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Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Sport
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AJ Ginnis, former U.S. Ski Team athlete, to be first 2026 Olympic torchbearer
AJ Ginnis, former U.S. Ski Team athlete, to be first 2026 Olympic torchbearer Greek Alpine skier AJ Ginnis, a world slalom silver medalist and former U.S. Ski Team member, will be the first torchbearer of the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic torch relay that starts Nov. 26. Ginnis, who eyes his Olympic debut in February at age 31, will receive the flame in the ancient Olympic site of Olympia, Greece, to start the torch relay. A Greek athlete traditionally is the first torchbearer before an athlete from the Olympic host nation. Advertisement 'It is a great honor for me, something that I never imagined as a child," Ginnis said, according to the Greek Olympic Committee. The relay will culminate at the Feb. 6 Opening Ceremony at the San Siro Stadium in Milan. The relay typically spends multiple days in Greece, the birthplace of the Olympics, before moving to the host nation. For Milan Cortina, the Italy portion of the relay will start Dec. 4 in Rome. Ginnis, 30, missed most of last season due to knee surgery. In 2023, he earned what is believed to be Greece's first world championships medal in any Winter Olympic program event when he took slalom silver. Advertisement The best Greek finish in any event at a Winter Olympics was 13th in women's skeleton in 2002. Ginnis previously raced for the U.S. at the 2017 Worlds, then was dropped from the national team after the 2017-18 season following several injuries and a best World Cup finish of 26th at the time. He switched to his birth nation of Greece, where he had learned to ski at Mount Parnassus, a 2 1/2-hour drive from Athens. He moved to Austria at age 12 and then Vermont three years after that. Ginnis has undergone at least seven knee surgeries in his career. He tore an ACL in summer 2021, ruling him out of the 2022 Winter Games. Advertisement He thought he was done with ski racing when he went to Beijing to work the 2022 Olympics for NBC. 'When I came back, I told myself, my goal is to go into the next Olympic cycle being a medal contender,' he said at the 2023 Worlds. 'Fighting back from injuries, getting cut from teams, trying to fundraise for what we're doing now. ... This is a dream come true on every level.' NCAA Photos Archive The Ivy League school that's intertwined with the Winter Olympics How Dartmouth put an athlete on every U.S. Winter Olympic team.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Vonn and Shiffrin glad to race Olympics on familiar terrain
Lindsey Vonn says the prospect of racing for gold at Cortina d'Ampezzo in Italy was her main motivation for coming out of retirement. (Patrick T. Fallon) Record-breaking downhill skier Lindsey Vonn said the choice of Cortina d'Ampezzo for the women's races at the 2025 Milan Winter Olympic was her main motivation for coming out of retirement. The former Olympic and world champion stunned the sports world when she returned to the US ski team last year aged 40, five years after retirement. Advertisement Vonn's retirement followed a serious knee injury but after she underwent a titanium reconstruction of her knee, she opted to return. And she told AFP that the prospect of competing for gold at the course in the Italian Dolomites was her primary motivator. "It was probably the biggest reason why I came back -- because it was in Cortina. I don't know if I would have come back if the Olympics hadn't been in Cortina," she said. "It's always been historically a great place for me. It's where I got my first podium, where I broke the Women's World Cup win record, and I think it would be a really fitting place to end my career again. It's definitely been the carrot that's been dangling in front of me," she said. Advertisement Vonn picked up the first podium of her return at Sun Valley in March, finishing second behind Switzerland's Lara Gut-Behrami in a World Cup Super-G race. It was a sweet reward for her efforts after she had faced some criticism for taking the risks on the snow after such a long absence. "The comeback season was incredible. A lot of amazing experiences. Sun Valley was definitely the best way to end it," said Vonn, who was speaking at an NBC event previewing the Winter Games. "It gives me a lot of confidence going into next season. But it was definitely up and down, some low points, and some really amazing experiences. Advertisement "So I think I learned a lot. I know what I have to do next year. I think, hopefully, people understand now my capabilities, and I think the conversation will be hopefully a little different next year than it was this year," she added. Vonn won her Olympic gold medal in downhill in Vancouver in 2010, a year after clinching World Championship gold at Val d'Isere. - Beautiful place - Her team-mate Mikaela Shiffrin, who endured a nightmare Olympics in Beijing in 2022, said she was also glad that a well known European venue had been chosen for the next Games. "It's a beautiful place and it's a place that we're more familiar with on the Alpine side. And that feels really good to go to a place where we have some knowledge," she told AFP. Advertisement "We can talk about the Olympic planning and we can imagine what it's maybe going to look like because we've been there, we've seen it. And so that's going to be, I think, a really nice thing to go to a place that feels, for me in a way, it feels like home. Because I spent so much of my life in Europe now that it's like, OK, here we are. We know," she said. Shiffrin, who has the most World Cup wins of any skier in history, won gold in slalom in Sochi in 2014 as an 18-year-old and then triumphed in giant slalom in Pyeongchang four years later. But in Beijing she failed to finish in either of her favoured events and left without a medal. "I think what I realized from the Olympics is there's always something new around the corner. And when I thought I experienced everything after South Korea, then Beijing came and changed everything I knew about the Olympics," she said. Advertisement "It just gave me experience of how hard and upsetting this kind of event can be when everything does go kind of wrong," she said. "I think that the best approach is like, do the best we can, and I'll be prepared and I'll practice and be ready to go. And then what happens, happens, but life goes on," she said. rg/sev/nl/des
