There’s a joke about the difference between the Summer and the Winter Olympic Games. The Summer Olympics features activities that wouldn’t be out of place at a picnic: swimming, running, tennis, volleyball, and so on. The Winter Olympics, on the other hand, includes potentially harrowing ways to die.

And it’s true! There’s downhill skiing: hurtling down a sheer face of ice at eighty miles per hour. Ski jumping: schussing straight down a steep hill, jumping off a ledge, travelling a hundred metres through the air, and landing . . . on skis. Skeleton: lying face down, one’s chin inches off the frozen surface, while sledding head first along a curving ice chute at nearly ninety miles per hour. Aerial skiing: not unlike ski jumping, but add flips and twists. Hockey: sharp blades, swinging sticks, frozen rubber discs flung at high speeds, and, sometimes, flying fists. Bobsled: like Formula 1 racing—in a convertible. Biathlon actually involves guns. Luge seems tamer than skeleton, sort of—at least lugers slide feet first—except that an athlete actually did die in a crash during a training run just before the start of the Vancouver Olympics. Cross-country skiing looks relatively safe, until you see competitors pass the finish line and collapse onto the snow, frantically trying to pull in more oxygen, sometimes making the small sounds of a gravely wounded animal. Ski cross: what?!

There’s also curling.

At the start of the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics, perhaps the joke seemed a little too literal. The most hyped event leading up to the Games had been Lindsey Vonn’s attempt to win the downhill at age forty-one, coming out of a five-year retirement, after a partial knee replacement—and to do it only nine days after fully rupturing her A.C.L. But Vonn took an aggressive line down the course, hooked her arm on a gate, and shattered her left tibia just moments into the race. She was taken off the mountain on a stretcher dangling from a helicopter. On Friday, she posted images of an X-ray of her leg, following her sixth surgery in less than two weeks. The bone was a latticework of screws and plates.

There have been other, less widely publicized crashes and accidents—even during just that women’s downhill, when a second skier had to be helicoptered off the mountain following a crash late in the race. The two-time Olympic medallist freeskier Cassie Sharpe was carried off the half-pipe and taken to the hospital after a hard fall in qualifying. So was a teen skier from New Zealand, Finley Melville Ives. And so on. But it quickly became clear that the risk of physical injury was simply part of the danger that athletes faced during these Games. The real sense of jeopardy that dominated the opening week was psychological.

How else to explain the performance of Mikaela Shiffrin—the greatest alpine skier in history, and the winner of seven of eight slalom World Cup races this season—during the combined event? Shiffrin’s quest to redeem her poor performance during the 2022 Beijing Olympics, where she did not finish three of six runs and came away without any medals, was another major story line coming into these Games. Her teammate, Breezy Johnson, the gold-medal winner of the downhill after Vonn’s crash, handed Shiffrin a lead going into the slalom portion of the event—a perfect opportunity. But she skied hesitantly, failing to find a rhythm as she cut through the gates, and finished with the fifteenth-best time out of eighteen skiers—something hard to imagine in any circumstance but the Olympics.

Shiffrin’s struggles were hardly a secret. But even those whose egos seemed built for the brightest spotlight weren’t immune to the intense pressure. The American figure skater Ilia Malinin came into the Games considered as close to a lock for the gold in men’s skating as possible. He had not lost a competition in more than two years, and sometimes won by twenty or thirty points, in a sport where the result often comes down to the final skater. With his athleticism and his bravado—his programs featured the world’s only quad axel and the only backflip, which always elicited a roar from the crowd despite earning him no points—Malinin looked poised not only to win but also to bring men’s figure skating into the mainstream. No one at these Games faced higher expectations, but no one seemed better equipped to handle them. That “Quad God” nickname? He gave it to himself. But after a brilliant short program and a strong opening quad flip during the free skate, he bailed out of his quad axel attempt midair, and then fell apart. The Quad God finished in eighth place. “I thought that all I needed to do was go out there and trust the process that I’ve always been doing with every competition,” Malinin said after his collapse. “But of course it’s not like any other competition. It’s the Olympics. It was really just something that overwhelmed me, and I just felt like I had no control.”

Malinin is twenty-one years old, but he looked more like a lost boy as he skated off the ice. It was hard not to feel for him—and to feel a little guilty, too. I’d been so confident in his victory that I’d turned off the TV not long before he was set to skate, in order to get my car inspected. I figured it would be easy to catch it later, on replay: I thought there was, after all, no suspense.

Why do we do this to people? And it isn’t just the Vonns, Shiffrins, or Malinins—many athletes with far less celebrity (and far less money) were in the vulnerable position of orienting their entire lives toward a single opportunity, which in some cases lasted only a few minutes. Winter Olympians are more or less ignored for years, and then required to perform in front of millions of newly minted armchair experts, many of whom would not brave a snowy sidewalk without a jug of ice melt. It’s no wonder that athletes sometimes straddle a gate and then throw their ski poles.

That’s part of the story of this Olympics, but as the Games went on it started to seem the smaller part. Because the athletes were having, finally, so much fun, and sharing that fun with us. Even some of the grievances and controversies had a silly, comic element. The Norwegian scheme to doctor the crotches of ski-jumping suits? Allegations of ski-jumper penis enhancement? The dog that ran onto a course and raced the cross-country skiers? The biathlete bronze medallist who broke down in tears and admitted to cheating on his (now ex-)girlfriend, in a gonzo bid to get her back? (He failed.) The expletive-filled accusations of rule violations during a curling game? That’s right—curling beef! And none of it involved Donald Trump. Honestly, it was a treat.

Not every athlete has been so lucky to escape the current political moment, of course. After the freeskier Hunter Hess commented that he doesn’t “represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” Trump branded the Olympian a “real Loser.” Amber Glenn, the first openly queer figure skater to compete for Team U.S.A., who spoke up about the difficulties faced by the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, was inundated with threats. The geopolitical context of the final marquee event, the men’s gold-medal hockey game, between U.S.A. and Canada, will be impossible to escape. There has even been some speculation that Trump, who once talked about annexing Canada, may fly to Milan to attend.

That’s nothing new: politics has been part of the Olympics since their inception, despite what the pooh-bahs claim. But they do transcend politics, too, and give us real examples of excellence. As this year’s Games neared its end, the awesome moments seemed to pile up, one atop another. The sight of American speed skater Jordan Stolz striding, powered by his—sorry!—godlike quads. The legendary Norwegian cross-country skier Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, surging up a hill and away from the pack. The American snowboarder Chloe Kim finishing in second, and then rushing to embrace the gold-medal winner, South Korea’s Choi Ga-on. The Italian skier Federica Brignone, who broke multiple bones in her leg less than a year ago, walking away with two gold medals. Another Italian, Francesca Lollobrigida’s tiny son, wearing his mom’s gold medal, grabbing his mother’s face as she gave a post-race interview. Elana Meyers Taylor with her two sons, after winning the monobob for the U.S. The American hockey player Megan Keller’s slick move to pull the puck past a Canadian defender and score in overtime during the gold-medal game, adding another unbelievable moment to the two teams’ long and perfect rivalry. The American figure skater Alysa Liu, skating with pure confidence and absolute freedom. When she finished, there were still two skaters who could beat her. But her thrilled reaction made it obvious that a gold medal would be great, but it was, at that moment, beside the point.

I’ve felt something odd while watching these Olympics, something missing of late: hope for the future. All these young people, doing remarkable things! They have offered not only examples of how to test physical limits but also of how to be. It has become a cliché to talk about the importance of process, to downplay an emphasis on results. It’s not just wellness-speak, either. The Olympic creed is “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.” It’s not so easy, of course, and when most athletes speak that way it sounds hokey and false. But when an athlete manages to find that peace, it really does seem like the most genuine victory of all.

On Wednesday, Mikaela Shiffrin stood in the starting gate for her first slalom run, and discovered that she was ready. She already had what she needed inside of her—but one thing that was missing was her father, who died in an accident in 2020. And she realized that she needed her father. And so she talked to him, she said later, and accepted, finally, that he would not speak back. Shiffrin’s father cared more about good turns than winning races. And so when she raced that day, her turns were great.

Shiffrin finished her second run a second and a half clear of second place. “The wonderful thing about this day was that I felt proud before it happened,” Shiffrin said afterward. “We took that pride into the day. That was wonderful.” Yes, it was. ♦