When most people think of American sports, they think of baseball, football, hockey and basketball. But with the end of football season and MLB Opening Day not until March, the country turned its attention to the XXV Olympic Winter Games in Milano Cortina, Italy, where the United States showed the world why it is a figure skating powerhouse.
On Sunday, February 8, the United States won the Figure Skating Team Event, becoming back-to-back gold medalists in this event. The team performed two routines in each of the four figure skating events: men’s singles, women’s singles, pairs and ice dance. The United States led early in the competition, but Japan began to close the gap after winning both the pairs and women’s finals. America’s gold medal hopes rested on the shoulders of 21-year-old Ilia Malinin. Malinin finished second in the men’s short program to Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama but came back with a vengeance in the free skate, besting Kagiyama’s teammate Shun Sato 200.03 to 194.86. Although Malinin slipped and nearly fell during his routine, its difficulty was enough to secure Team USA a 69-68 nail biting win over Japan.
Coming off their gold medal in the team event, Madison Chock and Evan Bates earned a silver medal in ice dance. They finished second in both the rhythm dance and free skate to France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. Chock and Bates became partners in 2011 and married in 2024. Their chemistry has helped them win the last three World Figure Skating Championships in ice dance. While they came up just short of an individual gold, Chock and Bates are still leaving Italy with some impressive hardware.
In a shocking turn of events, the “Quad God,” Ilia Malinin, did not medal in men’s singles. Despite leading after the short program, a series of falls during his free skate put him in eighth place in an event that many thought was his gold to lose.
“Maybe I was too confident,” Malinin said in an interview with NBC following the event. He opened up about his mental health struggles because of all the pressure he faced with the eyes of the world on him at such a young age. He showed incredible maturity, though, adding in another interview with CBS, “You learn a lot more from failure than you do from winning.”
Fortunately for Team USA, they ended the games with a gold medal in the final figure skating event, women’s singles, thanks to Alysa Liu, who became the first American woman to win this event since 2002. Liu was in third place after the short program behind Japan’s Ami Nakai and Kaori Sakamoto but delivered an outstanding 150.2-point free skate performance that sent her to the top of the podium.
Liu also competed in Beijing in 2022 but retired afterwards at just 16 because of the immense pressure she was under and the toll the sport took on her mental health. She said that she was satisfied with her career and was ready to move on. After two years away from figure skating, she returned to the sport and now has a gold medal to show for it. Liu became a fan favorite throughout the Games, gaining five million new followers on Instagram. Her infectious personality came through in her performances, especially at her gala skate where she did a routine to PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson’s Stateside.
The 2026 Olympic Winter Games saw the United States set a national record for most gold medals in a single Winter Games with 12, surpassing the previous mark of 10. Team USA won a total of 33 medals, second only to Norway with 41. The next Olympic Winter Games will be in the French Alps in 2030. The world now sets its sights on 2028, when the United States will host the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad, commonly known as the Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles. It will be the first time any Olympic Games are on American soil since Salt Lake City in 2002.
