This month’s coverage of [global sporting event in Italy] is supported by Runners’ Edge Alaska. We sincerely appreciate their belief in what we are doing here.
By Gavin Kentch
TOBLACH — We all spent a lot of time over the last four years waiting for the Olympics to happen. Then the Olympics happened. Now they are done.
The athletes have dispersed back to their regular lives, which, for the professional skiers of the bunch, probably looks a lot like their life a month before the Olympics, to be honest. The World Cup crew, for example, is now reassembled in Falun, where racing resumes on Saturday afternoon with a skate sprint. At a lot of levels the Olympics felt like the be-all, end-all of this year in high-level ski racing… but in fact just 19 out of 28 scored events that count toward the World Cup overall standings have so far been held. There is, somehow, a third of the season yet to come.
But that is this weekend. (Oh also starters for this weekend, and for the rest of Period 4 save World Cup Finals, will be drawn from this list fyi. For Lake Placid you want the first tab here.) For now, I am finally emerging from the post-Games stupor — a lot of skiing in the sunshine in the Dolomites is helping — and have at least two Olympics wrap-up stories to share before we get back to the World Cup grind.
This one is simple: We had an accredited photographer, Anna Engel, at the Games. You may have noticed the slightest improvement in the site’s visuals relative to the blurry screenshots that are my stock-in-trade around here. Anna took thousands of photos across ten race days. Here are twenty of her favorites.
But first, here is a horrible photo of Anna (far left, inside pink circle) doing her job that I took with my phone from my spot over in the press tribune seats. If you ever had any doubt why sports photography remains the province of real photographers and not of print media with an iPhone, this should clear that up for you. But hey, I totally nailed the finish-line shot of Ebba Andersson.
Update: Anna reminds me that there exists this better photo of the two of us. This is why I do words and she does images.
And also this, of just Anna. She gets the glamour shot here because she was behind the camera for hours for two weeks straight:
Okay, two quick asides before the actual pictures:
As a more important aside, I am proud of our little site that could. Anna has as much formal photography training as I have official journalism instruction, viz., none. My bias here is intractable — this site is my baby and Anna is one of my closest friends — but I really do think that, on the merits, our coverage from Val di Fiemme stacked up well against that of much larger outlets that have things like “training” and “org charts” and “budgets that do not involve GoFundMe.” And the photos really helped with the overall effect. Like, a ton.
It turns out that a love of skiing so deep that you will pay your own way to Italy if need be and eat granola in your hotel room to save on expenses will get you pretty far; passion, like murder, will out. “Thanks for all you do,” Ben Ogden told me, leaving the podium press conference, on literally the day he had won an Olympic medal, and he meant it. That made a whole lot of late nights all worth it right there.
As a less important aside, albeit more germane to this article, we have Olympic photos. We have lots of photos, including multiple ones of every American in every race. If you are a school or a club or a team or so on and you would like photos (for non-commercial use!), please be in touch. A single Olympics photo from Getty Images will run you close to $500. We can get you multiple shots of your athlete in every race for the same price.
Be in touch if interested: anna (at) nordicinsights.news. Any money from photo sales goes to Anna, fyi; I paid her what I could from this site’s meager budget, but it was far less than she deserved. She has at least made enough from photo sales by now to cover her equipment, so anything else is actual income for her by this point (notwithstanding the cost of plane tickets and lodging oops).
Anyway. Here are some good photos from the 2026 Milano–Cortina Winter Olympics, as chosen by Anna.
Frida Karlsson, relay
Federico Pellegrino, classic sprint start
Novie McCabe and Rosie Brennan, skiathlon
Ben Ogden backflip (and incredulous Norwegian onlookers), classic sprint
Julia Kern, classic sprint
Ben Ogden, classic sprint
Jessie Diggins, relay
Lead pack, men’s 50km classic
Federico Pellegrino, Gus Schumacher, and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, team sprint
Julia Kern, team sprint
Jessie Diggins, 50km classic
Gus and Ben, team sprint
Hailey Swirbul, 50km classic
Hunter Wonders, 50km classic
Rosie Brennan, 50km classic
Julia Kern (bib 6), and others, relay
Gus and Klæbo, team sprint
Jessie Diggins (supine) and Hailey Swirbul, 10km skate
Gus Schumacher and Hugo Lapalus, relay
Group hug, relay. The end.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American skiing. We started with nothing and now we’re at the Olympics. You can read more about our first three years here, and donate to the Olympics fund here. Thank you for consideration, and, especially, for reading.
