By Gavin Kentch
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It is Wednesday of The Week When Everyone Announces Their Olympic Team. We know who will be competing in Val di Fiemme for Norway. For Sweden. For Brazil. And still, nothing out of Park City.
(No, I don’t know when this will be announced. “U.S. Ski & Snowboard will nominate the Team to the USOPC on January 20, 2026,” states section 9 of the selection document. If USSS gets an additional quota spot following the reallocation process — in this case, an eighth spot for the men — that athlete will be nominated on January 23. The 20th was yesterday. The 23rd is Friday. That is all I know at this time. Oh, but also, as I write this, Chris Grover is currently active in the USSS points Google Doc, and has placed his cursor in the upper lefthand cell. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN.)
Anyway. Until there is team naming news to report, please enjoy these images of this year’s Olympic uniform, per what is still, maddeningly, the lead story on the USSS home page. All photos are courtesy of USSS.
Here is your best sense of what the race suit will look like. This is a GS suit. Imagine less padding for nordic race suits, especially on the butt, and, I would assume, no thumb straps. Tell me that alpine skiers don’t wear HRMs without telling me, etc. (Actually, they could well; I know not a whit about alpine skiing, but obviously their HR is super high for the entirety of their run. Like, really high. All I mean by this is that the strap would cover the spot on your wrist where the watch goes, so you wouldn’t be able to see it. Klæbo’s signature glove from Hestra is cut short so that you can better access your HRM. These things matter.)
Anyway, here is the race suit. It says “USA” on the left leg, and has the Kappa logo on the left shoulder. It has the Kappa logo on the right leg, and the American flag on the right shoulder. The flag is backwards in the provided images, but I am assuming that it doesn’t look like this in person.
There are a lot of stars on the side of the suit. I think it’s a total of 18 on the right side, between the legs and obliques (15 on the left side), then nine more on the arms. This sums to 27 and 24, respectively. Personally I feel like someone missed a chance to have this come out to 26, as in the 2026 Winter Olympics; and/or to sum to 50 total, as in the 50 states (maybe Washington, D.C., is finally getting its due?); and/or to place ten stars on the arms, thereby evoking the ten teams of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, but I am literally writing this in the Blogger Uniform™ of shorts and a hoodie, so what do I know. It’s also possible that I just missed a star and the numbers add up perfectly.
There are no stars on the butt this year, as there were in the 2024/2025 World Cup suit. Some athletes did not appreciate having stars on their butt and so blacked out the stars, I think with black magic marker. I got so. many. questions from readers last season as to why there were no stars on [athlete name redacted] butt. I reached out to USSS for comment (I got back a polite “no comment” from the athlete involved) and wanted to pursue this, but I ultimately decided that I could not write the article without basically inviting people to zoom in on [redacted’s] butt, and so forebore.
Back to the 2026 Winter Olympics: Show race suit? Show race suit (click on any image to enlarge).
“A key source of inspiration,” the USSS press release tells us, “comes from the iconic design of Team USA uniforms at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games. Distinctive elements recalling the LA ’84 aesthetic include the star band inspired by the American flag and the bold ‘USA’ lettering, which appear across the collection as signature design features.”
The press release elsewhere notes that “the color palette is the traditional red, white and blue.” Solid choice there.
(Snark aside, I am assuming that no other country will have stars feature this prominently in their race suit, meaning that I should be able to pick out American skiers from a distance with relative ease when I am standing courseside at the venue next month. Therefore, I like them; the end. And if you think that the preceding paragraph is snarky, please know that I am biting my tongue so hard at any collection that is presented as “a tribute to American identity” at a fraught political moment when American identity apparently includes threatening to annex Greenland because the President felt snubbed by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. But hey, the Olympics are non-political. Just don’t ask where Russia was at those ’84 Games.)
Moving on.
Here is the race suit on an alpine skier. Flag still looks backward to me, but I am willing to accept that it is actually supposed to look like this, and will look correct in photos. Just not this one.
Update: This is in fact the correct portrayal of the flag on uniforms, and I could stand to brush up on my military vexillology. See generally U.S. Army Regulation 670–1, “Wear and Appearance of Army Uniforms and Insignia.” Thank you so much to the people who wrote in about this; I learned something new and specific, which is always a good thing.
Here is the race suit on an alpine skier doing a sick jump while something crazy happens with the lighting:
Here is the race suit on a snowboarder. This actually looks totally different to me, so maybe there is more variance among the ten USSS suits than I realized. Stay tuned. No there’s nothing in the provided media images showing nordic, sorry.
This one is a single JPEG file in the provided media. Not sure what’s going on here.
Nor do I really know, at all, what is happening here. Flags are the right way, though!
This athlete is wearing a long coat and looking up at the sky. I do see ten stars on the sleeve, here, which is what I was hoping for before. Also, peep the thumb holes.
(For the record, the ten teams within the U.S. Ski & Snowboard aegis are, per USSS, “the Stifel U.S. Ski Team (alpine, cross country, freestyle aerials, freestyle moguls, freeski, ski jumping, nordic combined, Para alpine), Hydro Flask U.S. Snowboard Team, and Toyota U.S. Para Snowboard Team.” Not sure why snowboard and para snowboard fall outside of the Stifel umbrella; I would assume that they had signed licensing deals with Hydro Flask and Toyota that were still in effect when the Stifel era began. Stifel, btw, is a brokerage and investment firm headquartered in the nordic hotspot of *checks notes* St. Louis, Missouri. Insert Chingy joke here. Yes I am old.)
There are three provided images using this model (three-and-a-half, if you count the oddly oriented one above). She is more put together than my hoodie and shorts self. There is also a not-zero chance that she is an Olympic athlete whom they tapped for this photo shoot, so I’m not gonna be snarky beyond that, in case she is better at sports than me as well as at fashion.
In conclusion, here are the last five images provided in the media file. They show a jacket, or details of same.
“This uniform represents everything we want our teams to feel as they arrive in Milano Cortina: united, confident and ready to perform at the highest level,” says Sophie Goldschmidt, President and CEO of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, in the USSS press release. “Working closely with Kappa, we were able to create a collection that delivers world-class technical performance while celebrating the pride, history and identity of our team. For the first time since the 1980s, every Olympic and Paralympic athlete under U.S. Ski & Snowboard will wear the same uniform [this part actually feels very cool to me –Ed.], and that shared look reflects the strength of our athletes, our partnership and our collective pursuit of excellence on the world’s biggest stage.”
If you’d like to find out whether the head of Basic Net, the parent company of Kappa, believes that this partnership reinforces their long-term vision of working side by side with athletes and federations to develop authentic, performance-driven products born from real sporting experience, you’ll have to read the book.
[Finally, and since we’re all waiting for new news right now:
Read more: Red, White, and… Black? A Visual History of the USST Uniform, 2008–2019]
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