Olympic Wrap-Up: Heroes & Villains, Omaha Gets Hockey Gold, & More
by Olivia White
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy wrapped up Sunday, and the aftermath left Americans with many heart-warming stories, heroes, and a few villains.
Team USA Brings Back Hockey Gold
In the final days of the 2026 Winter Olympics, Americans watched in suspense as both the men’s and women’s hockey teams competed for gold against Canada.
Team USA swept the gold hockey medals, becoming only the second nation to ever do so. Both teams won 2-1 in overtime, leading to the men’s first gold medal in 46 years and the women’s first in eight years.
The victory was emotional for many as the world watched the Team USA men bring the young children of Johnny Gaudreau onto the ice to celebrate gold with them and be part of the official team photo. Gaudreau was their teammate, and he was killed by an alleged drunk driver in 2024 with his brother while they were cycling.
Jake Guentzel, a former University of Omaha Maverick Hockey player, was a key part of Team USA’s victory against Canada. He played almost 20 minutes in the final match and had two shots on goal. He scored one goal in six games at the Olympics.
Guentzel played three seasons for the Omaha Mavericks from 2013 to 2016. One of the assistant coaches for Team USA, David Quinn, also used to help coach Mavericks hockey from 1996 to 2002.
Heroes and Villains
Before the Olympics even began, Americans watched and grieved when Alpine Ski Racer Lindsey Vonn crashed in Switzerland and sustained a ruptured ACL in her left knee and a bone bruise as a result. This was a comeback season for her after having a partial knee replacement. Despite her injury, the 41-year-old made the decision to go ahead and compete in the Olympics that was only a week away, and the country rallied behind her.
Her likely final Olympics games did not have a fairytale ending, as Vonn put it herself. Vonn crashed again and sustained a complex tibia fracture, which required multiple surgeries to fix. She made it through several rounds of surgery successfully, and her leg was saved. And for her? Vonn said it was worth every moment.
“It wasn’t all for nothing…It was everything,” Vonn wrote on her Instagram on Saturday.
Another American comeback story ended with a different outcome. Figure Skater Alysa Liu came out of retirement in 2024 after walking away from the sport two years earlier at 16 years old due to burnout and intense pressure. She had been the youngest woman to land a triple axel in international competition and the first to combine it with a quadruple jump.
Liu had won two US championships and made her first Olympic team at the age of sixteen. Returning to the ice, this time for herself and not to prove anything, she was said to be the least nervous person in the building. And she won gold.
Fellow Figure Skater Ilia Malinin, known as “Quad God”, had high expectations surrounding him heading into the 2026 Winter Olympics. This would be the 21-year-old’s first Olympic appearance, but he was already a two-time world champion and the clear favorite for gold.
However, as the pressure built and Malinin took the ice, he suffered two falls during his routine and placed eighth in the individual competition. Despite the heartbreak, he hugged and congratulated the winner, Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov.
Malinin would later take the ice once again and compete in the team competition and help the US win gold, still walking away from his first Olympic Games as a Gold Medalist.
Not every Olympian was seen as a hero, though. American-born Eileen Gu competed for China, causing some Americans to label her a “traitor.”
“Eileen Gu is a traitor,” Enes Kanter, a former NBA basketball star, said on Twitter. “She was born in America, raised in America, lives in America, and chose to compete against her own country for the worst human rights abuser on the planet, China.”
Kanter went on to say that Gu “chose Communism over Freedom.”
In one of the more bizarre moments of the games, Strula Holm Laegreid, a Norwegian biathlete, won a bronze medal and promptly gave an interview where he admitted that he cheated on his girlfriend.
“I told her a week ago. And it’s been the worst week of my life,” he said. “I had a gold medal in life, and there’s probably a lot of people out there who look at me differently now, but I only have eyes for her. Sports has taken a bit of a back seat these past couple of days. Yeah, I wish I could share this with her.”
Laegreid said he was making the confession in the hopes that if he “put it all on the table,” his ex-girlfriend would get back together with him. The Olympian went on to win three silver and two bronze medals in total.
American Continues to Climb
Milano Cortina 2026 ended as one of the most successful winter Olympics for America. America finished second in the medal count with 33 overall medals and 12 gold medals. Norway finished first with 18 gold medals and 41 overall medals.
The 33 medals were just one less than the highest Winter Olympics medal count by the U.S. The highest was in the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, when the U.S. won 34 total medals.
The medal count is a steady improvement from the last couple of Winter Olympics for America. In 2018, the U.S. won only 23 total medals, and in 2022, it won 25.
The world now looks towards Los Angeles as the city will be the host for the 2028 Summer Olympics. The U.S. has not lost the total medal count in the Summer Olympics since 1992.
— Olivia White is a freelance reporter with The Plains Sentinel. She previously was a staff writer for The Northside Sun.
