Milano-Cortina 2026 | Special Report
A Record That Goes Deeper Than the Medal Table
The most women's events in Winter Games history. The oldest woman to win individual Olympic gold, ever. Six individual golds and two mixed-gender golds driven by women, in a record 12-gold Games for Team USA. Milano-Cortina 2026 set marks across every discipline, and the most consequential ones had nothing to do with times or scores.
By REAL SPORTS Staff | February 2026
The numbers from Milano-Cortina are worth sitting with. Women competed in 50 events across 16 disciplines, the most ever at a Winter Olympics. They made up 47 percent of the 2,880 athletes on the field of play, up from 44.7 percent at Beijing 2022 and just 4.3 percent at the first Winter Games in Chamonix in 1924. Twelve of sixteen sport disciplines reached full gender balance for the first time. The United States sent 232 athletes, its largest Winter Games delegation ever, and women accounted for 7 of the team's 12 gold medals.
The results are the visible layer. Underneath them is a set of structural changes, in event design, federation governance, research investment, and development pipelines, that will determine what the numbers look like in 2030 and beyond. That is the story Milano-Cortina 2026 tells when you look closely.
1. The Invisible Rulebook Finally Got Rewritten
The most consequential change at Milano-Cortina had nothing to do with any individual performance. For the first time in Olympic history, women's Nordic skiing races matched men's distances, an adjustment so long overdue that it barely registered as news. That relative silence is itself worth noting.
For decades, women raced shorter courses in cross-country and ski jumping. The official rationale was rarely stated plainly. The underlying assumption was that female athletes needed protection from the demands of elite competition. It is the same logic that kept women out of the Olympic marathon until 1984, and the same premise that Michele Kang's research initiative, the Kynisca Innovation Hub, is now systematically dismantling: that female physiology is a limitation to work around rather than a performance system to understand and support.
The assumption was not that women could not handle the distance. The assumption was that no one had bothered to ask.
The distance change had immediate, practical consequences for every woman competing in Nordic events at these Games. Training schedules, pacing strategy, nutrition protocols, and recovery timelines all required recalibration for athletes who had spent years preparing for shorter races. The national programs that adapted fastest were the ones that had already invested in female-specific physiology research. That correlation is not coincidental.
This is the thread connecting the distance parity decision to Kang's 55 million dollar investment in female athlete science at U.S. Soccer in 2025. Women's sports infrastructure has consistently been built on assumptions borrowed from men's programs. The performance ceiling imposed by those assumptions is finally being challenged at the systems level, not just the individual level.
Milano-Cortina also produced a record for women's participation and brought gender balance to the majority of disciplines for the first time. These numbers are often reported as milestones without context. The context matters: they are the downstream result of decades of Title IX advocacy, federation lobbying, and athlete organizing that rarely appeared on the sports desk when it was happening. The governance fights that made the medal ceremonies possible deserve at least as much attention as the ceremonies themselves.
2. Women Were the Medal Strategy, Not the Side Story
Six of Team USA's twelve gold medals at Milano-Cortina were won exclusively by women: Breezy Johnson, Elizabeth Lemley, Elana Meyers Taylor, Mikaela Shiffrin, Alysa Liu, and the U.S. women's hockey team. Women also contributed to two mixed-gender golds, with Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn, Isabeau Levito, and Madison Chock in the figure skating team event, and Kaila Kuhn in the mixed team aerials. Eight of twelve gold medal performances had a woman central to the result.
The silver and bronze haul was equally driven by women. Chloe Kim, Jaelin Kauf (two silvers), Cory Thiesse, Jackie Wiles, Paula Moltzan, Elizabeth Lemely, Kaillie Humphries (two bronzes), Jasmine Jones, Corinne Stoddard, and Mia Manganello taking home medals. In a record 33-medal Games, women drove the majority of the American performance from the opening day to the final medal ceremony.
The names matter. The pattern behind the names matters more. Johnson and Shiffrin represent alpine programs built across decades of sustained coaching infrastructure. Liu's two golds come from a figure skating development system whose returns, and whose costs to the athletes inside it, deserve full examination. Meyers Taylor's monobob gold is inseparable from the recruiting and governance work she has invested across five Olympic cycles. The women's hockey team's overtime comeback was delivered by a program that has maintained elite depth while competing for funding and visibility against the men's game for thirty years. Kauf and Lemley's combined four medals in moguls came from a freestyle program that has invested specifically in female athlete development and cross-discipline recruitment. These are not parallel stories. They are one argument.
That argument is this: when programs invest deliberately in women, across coaching infrastructure, development pipelines, athlete support systems, and recruiting breadth, the results compound across sports simultaneously. The U.S. medaled across six distinct disciplines where women were the primary performers. That breadth is the data point that federation executives and board members should be reading most carefully. It is not an accident. It is a return on investment.
Six individual golds. Two mixed-gender golds. A majority of 33 total medals. Women were not a subplot at Milano-Cortina. They were the structure of the American program.
The U.S. women's bobsled program arrived at Milano-Cortina with three Olympic-level pilots, six athletes total, and a depth of talent that did not exist a decade ago. The person most responsible for building it was also the person racing in it. Elana Meyers Taylor's gold in the monobob is the result on the scoreboard. The pipeline she spent years assembling is the result that compounds.
The pipeline Meyers Taylor built
Meyers Taylor has spent years recruiting athletes to bobsled the way other programs recruit to college rosters. She sent an Instagram direct message to Jadin O'Brien, a three-time NCAA indoor pentathlon champion at Notre Dame and 10-time All-American, years before O'Brien responded. O'Brien initially assumed it was a bot. It was not. Two days after her Notre Dame track career ended in August 2025, O'Brien drove 12.5 hours from South Bend to the USA Bobsled training facility in Lake Placid, New York, tried the push track, and within two weeks was pushing alongside the program's established athletes. Six months later she was an Olympian.
O'Brien was not the only athlete Meyers Taylor recruited to the ice track. Jasmine Jones, the push athlete who earned bronze at Cortina alongside pilot Kaillie Humphries, came to the sport through Meyers Taylor. So did skeleton athlete Mystique Ro. Kaysha Love, who competed at Beijing 2022 as a push athlete and arrived at Milano-Cortina as a pilot in her own right, is another product of a program that has systematically widened its recruiting base. Love's push athlete at these Games, Azaria Hill, is a former UNLV sprinter. The U.S. women's bobsled team at Cortina was built from track programs at Notre Dame, UNLV, and beyond. That is not a coincidence. It is a recruiting strategy, and Meyers Taylor has been executing it for years.
Meyers Taylor spent years recruiting Jadin O'Brien over Instagram. Six months after O'Brien's first bobsled run, she was an Olympian.
Coach Chris Fogt, who announced the final Olympic pairings at an airport hotel in Munich, presided over a women's roster that included three pilots at varying career stages: Meyers Taylor in her fifth Games, Humphries in her third for Team USA after two golds for Canada, and Love in her first Games as a pilot. That generational range in a single Olympic team does not assemble itself. It reflects deliberate development work across multiple years.
Meyers Taylor's own words make the philosophy explicit. 'I wanted to give other people the opportunity to enjoy the sport like I have,' she said at Cortina. 'It's changed my life. It's given me a life. It's given me a family. The women's bobsled team has been one of the most successful in U.S. history. I'm very passionate about that legacy, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to make sure that legacy stands.' She has also been explicit about the diversity dimension of that recruiting: 'Part of my efforts in recruiting have always been to recruit the best athletes possible. Not to base it off of color, not to base it off of race, not to base it off income level.'
The result at Milano-Cortina was three medals from four bobsled events, matching the U.S. total from Beijing 2022 and producing the first American back-to-back bobsled gold since 1936 and 1948. The Women's Sports Foundation, where Meyers Taylor served as a past president, presented her the Wilma Rudolph Courage Award in 2022. Her six career Olympic medals tie speedskater Bonnie Blair for the most ever by an American woman in the Winter Games. The infrastructure she built produced every U.S. women's bobsled medal at these Games.
The NCAA as an Olympic engine
O'Brien's path from Notre Dame to Cortina in six months is the most compressed version of a pattern that ran through the entire U.S. women's program at these Games. Jasmine Jones is also a former track athlete. Azaria Hill came out of UNLV's sprint program. Kaysha Love's transition from push athlete to pilot in a single Olympic cycle reflects the depth of a collegiate talent base that, when recruited and developed correctly, can produce Olympic medalists inside a single quadrennial.
The IOC's December 2025 FAIR recommendations, 56 specific guidelines backed by 600 research articles, acknowledged explicitly that the NCAA and comparable collegiate structures function as the primary development pipeline for women's Olympic performance in the United States. The recommendations called for stronger investment in those pathways specifically, noting that return-on-investment figures for women's collegiate athletics, measured in international competitive results, have no equivalent on the men's side in most winter sports. That investment case has been made in practice at Cortina. It now needs to be made in budget decisions at the federation and institutional level.
The coaching model is being rebuilt alongside the pipeline. Emma Hayes, now leading the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team, has argued publicly that the entire system of coaching female athletes was built by copying the men's model: nutrition protocols, periodization schedules, recovery timelines, return-to-play standards after injury, all developed for male physiology and applied wholesale to women. The IOC's FAIR framework names this directly and calls for sport-specific female physiology research to be embedded in coaching certification at every level. At Cortina, the programs that had begun that work produced the deepest rosters. The programs that had not produced the most visible talent gaps.
4. The Ecosystem Still Has Catching Up to Do
The structural gains at Milano-Cortina 2026 were real and measurable. So were the gaps that remain. The IOC's own December 2025 FAIR recommendations, issued two months before the Games, confirmed what female athletes have reported for years: body shaming in sport increases injury risk, not only psychological harm. Research published alongside those recommendations found that comments about athletes' bodies from coaches, officials, and media correlate directly with increased injury rates and earlier career exits. The recommendations named this explicitly. Implementation at the level of individual federations and coaching staffs remains incomplete.
The corporate storytelling question is related and distinct. Women's sports have attracted genuine investment: the WNBA's $2.2 billion dollar media deal, the PWHL's expansion to eight teams, Unrivaled's $30 million dollar inaugural revenue. Sponsors have followed. The narrative those sponsors fund can still reduce female athletes to empowerment symbols rather than engaging with the structural complexity of their careers. 'She overcame' is a usable advertising story. 'Her federation did not have female-specific injury protocols until 2024' is not. The space between those two framings is where accountability lives.
Prize money disparities across winter sports disciplines remained measurable at these Games. Governance representation, women in decision-making roles at the federation level, improved slightly and remains below parity in most of the sports contested at Milano-Cortina. Both of these factors will directly shape the outcomes at the 2030 Games.
The Open Question
The 2026 Winter Olympics produced something worth examining carefully: the most structurally equitable Winter Games in history, with verifiable records in women's participation, events, and gender-balanced disciplines, alongside a set of systemic gaps in research, pay, and governance that those records do not yet resolve.
Women rewrote the event list at these Games. Fifty events, 47 percent of athletes, four entirely new disciplines. They carried national medal programs: six individual golds and contributions to two mixed-gender golds across six sports disciplines. A growing number of them are running the federations that produced those results. The research is being funded at scale. The systems are being rebuilt from the ground up.
The performance is ahead of the infrastructure. The infrastructure is ahead of where it was. That gap is the story.
By 2030, the Kang Women's Institute will have produced peer-reviewed research on female athlete physiology that did not exist before 2026. The PWHL will have played four more seasons and, per its own projections, approached profitability. The WNBA's $2.2 billion dollar media deal will have reshaped what women in team sports can earn. Federation governance boards will have more women on them.
At Milano-Cortina, the athletes showed exactly what is possible when structural conditions begin to catch up with the talent. The open question heading into 2030 is how much faster the results will come when the science, the pipelines, and the pay structures complete that work. [RS]
SOURCES
IOC FAIR Recommendations, December 2025 | Kang Women's Institute Launch, U.S. Soccer, December 2025 | Women's Sport Trust Annual Review 2025 | REAL SPORTS 2025 Most Important Moments in Sports | Forbes WNBA Valuations 2025 | PWHL Season Two Report | Olympics.com Milano-Cortina 2026 official results
REAL SPORTS | The Authority in Women's Sports(TM) | Since 1997 | realsports.com
No comments:
Post a Comment