The Games Are Over. Let's Talk About What Actually Happened.
While the ski world made headlines for all the wrong reasons, the snowboard community showed up and did its job.
Milan-Cortina 2026 is in the books, and depending on which slope you were watching, you either witnessed snowboarding at its most compelling or a soap opera masquerading as a ski competition.
Let’s start with the mess. Freestyle skier Hunter Hess kicked things off by announcing to a press conference that representing the United States gave him “mixed emotions.” The resulting firestorm consumed the opening days of the Games, triggered a presidential broadside on Truth Social, and turned Hess’s family into targets of harassment and death threats. To his credit, Hess qualified and competed. But the self-inflicted wound was hard to watch. You want to make a political statement? Fine. But maybe not at the opening press conference of the most-watched Winter Games in a decade, when your job is to go ski a halfpipe.
Then there was Eileen Gu. Born in San Francisco, raised in America, educated at Stanford, and competing once again under the Chinese flag. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau paid her and fellow American-born-turned-Chinese-athlete Zhu Yi a combined $6.6 million in 2025 alone to qualify for these Games. Gu finished with two silvers and a halfpipe gold, became the most decorated female freeskier in Olympic history, and managed to avoid answering a single question about human rights in China. She said she hadn’t done the research. You either buy that or you don’t.
Meanwhile, over on the snowboard side of Livigno Snow Park, the riders did what snowboarders do: they put their heads down and rode.
Chloe Kim showed up with a torn labrum, won silver in the halfpipe, and pulled 17-year-old Gaon Choi in for a hug after the Korean phenom dethroned her. Jake Canter threw a double underflip and a massive backside 1980 on his final run to bronze in men’s slopestyle when it counted. Japan dominated the park and pipe in a way that was impossible not to respect. And through all of it, there was no controversy, no press conference theater, no distractions. Just snowboarding.
The cherry on top came from the ice. The USA men’s hockey team won their first gold since the 1980 Miracle on Ice, with Jack Hughes burying the overtime winner against Canada in a game that Connor Hellebuyck essentially won by himself with 41 saves. And the women backed it up, going undefeated through the entire tournament, with Hilary Knight tying it in the final minutes and Megan Keller ending it in overtime. A clean double gold in hockey felt like the right punctuation mark for an American team that just wanted to compete, not perform.
The Olympics are done. The FIS circus has packed up its judging panels and subjective scoring and headed home. Now it’s just snowboarding again: Natural Selection, banked slaloms, the Bomb Hole Cup, and the season still running hot through spring. No politics. No press conference theater. No flags of convenience.
That’s the sport we signed up for. Go shred!
