Winter Olympics, Milan Cortina
Digest more
The nail-biting sport continues to be a Winter Olympics favorite, but its massive speed and high intensity action can be treacherous.
What to watch for: Austria’s Anna Gasser is the two-time defending Olympic gold medalist, but she hurt her shoulder surfing during the summer and has been rehabbing with the hope of making it three straight. New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, the 2022 big air silver medalist and also a slopestyle star, is another favorite.
The Winter Olympics are a bit of an enigma to most sports fans in the United States. The average person has seen hockey, the understand figure skating, and we get enough extreme sports through osmosis that the snowboard half pipe makes sense — but a lot of the events are more Euro-centric.