There’s only so much curling a man can take. For me, that limit is about 15 minutes, at which point I turned off NBC’s Friday morning coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics. The winter edition of the Olympics has always been a tough sell for me and most Americans who live outside the gray, brutally cold Northeast. But for some reason, this year’s games feel more lifeless than ever.
Here in the Mid-Atlantic, two weeks of ice-covered pathways and bottlenecked roads have kept an entire region of people who prize their mobility snowbound. Well, more accurately, “snowcrete”-bound. Eagerness for spring hasn’t exactly helped increase interest in the winter games. Below-freezing temperatures have made everything solid and immovable. Cars, people, and daily life itself are all stuck, miserably waiting for the warm rays of March and April to do what salt and shovels simply cannot. I suppose some people like this weather. They probably like the Winter Olympics too. I am not such a one.
Count my 7-year-old nephew among the Americans who also don’t see the appeal. Team USA’s mixed doubles figure skaters were being interviewed on Thursday evening when he turned toward me with a smirk. I did my best to defend the elegant art of jumping and spinning on ice, but he just wasn’t buying it. The next promotional sequence featured snowboarding, which I assumed might finally hook him. But his eyes just glazed over. “Do we have to watch this?”
At its core, the great appeal of the Olympics has always been the opportunity to express pride in our nation while flexing our physical and economic might over other countries in a peaceful arena. When Americans think of the Winter Olympics, the story that instantly comes to mind is the “Miracle on Ice,” when a ragtag group of American college hockey players defeated the dominant Soviet Union team at the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, New York.
Cold War tensions were high, and the Soviets had humiliated the same American team by a score of 10–3 in an exhibition only weeks prior to the Olympic Games. The upset was so improbable that, in the final moments of the game, ABC broadcaster Al Michaels delivered the call that still resonates decades later: “Do you believe in miracles?” Michaels shouted. “Yes!”
But miracles feel in short supply at these games, and I’m struggling to find a single inspiring story to follow.
What are the great narratives of these Winter Olympics in Milan? The 41-year-old Lindsey Vonn, a five-time Olympian and one of the most decorated alpine skiers in history, is returning to the games after retirement from the sport in 2019. After a career riddled with injuries, her knees are essentially destroyed, a reality made only worse when she ruptured her ACL during a training run in Montana and was airlifted off the course only a week ago. But Vonn is determined to compete and was on the practice course in Italy on Thursday, using a brace to stabilize her injured knee.
In the saddest and most predictable outcome, Vonn crashed in her first event at the Olympics on Sunday. She was airlifted off the course and likely has months of recovery ahead. Beyond Vonn, whose audacious comeback story ended in misery, I’m not finding much to root for. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were on hand to watch Team USA’s women hockey team stomp the Czechs on Thursday. I caught about five minutes of the replay on NBC’s broadcast but found myself quickly nodding off. Sorry, ladies. In a post shared to X as the games got underway, The American Conservative contributor Steve Sailer addressed America’s lack of interest in this year’s Olympics. “The tastes of sports media >50 years ago were more upper class and cosmopolitan (e.g., Wide World of Sports),” wrote Sailer. “Americans felt they should try to be more interested in what the rest of the world, especially European elites, were doing, like ski-jumping.”
Ironically enough, it’s the ski-jumping contest that has provided the greatest controversy and humor of any event thus far at the 2026 Games. In an immensely funny news item from Thursday, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced it was investigating claims that male ski jumpers are injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid in order to fly further. German newspaper BILD called it “Penisgate.” The alleged injections help make the jumpers more aerodynamic in a sport where centimeters can define the difference between gold and silver. But the laughter I gained from reading reports about the incident doesn’t make me any more interested in actually watching the competition.
I suppose I’ll catch bits of the action from Italy over the course of the next two weeks. It’s that dead time in the sports world where American football has essentially ended, the NBA regular season trudges forward, and we’re still a full month away from March Madness, the coup de grace of college hoops. For all intents and purposes, the English Premier League has already been decided, and the World Cup won’t get started for another four months. As a sports fan, the options are limited. So the Winter Olympics, whether I like it or not, will get a reluctant look-in. Here’s hoping it can manifest a storyline befitting the hype.
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