What was it like to cover 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy? Cold! | Estes

People have been asking me what it’s like to cover a Winter Olympics.

It’s cold, I tell them.

They’ll smirk at this wise guy who just went swimming only to report how “it was wet,” but I’m not being dismissive. It’s an honest answer. That’s what it was like for me the past few weeks in Italy.

See, while you were watching Olympic events held indoors – hockey, figure skating, speed skating – in Milan, where temperatures stayed in the 50s much of the time and it didn’t snow, I was nowhere near Milan. And nowhere near the events in Cortina, for that matter.

I was in Livigno. Blessed to be part of the esteemed team covering these Olympics for USA TODAY, I was stationed way, way up in the Alps near the border with Switzerland. That was about four hours from Milan. Livigno is where snowboarding and freestyle skiing were held. Outdoors. Often at night.

Livigno was a beautiful place. Peaceful and charming, kind of like a Christmas card come to life. It’s a ski resort town. Very small. Most everything walkable. Tucked away from the rest of the world. To get there, you pass through insanely winding roads with hairpin turns so tight that traffic must stop in one direction, allowing the other to pass.

Snow tires are required on vehicles, and here’s why: More than two feet of snow coated this little town during the Olympics’ final week.

Brrrrrrrrrr ...

Oh, I wore layers upon layers. Snow pants and snow boots and compression shirts. Gloves and hand-warmers. Anything that crossed my mind ahead of time to bring from home to stay warm proved a tremendous idea. I needed all of it. It was cold during the days. It'd get downright frigid at night.

Don’t get me wrong, though. This wintry world, foreign as it was for a southern sportswriter, could be delightful.

Snowboarders and skiers were some of the coolest, most down-to-earth, most laid-back athletes I’ve encountered in my career. They were outstanding company. Most were delighted that we were there and so interested in documenting their stories.

“You’re the man,” U.S. snowboarder Jake Pates told me with a smile, expressing how much he’d appreciated the story I’d written about his journey and struggles with mental health. Another U.S. snowboarder went in-depth with me about his cat, showing off photos like a proud parent. I met the incomparable Nick Baumgartner, a snowboard cross racer who wants to compete into his 50s.

I traveled to lovely Bormio one day to watch an Alpine skier, representing Brazil, win a gold medal. It was the first Winter Olympics medal ever for a South American country. Lucas Pinheiro Braathen couldn't have been a more fascinating personality to do it, too.

That’s the beauty of covering an Olympics. It isn’t about travel or the prestige of the occasion. It’s the ability to experience different cultures and appreciate different sports and athletes who aren’t doing this for any reason other than genuine love and devotion. That makes their stories inspirational.

Take freestyle skiing women’s aerials, for instance. I'm witnessing this visually stunning event in which skiers soar off ramps into circus-style acrobatics, and I interview an American competitor named Tasia Tanner, who explained how aerials wasn’t her real job.

While training, she has worked 40 hours a week as an IT manager at a hotel in Park City, Utah. This was likely her final Olympics. She’d had three surgeries on her right side – her shoulder and two knee ACLs – and her “body is currently just not really able to keep up with this sport, unfortunately," she said.

She's 23 years old.

How can you not respect the passion it takes to chase an Olympic dream in such fashion? And about nine out of ten Olympians, it seems, have similar backgrounds. They have families and jobs. They've had injuries and adversity. Few ever hear about them unless lightning strikes every four years.

Without this trip, I wouldn’t have gotten to know Tasia Tanner.

I’d have been preoccupied with what Tyler Tanner was doing over at Vanderbilt.