The Olympic and Paralympic sports schedule ramps up this weekend with Saatva Skate America in figure skating, the U.S. curling trials for the Milan Cortina Games, the start of the speed skating World Cup and Mikaela Shiffrin racing her first slalom of the season.
At Skate America, which begins Friday in Lake Placid, New York, world champion Alysa Liu bids to be the first U.S. woman to win a fully international Skate America since Ashley Wagner in 2016.
Last season, Liu ended a two-year retirement and then became the first U.S. woman to win a world title in 19 years. Liu, who finished second at her opening Grand Prix, will qualify for the Grand Prix Final if she wins Skate America and will likely make it with a top-three finish.
The six-woman Final is shaping up to be a mini preview of the Milan Cortina Olympics with three-time world champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan having already clinched a spot in the field.
Three-time world champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates eye a fifth Skate America ice dance title to tie the record held by Tanith White and Ben Agosto. Chock and Bates rank third in the world this season by best score (208.25) and would face the world’s other top couples for the first time this season at the Final. The top score this season is 211.02 by Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron of France.
The men’s event features Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan, the world silver medalist last March, but a distant 31.09 points behind Ilia Malinin.
The U.S. contingent is led by two-time Olympian Jason Brown. Brown, the U.S. silver medalist behind Malinin in 2023 and 2024, can bolster his already strong position for one of three Olympic spots to be handed out after January’s national championships. A committee picks the team based on skaters’ bodies of work over the previous year.
The pairs’ competition includes the world’s two-highest scoring teams this season: reigning world champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara of Japan and Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava of Georgia, both of whom won their opening Grand Prix events.
The Olympic Trials winners cannot qualify for the Olympics until December. The men’s and women’s teams that win best-of-three championship series at trials in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, advance to a global, last-chance Olympic qualifier in December in Kelowna, British Columbia.
There, the top two teams per gender qualify for the Milan Cortina Games. The wheelchair mixed doubles champions at trials automatically qualify for the event’s Paralympic debut.
John Shuster, who led the U.S. to its first Olympic curling title in 2018, eyes a sixth Games, which would tie the U.S. record across all Winter Olympic sports. Shuster’s team won its first four games in group play to make the championship series that starts Friday.
Sisters Tabitha Peterson and Tara Peterson made up half the 2022 Olympic women’s team. In 2024, Team Peterson won a third consecutive national title, then each sister gave birth to her first child. The team won its first four games at trials, clinching a championship series spot.
The 2002 Olympic oval outside Salt Lake City hosts the first of five speed skating World Cup stops this season, and the only one in the U.S.
World Cup results determine how many Olympic quota spots each nation receives, plus help determine the favorites for the Milan Cortina Games.
Jordan Stolz swept the 500m, 1000m and 1500m at the World Championships in 2023 and 2024. He then won silver in the 500m and 1500m and bronze in the 1000m at last March’s worlds coming back from illness. While Stolz can re-establish his dominance in World Cups, his focus is on peaking for the Milan Cortina Games, where he can become the second American in any sport to win three golds at a single Winter Olympics after fellow Wisconsin-born speed skater Eric Heiden.
Both Stolz and Cooper McLeod, the world 500m bronze medalist, can meet objective criteria for Olympic qualification if they place in the top five at two of the four fall World Cups in the same distance where they won a world medal.
The top U.S. women are Erin Jackson in the 500m and Brittany Bowe in the 1000m and 1500m. In 2022, Jackson became the first Black woman to win individual Winter Olympic gold. Jackson has since dealt with health challenges, while Femke Kok of the Netherlands has become the world’s best in the 500m. Bowe, too, faces competition from the Dutch: Jutta Leerdam and Kok in the 1000m and Joy Beune in the 1500m.
After season-opening giant slaloms in late October, the World Cup resumes with Mikaela Shiffrin’s trademark event of slalom in Levi, Finland. The winner’s prize is a reindeer (that stays in Finland).
Eight of Shiffrin’s record 101 World Cup victories have come in Levi, her most successful venue. Shiffrin and 2022 Olympic slalom gold medalist Petra Vlhova of Slovakia combined to win the last 13 Levi slaloms, but Vlhova remains sidelined indefinitely after knee surgery following a January 2024 race crash.
Last season, Shiffrin won the first two World Cup slaloms, then missed two months after a race crash. She came back to win two of the last three World Cup slaloms.
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