Tina and Milo, Milano Cortina 2026 mascots, look on during the Olympic Torch Relay on February 5, 2026, in Milan, Italy. | Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

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Vox loves the Olympics. Absolutely loves them. We briefly debated popping up a limited-run Winter Olympics newsletter this week, but then remembered that we are not in fact a sports site and have no actual sports reporters on staff.

No matter! The Olympics are fun (and, occasionally, inspiring and heartbreaking and anxious and weird) because they touch a wide range of human interests, from geopolitics to climate to celebrity and culture. And in that spirit, I’ve polled my colleagues and poked my head into a few planning sessions to see what Olympics storylines everyone is watching.

In today’s edition, we round up the interesting characters, open questions, and emerging trends that could define the Milan Cortina Games, from the debut of skimo (fascinating! fun!) to the complicated moral calculus of rooting for Team USA right now (nuanced, uncomfortable, in short: a bummer).

The whole shebang officially kicks off this afternoon at 2 pm ET, with a primetime broadcast at 8 pm. You can absolutely bet that I and many others at Vox will be tuning in.

Are we the baddies? I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how American fans react to, well, being global villains. I think it could be particularly interesting around Olympic hockey. Probably the most famous moment of American underdogness — at least since the American Revolution — was the 1980 Olympics hockey win. The Americans and the Canadians are the top rivals in Olympic hockey, and these Games will be intense. We’re not plucky underdogs — the US team probably has the second-best chance at the gold after Canada — and we will not be the crowd favorite. What’s that going to feel like? —Bryan Walsh

Skimo. I’m still rooting for the Winter Olympics to add two of my favorite sports — cross-country running and cyclocross bike racing, both of which are great in the snow — but for now, I’m plenty excited about the new sport we did get: skimo, or ski mountaineering. As the name suggests, it involves summiting a climb (partially with skis, partially without) and then tearing back down it. Athletes have to transition between phases along the way, triathlon-style, and it looks thrilling. —Cameron Peters

Ilia Malinin. Twenty-one-year-old figure skater Ilia Malinin is competing in his first Olympics this year, but he’s already broken a ton of records. In 2022, he became the first (and still only) skater to land a fully rotated quadruple axel in international competition, and in December, he landed a record seven quadruple jumps in a single program. In other words, Malinin is a mind-bogglingly aggressive, physical skater — The Atlantic dubbed him “the man who broke physics” — and his programs will be really fun to watch when they kick off this weekend. —Caitlin Dewey

A figure skater’s tragic backstory. Maxim Naumov is a member of the US Olympic figure skating team whose parents — world champions in skating themselves — were among the 67 people killed when an American Airlines plane and a helicopter collided over the Potomac River in Washington, DC, last January. As much as the plane crash affected DC, it was even more devastating for the figure skating community, which lost 28 parents, skaters, alumni, volunteers, and more. It’s hard not to root for Naumov in the aftermath of such sadness. —Libby Nelson

US immigration agents. The Department of........

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