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In 2002, on home ice and snow in Utah, the USA obliterated its records for most gold medals (10, beating the previous high of six) and most overall medals (34, more than two times the previous high of 13) by the country in a single Winter Olympics.
In 2026, the USA broke that national record for gold medals with 12, and broke the 30-medal mark for the first time outside North America (Norway broke the overall record with 18 golds).
If that stat seems surprising, perhaps it’s because the bulk of those US medals were won by people who are not household names. You won’t see Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart cheering them on US TV. You may not even know their sports.
Sure, some of the athletes drawing the pre-Games hype followed through – Mikaela Shiffrin, Alysa Liu, Jordan Stolz and the men’s and women’s hockey teams among them. Ilia Malinin fell short in his individual event, but we can’t forget that his otherworldly skills nailed down gold in the team event.
But you could win a lot of trivia contests by naming other US medalists and asking contestants to name their events. Elizabeth Lemley? Connor Curran? Ben Ogden? Jaelin Kauf? Paula Moltzan and Jackie Wiles?
One stunning stat sums it up: In Milano Cortina, the USA won more medals in cross-country skiing than snowboarding.
That’s right. Cross-country skiing. The USA’s GOAT, Jessie Diggins, overcame a rib injury in her first event to take a hard-earned bronze. To give away one of the trivia answers above: Ogden took silver in the men’s sprint and teamed with Gus Schumacher for another silver in the team sprint.
Snowboarding medals? Two-time defending halfpipe champion Chloe Kim took silver. Jake Canter, who came into the Games with a thinner resume than many of his teammates, took bronze in slopestyle – a medical marvel, given that he survived a horrific accident as a 13-year-old that left him in a medically induced coma for nearly a week.
And that’s it. In 2002, US snowboarders won more than that in one event, sweeping the men’s halfpipe podium.
This year, USA fared only slightly better in the related freestyle skiing events that have, like the snowboard events, been eagerly roped into the Olympic programme by the IOC as it tries to capture the youth audience. Alex Ferreira completed his medal set in ski halfpipe, veteran Alex Hall picked up silver in slopestyle, and Mac Forehand got a silver in big air. Four years ago, the USA got five medals in the same three events.
What’s going on? In a sense, the USA’s “extreme sports” stars are victims of their own success. And that may not be a bad thing.
Consider basketball, which dominates much of US culture from isolated farmhouse hoops to busy inner-city asphalt courts. For decades, the US ruled the Olympics, even with college players going against de facto pros from elsewhere. They restored order when NBA players joined the fray, but the men’s team failed to win gold in 2004 and have been challenged in every Olympics since then, even as the US women continue at a level far above their peers. Not coincidentally, the NBA’s talent pool is now roughly one-fourth foreign, and the US men will have to get past the likes of Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Dončić and Victor Wembanyama at the next Summer Olympics.
While the US hoops community may gnash its teeth watching the US men’s team labor to victory, it can also congratulate itself on evangelizing the sport. Compare basketball with women’s hockey, in which the two finalists in almost every world championship and Olympic tournament are Canada and the US, rendering the round-robin and early knockout phases nearly meaningless.
Snowboarding has gone through the same global growth. Like basketball, the sport was born in the USA, and American athletes have long dominated. This year, Kim winning silver rather than gold was seen as a shock. But it’s also an indirect victory that demonstrates the impact US snowboarders as a whole, and very specifically Kim herself, have had. Kim didn’t falter in her event. She was outdone by South Korea’s Gaon Choi. And who inspired and even directly mentored Choi? That would be Kim.
So the glass-half-full interpretation of the world’s rising challenge in snowboarding and freestyle skiing would be that sports and entertainment are still major US exports, as evidenced by the sounds of Sweet Caroline during hockey intermissions in Italy. The glass-half-empty approach is that US athletes are struggling to remain the masters of the sports that were invented in the States.
Meanwhile, the US did just fine elsewhere in Italy. Alpine skiers rebounded from a one-medal showing in 2022 to win four this time around, even with Lindsey Vonn suffering a horrific injury and Shiffrin only taking one medal. Long-track speedskaters picked up five medals, the most since the trio of Joey Cheek, Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick won seven in 2006. Other medals came in both typical (ice hockey, figure skating, women’s bobsleigh) and atypical (luge, curling) sports.
And snowboarding and freestyle skiing are both in a very good place, with new generations in and out of the USA pushing the sport’s boundaries and finding new ways to flip and spin.
