Stars could align for USA and Canada in ice hockey, while hosts Italy are getting their downhill hopes upAll eyes are on the, ah, essentials of the Norwegian men’s ski jump team as they try to recover from one of the great botched crotch stitch switch scandals of 2025.Two of their gold medal-winning athletes from Beijing 2022, including the defending Olympic champion on the long hill, were banned for three months after a whistleblower published a video of their coach tampering with the (strictly regulated) crotch stitching on their jumpsuits at the Nordic world championships last year, in an attempt to make them more aerodynamic by adding padding.Groin-gate led to a national debate about ethics in sport and a complete overhaul of the rules.We’re told doctors are now using “3D measurements” to carefully scrutinise all competing athletes before competition.After a 12-year holdout, the National Hockey League has finally agreed to let its players participate in the Olympics again, which means the ice hockey tournament at Milano Cortina is going to be a proper test of the world’s best for the first time since Sochi in 2014.

Russia have been banned from the competition, but given the current state of relations between Canada and the US there’s still going to be plenty of geopolitical needle.The opening match between the two during the Four Nations last year started with three fights in the first nine seconds, and any game between them in the knockout rounds is going to be the single hottest ticket of the Olympics.Elbows up.But before all that, the two countries have things to thrash out on the ice track.The run-up to the Games has been dominated by a row over the women’s skeleton, after the Canadian coach Joe Cecchini gerrymandered the final qualification event by withdrawing several of his own competitors to ensure one of them made it to the Games ahead of USA’s Katie Uhlaender.

According to Uhlaender, who would have been competing in her sixth and last Olympics, Cecchini was entirely unrepentant about it.He’s been cleared of any wrongdoing.But Uhlaender has pursued her case through a tribunal all the way to the court of arbitration for sport, and has even been calling on the US vice-president, JD Vance, to intervene for her at the IOC.The Canadians are also making a fine display of their soft power.They roped in Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, stars of the world’s favourite ice hockey themed gay romance Heated Rivalry, to carry the Olympic torch.

Apparently it just wasn’t hot enough already,The Canadian team have a history of turning out the Games’ iconic merchandise,In 1998 it was the baggy poor boy hats, in 2010 it was the big red mittens,This year’s gear is being provided by Lululemon, but everyone’s really after a replica of the Heated Rivalry national team fleece Williams’s character, Shane Hollander, wears on the show,Province of Canada have just announced they’re making it available for sale.

Mark Carney’s already wearing his.Thirteen Russian athletes will be competing, along with seven Belarusians.They’ll be registered as neutral athletes, having apparently satisfied “background checks” that they don’t publicly support the invasion of Ukraine, conducted by a three person-panel, who are, bizarrely, made up of a retired Japanese gymnastics coach, a retired synchronised swimmer from Aruba, and the former Memphis Grizzlies forward Pau Gasol.Their combined expertise hasn’t done anything to reassure the Ukrainian athletes in alpine, cross-country, and freestyle skiing, speed and figure skating and the luge, who now have to compete against “neutral” representatives of the nation waging war on them.While everyone else’s attention is elsewhere, Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo will be skiing, slowly, into the history books.

Klæbo may just be the greatest endurance athlete on the planet.He has already won seven Olympic medals, but he reached entirely new heights at the world championships last year when he won all six of his events across 12 days of competition, from the 1500m sprint through to the 50km slog.The clean sweep had never been done before.If he can repeat the feat across 15 days of competition in Italy, he would become the first athlete in history to win six gold medals at a single Winter Games, as well as one of the most decorated Olympians in history.It wouldn’t be the Olympics without an obscure new sport being included on the roster; this year it’s ski mountaineering (“skimo” to those in the know) in which athletes run up a mountain and ski back down it again in what may or may not be best understood as an elaborate metaphor for the human condition.

Competitors wear skins on their skis for the uphill, before taking the skis off to trot up the steepest bits, and then putting them back on to come down again,The whole thing takes three minutes,We can only hope its does as well as ski ballet, bandy, and military patrol, and some of other sports the Winter Games has offered over the years,The hosts have set themselves a target of winning 19 medals, which is looking pretty steep after a series of recent injuries,They still have high hopes of Stefania Constantini and Amos Mosaner in the mixed doubles curling, and the double Olympic champion Arianna Fontana in the short track skating, but the one the nation will stop for is the women’s downhill, where the implausibly brave and impossibly quick Sofia Goggia is to go against her friend, and mentor, Lindsey Vonn, who had come out of retirement and is confident of competing despite a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament.

Goggia won their last Olympic head-to-head, taking the gold medal in 2018.And just when you thought the Games might give you a chance to get away from all this sort of thing, up pops Jake Paul.His fiancee, Jutta Leerdam, will be competing for the Netherlands in the long track speed skating.She was already a celebrity in her home country, where the sport’s a national obsession, after she won six world championships and an Olympic silver in Beijing, but her relationship with Paul, which – like all great 21st-century romances – started when he sent her an Instagram message inviting her to appear on his podcast, has turned her into one of the highest-profile athletes at these Olympics.The great love stories of the Games, though, are in the mixed doubles curling competition, which features not one but two married couples.

The Canadian pair of Brett Gallant and Jocelyn Peterman fell in love when they teamed up to try to qualify for the event in 2018.They failed that time.And again in 2022.Eight years later, now married with a kid, they finally made it.Their match on 5 February will pit them against another couple, Magnus Nedregotten and Kristin Skaslien from Norway, whose marriage has, amazingly, managed to survive the fact that they lost the gold-medal match against Italy four years ago.