THE PAGE TURNS

February 21, 2026March 2, 2026

Olympic Redemption & the Four-Year Interval, Milano-Cortina Version

Shiffrin wins a second slalom gold, four Games later. AP Photo/Marco Trovati.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. They’d been here before. I’ve written about this before. More than once. These Games have happened before. This Olympic thing, this redemption thing, is like a video on a loop playing a story on repeat. It’s built into the competitions. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s why the Olympics is a gift that keeps on giving.

The Greeks created the four-year interval, back when lifespans were shorter. They had a Games every year, but only one Olympiad to honor Zeus. It must have been the same, with veteran athletes returning after a loss to win. If they survived the wars, disease, injuries, and other calamities of 750 B.C.E.

The Winter Games are a particularly brutal place for athletes to perform. Landing on the wrong part of a blade, tipping your ski into the wrong side of the pole, or twisting a curling rock just a little too much can crush medal hopes faster than a boot on an ant. What makes them even harsher is that you may have waited four years to glide away from center ice or launch down that hill, only to see all that work erased in a second. Then, it’s time to make hard choices; can you go back to training and wait out that four years for one more chance?

February 15, 2026February 17, 2026

Generational Talent

Jordan Stoltz, about ten years old, skating on his backyard pond in Wisconsin. Photo by his dad, Dirk Stoltz.

…widely expected to be the Greatest Of All Time…

A couple days ago, gold-medal winning figure skater Ilia Malinin popped out of his planned quad axel into a single and crashed on a quad lutz, thus causing the entire corpus of American media into a frenzy. Just days earlier, Malinin had single-handedly lifted Team USA into the gold in Team Figures, gutting out an unforgettable performance with five quads. But with a few off-balanced landings in his Individual competition, he transformed from the “just might be a” G.O.A.T. into the other kind of goat, the Charlie Brown kind.

When I first saw Malinin skate in December at the Grand Prix Skate Final, where he broke the world record for points in Men’s Figures, the commentators were showering syrupy accolades down, repeating that buzzword of the 21st century: Generational Talent. It’s a phrase that used to be “once-in-a-lifetime” or “living legend…” But Generational Talent has to be forged into actual medals, so, for now, Malinin can read the memoirs of Lindsay Vonn, Michelle Kwan, Kurt Browning, Bode Miller, and other great athletes who did not meet the absurd expectations placed on their Olympic shoulders. He is still a gold medal winner and may, still, end up being a G.O.A.T. Yet surely telling someone for years that they just might be the Greatest Of All Time is a burden rather than a compliment.

Meanwhile, since those words Generational Talent are the phrase du jour, I thought this is worth exploring in full, even if Malinin is not the centerpiece.

What kind of Generational Talent are we seeing in the 2026 Games? What does that even mean? There is plenty out there. In fact, there’s another blond young man who just might live up to the phrase, not to mention a handful of women who ski like crazy, some old chicks who have lasted for a generation, and the real GOAT of the Games, the “Speed King,” who is on track to win every race in which he’s entered. Generational Talent can mean a lot of things.

February 10, 2026February 10, 2026

The Nerve

Lindsay Vonn during the Women’s Downhill training runs, which went perfectly fine, despite her injured knee. Photo from USA Today.

It’s only Day 5, and I’m already exhausted from the tension. And from the questions: Why did they do that? How could they do that? What were they thinking? What was going through their mind?

I have come to realize that while the Summer Olympics Games is athleticism, par excellence–speed, grace, power, technique, and courage–the Winter Games are all that plus insanity and psychosis. How could they possibly compete under those conditions, especially with the eyes of the entire world watching? And yet they do, again and again.

There will be much to talk about in the coming days, but today’s post has to start with the big topic, and I’ll get it right out there. Lindsay Vonn is a badass, and I applaud her for her efforts. I know some of you disagree, so I want to get into this a little, into the context of what Alpine skiers do, and the Olympic history that surrounds an athlete’s choices. Part of that larger context is the stress of what all these athletes must endure in making spectacles of themselves.

They have a lot of nerve.