A dog joined the cross-country team sprint at Lago di Tesero. Photo / NTB via AFP
The Winter Olympics attracted extreme characters and, across 17 days of competition in Italy, the stories veered between the sublime, ridiculous, inspirational and bizarre.
The advantages of a larger suit in ski-jumping are well accepted, meaning there was huge plausibility to claims aired in the German newspaper Bild that competitors were injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid. The World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed it would look into the issue.
Quelle surprise! When the individual scorecards came back from the ice dance, the extent to which the French judge had favoured compatriots Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fourier Beaudry over their American arch-rivals was laid bare. Madison Chock, one half of the US team, called for judges to be “vetted and reviewed”.
It had all gone so well. Despite fears of a backlash, the US Winter Olympic team were greeted with huge cheers. But then the camera turned to Vice-President JD Vance and the mood inside Milan’s San Siro stadium changed instantly.
Ilia Malinin was so good in the team event that even his opponents considered him unbeatable. The main question before the individual figure skating was not whether he would win but if we would see the quadruple axel and a one-footed backflip in the same sequence. And then he buckled, falling twice as the Milano Ice Skating Arena fell silent.
A stash of 10,000 Milano-Cortina-branded condoms had been provided for the 2800 athletes but in the space of three days, supplies inside the athlete villages had run out. “It clearly shows that Valentine’s Day is in full swing,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams observed.
She was a convicted thief and now she had a gun in her hand. Less than four months after being handed a suspended jail sentence, French biathlete Julia Simon won gold, beating team-mate Justine Braisaz-Bouchet into 80th. Braisaz-Bouchet’s bank card was one of those she had used.
With just nine days before the women’s downhill, Lindsey Vonn crashed and ruptured the ACL in her left knee. She decided to take her chance, clipping a gate after 13 seconds, and sending the mountain silent as she screamed in agony at the damage to her left leg. She has since had four surgeries and is not yet back on her feet, revealing on Monday that she almost had the leg amputated.
They don’t pay the athletes for winning, let alone appearing at the Olympics, so you might hope that the medals would stand the test of time. Well … after more than 200 medals from Paris 2024 were returned, Milano-Cortina organisers were also forced to mend at least four medals in Italy that had come apart from the ribbon.
The best that the entire British team had managed at any previous Winter Games was one gold medal. And never on snow. Step forward Matt Weston, Tabby Stoecker, Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale. In the space of five hours on one Sunday, they rewrote Great Britain’s Winter Olympic history.
The prelude to the penis enhancement allegations came last year when three Norwegian coaches were found to have secretly reinforced the stitching in the crotch area of ski-jumping suits after the official inspections. They were all ineligible at the Winter Games but the two ski-jumpers were in Italy after successfully arguing that they knew nothing of the skulduggery. They have gone home with two medals.
The biggest story of the Winter Olympics. When Vladyslav Heraskevych arrived for skeleton practice in Cortina on the first Monday of the Games, his “helmet of memory” depicted Ukrainian athletes who had been killed since the Russian invasion. He was also adamant that this was not political but a factual gesture of remembrance. The IOC was unmoved, disqualifying him from the event.
The Winter Olympics contained floods of tears, fury, regret, sadness but also joy. And perhaps the most eye-catching were those shed by Jake Paul, the YouTube star who has shared a ring with Mike Tyson and Anthony Joshua. He looked elated to see his Dutch girlfriend Jutta Leerdam win something of sporting substance.
Where to start with Sturla Holm Lægreid? He won a bronze medal. He used his post-race interview to try to win back his girlfriend by revealing to the world that he had cheated but said he still loved her. And then he apologised if he had taken the spotlight away from the race winner, who had paid tribute to a recently deceased team-mate. Oh, and the ex-girlfriend also did not seem to be won over.
The star of the opening ceremony was Andrea Bocelli. But he shared billing at San Siro with Mariah Carey, who attracted online criticism for appearing to mime some of a performance that did include a song in Italian. The organisers were asked directly whether she had sung herself but they refused to offer any guarantees and instead pointed out that it was usual for parts of an opening ceremony to be pre-recorded.
There are few more sedate winter sports than curling; an activity that any self-respecting armchair bowls, chess or snooker fan might find compelling but perhaps lost on a generation with shortening attention spans. Step forward Marc Kennedy, whose reaction to being accused of double-touching a stone was volcanic. Never before has curling appeared on more TikTok feeds.
Atle Lie McGrath had lost his grandfather on the day of the opening ceremony and was skiing with a black armband in his honour. An inspired slalom first run had placed him in a commanding position but then disaster. He straddled a gate, reacting by hurling his poles off the course and storming towards the forest before lying on his back.
Nazgul, the Czechoslovakian wolfdog, had been left at home by his owners, who happened to live near the venue for the women’s team cross-country in Tesero. Next thing they knew, their dog had become a star across the world after escaping from their home, finding his way on to the Olympic cross-country skiing course and then galloping down the finishing straight to the cheers of the crowds. They now have an official photo-finish snap to remember his day.
The build-up to the Games was dominated by the spectre of US Vice-President, JD Vance, arriving in Milan for the opening ceremony with members of the ICE agency. There were demonstrations on the streets of Milan while Gus Kenworthy, a British freestyle skier, also decided to urinate the words “f*** ice” into the snow.
For a team that kept finishing last, the Israeli bobsleighers attracted an extraordinary amount of attention. First a Swiss broadcaster devoted almost his entire broadcast to questioning whether Israeli athletes supporting the war in Gaza should be allowed to compete, and then the Israeli Olympic association itself withdrew the four-man team after accusing a competitor of faking injury so that the fifth member of the team could get a run out. “It did not meet the standards expected of Olympic athletes,” they said.
The athlete of the Games was the cross-country skiing phenomenon Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo, who won six gold medals, the most at any Winter Olympics. But the most transcendent was still Eileen Gu. Three medals, under fire from Republican senators for her Chinese sporting allegiance, and now off to Milan Fashion Week with medals four, five and six of her Olympic career. Most extraordinary of all, however, was the way she spoke so powerfully about her late grandmother after learning of the death between sailing four metres in the air to win halfpipe gold and then meeting the world’s media.