The Road to Glory: Athletes to Watch at The 2026 Olympic Winter Games

Editor’s Note: This is part of SportsTravel’s ongoing Olympic preview week. Check back each day this week for more.

February 2: What to expect at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, by Jason Gewirtz

February 3: Previewing each venue — and whether they’ll all be ready, by Paul Stevens

February 4: Looking back 20 years at the last Winter Games in Italy, by Ted Keith

February 5: Athletes to Watch, by Paul Stevens

February 6: Previewing the Opening Ceremony, by Paul Stevens

 

Every four years, the public becomes enthralled by a the Olympic Winter Games, turning into armchair experts who learn all of the rules of curling and become diehard fans of alpine skiing.

They also become passionate supporters of individual athletes, whether they are debutants competing in emerging sports such as ski mountaineering, or those back for a fourth or even fifth time. As ever, crowds will cheer on the underdogs that embody the spirit of the Games and support their long-time favorites in their quests to smash all records set before them.

According to data from the International Olympic Committee, almost 3,000 athletes are expected to compete in Milan Cortina. There will be 116 events in 16 disciplines taking place across 15 different venues across Northern Italy from February 6–22.

Which stars will cement their places in Winter Olympic history this year? Here are eight athletes from this year’s Games who could do just that, and where they got their start that has led them to the cusp of glory

Lindsey Vonn, Alpine Skiing (United States)

Where else could we start this list than with Lindsey Vonn – quite simply one of America’s most decorated Winter Olympic athletes.

A three-time Olympic medalist (including gold in downhill at Vancouver in 2010) and four-time World Cup champion, Vonn is one of only six women to have won World Cup races in all five alpine skiing disciplines – downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom and super combined – and she has the third highest super ranking of all skiers, between both men and women. She was named the United States Olympic Committee’s Sportswoman of the Year in both 2010 and 2011.

Having retired due to repeated knee injuries in 2019, Vonn, now 41, returned to competitive skiing in November 2024 and set her sights on returning to the Olympics in Milan Cortina. However, despite rupturing her ACL during a high-speed crash at a recent World Cup race in Switzerland, she has stated her determination to compete at this year’s Games – a feat that would make her the oldest woman to compete in Alpine racing in Olympic history.

As a child, Vonn (then Kildow) was taught to ski by her grandfather, Don Kildow, in Milton, Wisconsin, before moving to Colorado to hone her skills at Ski Club Vail. In 1999, she went on to become the first American athlete alongside Will McDonald to win the “Cadets” slalom events in Italy’s Trofeo di Sci Alpino, before making her World Cup debut at the age of 16 in 2000 in Park City, Utah, and her Olympic bow in Salt Lake City in 2002.

Mikaela Shiffrin, Alpine Skiing (United States)

Standing between Vonn and a second Olympic gold is U.S. rival Mikaela Shiffrin, now competing in her fourth Winter Games and also considered to be one of the greatest alpine skiers in the history of the sport.

To date, Shiffrin ‘s 108 World Cup victories are the most of any alpine skier (men’s or women’s), and she has two Olympic gold medals, the first coming at age 18 in Sochi 2014, making her the youngest slalom gold medalist in Olympic history.

Adding to her stocked trophy cabinet will require avoiding the disappointment of Beijing 2022, where she not only failed to win an individual medal, she didn’t finish in three of her five individual events. She has made an admirable recovery from subsequent battles with her mental health after a crash in the 2024-2025 season led to her coping with physical injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Through the encouragement of her own ski-racing parents, Shiffrin started skiing at the age of two in Vail, Colorado, and began slalom training at age six, before training at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont and then winning her first World Cup race at 16 years old.

Eileen Gu, Freestyle Skiing (China)

Freestyle skier Eileen Feng Gu, also known by her Chinese name Gu Ailing, attracted attention long before this year’s Olympic Winter Games. Born in San Francisco to a Chinese mother and an American father, Gu originally competed for the United States before switching to China at age 15 in 2019 through a request to the International Ski Federation – a decision which drew controversy when the Chinese Consulate General in New York said that Gu would have to have been naturalized or achieved permanent residency status in China to compete for the country.

When announcing the switch, Gu took to Instagram to say that she wanted to “inspire millions of young people” in China and to “unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendship between nations.”

In 2022, Gu became the youngest Olympic champion in freestyle skiing thanks to gold medal runs in the big air and halfpipe, as well as earning a silver in slopestyle, making her the first freestyle skier to win three medals at a single Winter Games.

That fall, Gu entered Stanford University, and the next year Forbes named her the second-highest earning female athlete in the world.

Arianna Fontana, Speed Skating (Italy)

Arianna Fontana has long been a legend in Europe: an 11-time Olympic medalist with five short track speed skating European titles and the Italian sportswoman with the highest number of Winter Olympic medals.

After claiming the European 1500 title in Tilburg, Netherlands, last month, Fontana is back for her sixth Winter Olympics and one of the big medal hopes for host nation the in Milan Cortina.

Her track record makes for impressive reading, having won gold medals in her specialist 500m short track event at the last two Winter Games. Four years ago, she secured three Olympic medals in China, taking her beyond cross-country skier Stefania Belmondo as the Italian sportswoman with the highest number of Winter Olympic medals.

Fontana began skating at the age of four and made her Olympic debut at age 15 in 2006 in Turin – the last time Italy staged the Games – when she claimed silver and bronze medals respectively.

Maxim Naumov, Figure Skating (United States)

One of the most poignant moments of these Olympic Games is likely to be when U.S. figure skating hopeful Maxim Naumov takes to the ice for his competition debut, just over a year after his parents, Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova (former world champions in pairs figure skating in 1994 for Russia) were killed in the Potomac River mid-air crash in Washington, D.C.

Only three days before the accident, his parents had written a caption on their final Instagram post saying that their son had “made us all proud.” One of the final things Naumov discussed with his parents was his dream to represent Team USA at the Olympic Games.

On the ice, Naumov’s pedigree – including becoming the 2026 U.S. national bronze medalist, a three-time U.S. national pewter medalist (for finishing in fourth place) and the 2020 U.S. junior national champion – suggests that he could yet replicate or even surpass his parents’ achievements.
The former gymnast and Simsbury (Connecticut) High School graduate began skating at the age of five after being inspired by his parents. To honor his parents, Naumov has taken a leading role at the Skating Club of Boston’s Youth Academy Program, which was established by his parents.

Auston Matthews, Ice Hockey (United States)

This will be the first time NHL players will take part in the Olympic Games since Sochi in 2014, and to say that the United States is under pressure to win ice hockey gold in Italy would be a significant understatement. At the heart of its Olympic Men’s National Team’s efforts to bring home their first gold medal since the “Miracle on Ice” team of 1980 will undoubtedly be Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews.

Matthews is right at home amid a star-studded U.S. roster, having been selected for six All-Star Games since debuting in 2017. Fellow forwards Jack Eichel and Jack Hughes (who is joined on the team by his brother, Quinn) give the U.S. plenty of scoring punch.

Matthews comes from a family steeped in athletic prowess. His brother played college baseball and his uncle, Wes Matthews, briefly played in the NFL for the Miami Dolphins. Matthews has been unable to bring a Stanley Cup to long-suffering Toronto Maple Leaf fans, but he can make up for that at least somewhat by delivering to similarly starved fans of U.S. men’s hockey.

Mia Brookes, Snowboarding (Great Britain)

Great Britain is not blessed with a plethora of Winter Olympic champions in its history but fans will be rooting for up-and-coming snowboarder Mia Brookes when she makes her bow in Milan Cortina.

At age 16 Brookes became the youngest world champion in snowboarding by winning slopestyle gold in Georgia in 2023, the same year she won the slopestyle competition at the 2023 Freestyle World Championships. She has also won two slopestyle gold medals at the Winter X Games and two World Cup titles in big air events.

With a lack of snow back home, Brookes began to learn how to snowboard at just 18 months at Kidsgrove Ski Centre in Stoke-on-Trent and continued her learning journey at Chill Factore near Manchester, now the UK’s longest indoor ski slope. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she studied remotely away from Sandbach High School to allow her to compete in snowboard events across mainland Europe and increase her chances of one day becoming an Olympic champion.

Following spells training in Switzerland, Italy and Austria, Brookes joined the GB Snowsport program at the age of 10 and a year later, she competed at the 2018 British Snowboard Championships in Laax in the Swiss canton of the Grisons

Emily Harrop, Skimo (France)

Ski mountaineering, otherwise known as ‘skimo’, will make its first appearance at an Olympic Winter Games this month, and one name hoping to dominate the headlines is France’s Emily Harrop.

Born to English parents in the Tarentaise Valley of the French Alps, Harrop could have been lining up for Great Britain but instead opted to represent France as that was the country in which she had nurtured her love for winter sports.

After originally competing in alpine skiing, an undisclosed injury forced her to discover ski mountaineering. By 2021, she had joined the Armée des Champions (France’s military sports team), which enabled her to translate her dream of becoming a full-time professional athlete into reality.
Coming into 2026, Harrop is not only an emerging star but a genuine medal hopeful in Milan Cortina. Now a four-time ISMF World Cup champion, Harrop closed out her 2025 season with seven wins out of seven races at the ski mountaineering World Cup, notably the sprint and overall crystal globe for the fourth season in a row.

For someone who has confessed to being “born with bindings on my feet and poles in my hands,” who would bet against Harrop being the first skimo Olympic gold medalist?