed to speedskater Brittany Bowe one day earlier.
The men’s tournament, the first to feature NHL players since 2014, also came down to a Canada-U.S. final that ended with Jack Hughes’ golden goal in overtime.
Stunning results for U.S. figure skating
After the U.S. won the team event — made up of men’s singles, women’s singles, pair skating and ice dance — it appeared the country was on the verge of a potential sweep in the individual performances. It didn’t exactly end that way.
Ilia Malinin, the big gold-medal favorite in men’s singles, entered the final with a lead but had multiple falls and dropped all the way to eighth for arguably the biggest upset of the Games. He said the pressure got the best of him.
Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the favorite in pairs, had stellar performances but took silver after Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron of France (somewhat controversially) outscored them.
The highlight of the Olympics, however, may have been Alysa Liu. The 20-year-old, who retired from figure skating four years ago, put on a performance for the ages in the women’s singles final and claimed gold while winning on her terms.
“That’s what I’m f-----g talking about,” Liu said as she skated off the ice following her gold-clinching performance.
Norway dominates the medal count
Despite having a population of just 5.6 million, the Nordic nation has long been a power in the Winter Olympics’ endurance sports like cross-country skiing and biathlon.
But Norway’s dominance grew to historic levels in Italy, where it led the medal count with 41, making it the first country to earn more than 40 medals at a single Winter Olympics. Six of its gold medals were earned by cross-country skier Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, known as “King Klæbo,” who became the first person ever to win that many at a Winter Games and only the fifth athlete to win six-plus golds at any Olympics, joining swimmers Mark Spitz (seven in 1972), Kristin Otto (six in 1988) and Michael Phelps (six each in 2004 and 2008) and gymnast Vitaly Scherbo (six in 1992).
Lindsey Vonn's comeback ends in a crash
Forced into retirement by injuries in 2019 before mounting a comeback in 2024, the American superstar skier, 41, entered the Olympics enjoying the healthiest season she could remember.
That changed less than a week before the women’s downhill began, when she tore a knee ligament in a crash. Determined to compete in a brace despite the injury, Vonn qualified for the downhill final with one of the fastest times in the entire field. But only 13 seconds into her run, she hooked a gate with her right arm and was sent spiraling, head-over-skis, into a crash that left a Cortina d’Ampezzo crowd full of her friends and family silent. She has undergone five surgeries, and her father has said he does not want her to race again.
Johnson and Shiffrin win skiing gold
In the same downhill race where Vonn crashed, U.S. teammate Breezy Johnson sliced down the treacherous Tofane course to join Vonn as the only other woman in U.S. history to win Olympic gold in the downhill. In Alpine skiing’s team combined event, Johnson and teammate Mikaela Shiffrin finished fourth, while Americans Paula Moltzan and Jackie Wiles — less than a year removed from surviving a plane crash — earned bronze.
Johnson would end the Games on a happy note after her boyfriend proposed at the base of the giant slalom competition. Shiffrin, who hadn’t earned an Olympic medal since 2018, had a cathartic end to the Games by dominating slalom for gold.
Ukrainian athlete barred from racing
Vladyslav Heraskevych planned to compete in skeleton while wearing a helmet featuring images of Ukrainian athletes who had been killed since Russia’s invasion of the country in 2022. But the helmet did not comply with the International Olympic Committee’s “athlete expression guidelines,” the IOC said, and a jury of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation disqualified Heraskevych from competing. His refusal to wear another helmet stemmed from his belief that there are things “more important than medals,” he said.
Trump calls U.S. athlete a 'loser'
Asked how he felt about representing the U.S., freeski athlete Hunter Hess responded that “just because I’m wearing the flag, doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.” That quickly caught the attention of President Donald Trump, who took to social media to call Hess a “loser.” The attention sparked by the comment was “challenging” to deal with, Hess later said, but he stood by his comment and even flashed an “L” sign after finishing a run, a self-aware nod to Trump’s comment.
“I love the United States of America,” Hess said. “I cannot say that enough. My original statement, I felt like I said that, but apparently people didn’t take it that way.”
Italy enjoys its best ever Winter Olympics
Before these Games, the high-water mark for Italian success at a Winter Olympics came in 1994, when the Azzurri won 20 total medals, including seven golds.
On its home turf this month, the host nation smashed those marks, winning 30 medals, the third most of any country, and 10 golds. Speedskater Francesca Lollobrigida won the 3,000 meters in an Olympic record on her 35th birthday, then celebrated with her 2-year-old son. She added another gold later in the Games. A year after suffering a devastating leg injury, Federica Brignone won gold in giant slalom. And speedskater Arianna Fontana won her 14th career Olympic medal.
Cheating admissions and allegations
Norwegian cross-country skier Sturla Holm Lægreid’s emotional admission in a postrace interview that he had cheated on his girlfriend and hoped to win her back quickly made him one of the most talked-about athletes at the Olympics. “I hope that committing social suicide [like this] might show her how much I love her,” he said. By the end of the Games he’d won five medals, but not his ex.
Lægreid wasn’t the only athlete caught up in a cheating scandal, however. On the ice, Canada and Sweden got into a heated shouting match after the Swedes accused Canada’s Marc Kennedy of an illegal double touch during a curling match.
Kennedy could be heard hurling swears at the Swedish team. When asked why he got so upset, Kennedy said: “He’s still accusing us of cheating, and I didn’t like it. So I told him where to stick it, because we’re the wrong team to do that to.”
You'd never seen an Olympics like these
For the first time, an athlete representing South America won a Winter Olympics medal. That was thanks to Lucas Pinheiro Braathen, the Oslo-born giant slalom racer who previously represented Norway, retired from the sport, then returned under the flag of Brazil, where his mother was raised.
Skiers like Pinheiro Braathen were captured throughout the Olympics from never-before-seen camera angles by small, agile drones that trailed athletes at speeds of up to 75 mph. The immersive views of athletes racing down slopes, sliding courses and speedskating tracks were a hit with viewers.
