Ten athletes from Team USA to watch at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics

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1) Lindsey Vonn Alpine skiing

Mikaela Shiffrin has surpassed Vonn’s record haul of World Cup wins and staked her claim as the GOAT. But Vonn has a solid claim to be the best ever in the speed events (downhill, super-G), and she has been racing exclusively in those disciplines since returning from retirement, surging to the top of the World Cup downhill standings at age 41. She has a score to settle with the sport’s biggest stage – her lifetime total of three Olympic medals (one gold) would probably be higher if not for a horror crash in practice in 2006 and injuries that either limited or outright excluded her from other Games. After some selection drama in the team combined event in last year’s world championships, it seems inconceivable that Vonn and Shiffrin, both of whom have had some misfortune in the Olympics, would not be paired up to form Alpine skiing’s equivalent of the 1992 basketball Dream Team. Vonn was in a nasty crash last weekend but it seems that she will be fit to take part in Italy.

2) Jessie Diggins Cross-country skiing

Not the global GOAT but certainly the US’s GOAT, Diggins is on pace to move into retirement as the World Cup overall champion, a prize she has already claimed three times. Since bursting into public consciousness with her team sprint gold medal in 2018, a moment made more memorable by commentator Chad Salmela’s frenzied “HERE COMES DIGGINS!” call, she has added two more Olympic medals, a second world championship and five straight top-two finishes in the World Cup overall standings. Diggins is a legitimate threat in most events and could leave Italy with more medals than anyone else in the US delegation.

Jessie Diggins is closing in on a fourth World Cup overall title, cementing herself as the world’s most dominant cross-country skier.

3) Aerin Frankel Ice hockey

Boston fans are prone to exalting their home town heroes, and Frankel is a prime example. She excelled in college hockey at Northeastern and is the cornerstone of the PWHL’s Boston Fleet, earning the nickname “the Green Monster” after the imposing wall in Fenway Park. Frankel has started in the last three world championships, winning twice and being named the 2025 event’s best goalie thanks to her 94.5 save percentage. She did even better in the Rivalry Series against Canada in November and December, stopping 96.1% of the shots she faced against the only other country to win Olympic or world championship gold.

4) Campbell Wright Biathlon

Other than the new event of ski mountaineering, the only Winter Olympic sport in which no US athlete has claimed a medal is biathlon. The person with the best chance of changing that is a former New Zealand biathlete who changed his nationality to the US after the 2022-23 season. He had a breakout performance at the 2025 world championships, taking silver in the sprint and pursuit and finishing fourth in the mass start. He has taken another silver in World Cup competition this season. With veteran Deedra Irwin also in good form, the US mixed relay team came tantalizingly close to the podium in a World Cup mixed relay on 24 January, finishing 2.3 seconds behind third-place Czech Republic. The men’s relay team also has a fourth-place finish this season.

Campbell Wright is a former New Zealand biathlete who changed his nationality to the USA after the 2022-23 season.

5) Danny Casper Curling

One hypothesis that explains the US men’s soccer team’s success at the 2002 World Cup is that several of the players were too young to feel the pressure. The 24-year-old Casper seems similarly impervious to nerves. Facing perennial Olympian and 2018 gold medalist John Shuster in a winner-take-all game at the Olympic trials in November, Casper rattled off clutch shots with the nonchalance of someone playing a Tuesday night social league game. The US had not yet earned its place in the Olympics, but Casper took care of that by scoring four in the ninth end against veteran Chinese skip Xu Xiaoming to wrap up the qualification tournament in style.

6) Ilia Malinin Figure skating

The 21-year-old from the DC suburbs has been dominant for so long that it’s easy to forget he’s appearing in the Olympics for the first time. He took bronze in the 2023 world championships and has since rattled off three straight Grand Prix finals and two straight world championships. He has earned the nickname “Quad God” because he lands a dizzying array of quadruple jumps, including the quad axel that eludes mere mortals. In the Grand Prix final in December, he shook off an error in the short program with a world-record performance in the free skate. He has posted eight of the 15 top scores since the current scoring system came into place in the 2018-19 season. This year, Malinin is the headliner of a US men’s trio that will bring an undercurrent of emotions – Andrew Torgashev has family in Ukraine, and Maxim Naumov’s parents were killed in the Washington DC plane crash a little more than a year ago that claimed the lives of many skaters and their families.

Ilia Malinin is the red-hot favourite to succeed Nathan Chen as the Olympic champion in men’s figure skating.

7) Jordan Stolz Speed skating

Could one US skater sweep the men’s sprints? At age 21, Stolz has already done it at two world championships. Last year, he merely medaled in all three sprint distances. In the World Cup this year, he has swept all 10 races at 1000m and 1500m. In the nine World Cup races at 500m, he has five wins, two second-place finishes, one third-place result and a lone podium miss, finishing 0.01 seconds out of third. Last year, he only lost once at 1500m, went unbeaten at 1000m, and won seven of 10 races at 500m.

8) Ollie Martin Snowboarding

The New Zealand-born teen soared into the snowboarding elite last year at 16, taking a World Cup slopestyle win and following up with bronze medals in slopestyle and big air at the world championships. He has landed both a frontside and backside 2160 – six full rotations while airborne. He returned to the podium at the World Cup stop in his home state of Colorado in December.

Colorado-based Ollie Martin represented the United States at the 2024 Winter Youth Olympics and won a silver medal in the big air event.

9) Kaysha Love Bobsleigh

The big names for the US women’s bobsleigh team are still Elana Meyers Taylor, who is trying to earn a medal (and a long-elusive gold) in her fifth straight Olympics, and Kaillie Humphries, the former Canadian driver who has three Olympic gold medals. But Love, a former collegiate sprinter at UNLV, has quickly climbed into elite status since switching from the back seat – she was Humphries’ brakewoman in 2022 – to the front. She had two runner-up finishes in World Cup two-woman competition this season and had a first and a second in monobob, the event in which she won the 2025 world championship.

10) Anna Gibson Ski mountaineering

It’s difficult to imagine a more impressive debut than that Gibson made in the new Olympic sport of ski mountaineering. She only started training in June after a suggestion by Cam Smith, a veteran of the sport. In December, she made her World Cup debut in a relay with Smith – and won. She’s not exactly a newcomer to the demands of the sport, in which athletes power their way up a mountain and ski back down. She has a background in Alpine skiing. And cross-country skiing. And cross-country running. She had landed on trail running before going in a new direction in a new sport, going from neophyte to Olympian in less time than it would take most people to haul themselves up a medium-sized hill.