Cheating, Penisgate and boos for Vance: the 10 wildest stories of the Winter Olympics | Winter Olympics 2026

1) Norwegian cheating guy

Cheating has been part and parcel of the Olympics since at least Eupolus of Thessaly in 388BC. But crooked boxers from ancient Greece never confessed their indiscretions on live television. Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid did exactly that after winning bronze in the men’s 20km biathlon for his first individual Olympic medal, publicly admitting he’d two-timed his girlfriend three months earlier and calling it “my biggest mistake” in an overshare for the ages carried live by national broadcaster NRK. Lægreid’s shot appeared to have missed the target one day later when the wronged party, wishing to remain anonymous, told the Norwegian paper VG it was “hard to forgive” what he did.

2) Dog on course

Every Olympics produces at least one breakout star. Few of them, however, arrive on four legs. Nazgul, a two-year-old Czechoslovakian wolfdog who lives at a nearby hotel in Tesero, burst on to the course during the women’s cross-country team sprint qualifier and launched a pell-mell dash for the line behind Croatia’s Tena Hadzic, though his time did not count because he is male. And a dog. Hadzic briefly wondered if she was hallucinating before officials escorted the crowd favourite off the snow. “He was cute but not aggressive,” Greece’s Konstantina Charalampidou observed. Nazgul, a very good boy according to multiple sources, has yet to comment on his tactics.

3) Swearing Canadian curlers

Canadians’ near-mythical reputation for politesse took a hit on the curling sheet during a bad-tempered game near the start of the competition. Tempers flared as Brad Jacobs’ Canada beat Sweden in a spicy round-robin tie, with Niklas Edin’s team alleging the Canadians were double-touching the stone after release. After a passive-aggressive back-and-forth in which each side asked the officials to monitor the other’s deliveries, tensions boiled over in the penultimate end when Marc Kennedy responded to Oskar Eriksson’s accusations of impropriety by telling him to “fuck off”. In a sport that prides itself on self-policing civility, the memes alone may have been worth it.

4) Penisgate

There was no bigger story during the early days of the Milano Cortina Games than “Penisgate”, the scandal which alleged that ski jumpers, seeking marginal aerodynamic gains after tighter suit regulations, had resorted to injecting hyaluronic acid into their members to inflate 3D body measurements and secure looser suits with the goal of increasing drag. World Anti-Doping Agency officials were asked, for perhaps the first time, to comment on penile enhancement as performance aid. The body’s Polish president Witold Banka, clearly as amused as the rest of us, said: “Ski jumping is very popular in Poland, so I promise you I’m going to look at it.”

5) Broken medals

“Don’t jump in them,” was Olympic downhill champion Breezy Johnson’s warning after her gold medal detached from its ribbon during a moment of customary excitement on the podium. The American was hardly alone. German biathlete Justus Strelow and US figure skater Alysa Liu both reported a faulty clasp connecting the medal to the ribbon, while Swedish cross-country skier Ebba Andersson said her silver medal split into two after falling in the snow. Some have attributed the design flaw to a breakaway mechanism required by law to prevent choking, but the rapid accumulation of complaints represented a rare wobble for Italian craftsmanship.

6) Biathlete credit card fraud winner

One of the more original Olympic redemption arcs belonged to Julia Simon. The 29-year-old French biathlete, fined €15,000 and given a suspended sentence last October for using the credit card details of teammate Justine Braisaz-Bouchet and a team physiotherapist, won gold in the women’s 15km – light years ahead of 80th-placed Braisaz-Bouchet. Simon had denied the fraud for three years before admitting guilt after photos of the cards were found on her phone, saying in a court hearing in Albertville: “I can’t explain it. I don’t remember doing it. I can’t make sense of it.” Before the massive hordes that packed the biathlon stadium at Rasen-Antholz, her aim proved considerably more reliable than her memory.

7) Ilia falls

It was difficult to see anyone derailing Ilia Malinin in the men’s figure skating entering Milan. He had gone nearly three years unbeaten in competition, owing to a stunning array of quadruple jumps including the quad axel, the heart-stopping four-and-a-half-revolution jump that had never been landed in competition until he came along. The Olympic debutant had shown traces of fragility in helping the US to team gold, but after falling twice during a catastrophic free skate that dropped him out of the medals into eighth place – one of the biggest shocks in Olympic figure skating history – the 21-year-old from the northern Virginia suburbs effectively described having a panic attack on the ice. Ascension must wait for the Quad God, at least until French Alps 2030.

8) Team GB’s first gold on snow

It took only 102 years but Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale finally broke through for Team GB’s first gold medal on snow at the Winter Olympics by winning the mixed team snowboard cross. Seeded 13th out of 16 teams entering the final rounds, having both turned in forgettable performances in their individual events, Bankes and Nightingale both held their nerve in the four-team final, with the former overtaking France’s Léa Casta with a decisive move during the second leg that flipped silver into gold. “It’s hard to describe in words,” Nightingale said. “We both put in so much hard work. The singles were tough but now there are tears of joy.”

9) Oldies win medals

The Winter Games can seem like a purpose-built showcase for gen Z prodigies and teenagers, but Milano Cortina often felt like a millennials’ playhouse. Nick Baumgartner was back for snowboard cross at 44. Canada’s Deanna Stellato-Dudek made headlines competing in the figure skating aged 42. Lindsey Vonn returned at 41 and was the biggest star of the whole Olympics for about 13 seconds. But the highest honours go to Austria’s Benjamin Karl, 40, who won the men’s alpine snowboarding parallel giant slalom in Livigno to become the oldest individual gold medallist in Winter Olympic history, a record that stood for exactly eight days, when it was lowered (raised?) by the American bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor.

10) JD booed?

US vice-president JD Vance was seemingly everywhere all at once in Milan during the first week of the Games. He soft-launched what looked suspiciously like the 2028 GOP presidential ticket alongside Marco Rubio at the women’s hockey, kibbitzed with boxer-influencer Jake Paul from the VIP seats – perhaps even slipping him a few talking points – squeezed in some figure skating before a state visit with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, then drew a chorus of lusty boos at the opening ceremony in a moment of audible dissent that was apparently scrubbed from the American broadcast. If the Olympics are usually a sanctuary from politics, Vance treated them more like a campaign stop with better lighting and tighter security.