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If you know the Milan Cortina Olympics start in 100 days, then you probably already know about returning stars like Lindsey Vonn, Chloe Kim and Mikaela Shiffrin. But every Games also features first-time Olympians who go from anonymity to the A-list overnight. These are the athletes who could do just that. Ilia Malinin brings quads, backflips, raspberry twist to figure skating Malinin, the son of figure skaters from Uzbekistan who settled in Virginia, has accomplished so much by age 20 that Olympic gold is just about his only box left to check. And all signs point to Malinin’s dominating in Milan, much as fellow American Nathan Chen did at the 2022 Beijing Games (Chen left competitive skating after his gold). Malinin is undefeated since December 2023, including winning back-to-back World Championships and performing the greatest collection of jumps in one program in history: all six types of quadruple jumps, including the most difficult, the quad Axel, which no other skater has ever landed cleanly in competition. Malinin is expected to go for a seven-quad program this season and has teased trying a quintuple jump in the future. Malinin unveiled separate new moves each of the last two seasons: the raspberry twist — a corkscrew-like aerial maneuver — and a backflip, which international officials previously outlawed from competition. Laila Edwards takes hockey to new Heights Over the last two years, Edwards became the first Black woman to play for the U.S. national hockey team, was MVP in her World Championship debut and then converted from forward to defense. She was also shouted out on a podcast you may have heard of that’s co-hosted by a pair of fellow athletes from her hometown of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Along with veterans like Hilary Knight and Kendall Coyne Schofield, Edwards is expected to be a key player as the United States looks to take the Olympic crown back from rival Canada. Siblings Miro, Flora Tabanelli fly high for host Italy When you think of Italian Winter Olympians, the names that come to mind could include those of Alpine skiing greats like Sofia Goggia and Alberto Tomba or Arianna Fontana, a short track speed skater with 11 medals. Italy hasn’t been associated much with freestyle skiing, until now. The brother-sister Tabanelli tandem could win the country’s first medals of any color in the discipline. Each won an X Games big air title in January, with the older Miro entering the Guinness World Record book as the first skier to land a 2340 (that’s 6½ rotations) in competition. Amber Glenn a figure skating story for the ages Few labels going into the Olympics carry the cachet of leading U.S. women’s figure skater. It could be 2025 world champion Alysa Liu (a 2022 Olympian) or 2024 world silver medalist Isabeau Levito. Or it could be Amber Glenn, who bids to become the oldest U.S. Olympic women’s singles skater in 98 years — and an Olympic rookie at that — at 26 years old. A decade ago, Glenn, a U.S. junior champion, left skating and briefly spent time in a mental health facility. She was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and an eating disorder. More recently, she endured severe concussions in 2020 and 2023, plus she came down with Covid-19 during the 2022 U.S. Championships, ruling her out of contention for the last Olympics. But she had a career year in 2024-25: five consecutive competition victories, having never before won an international event. William Dandjinou eyes 5 golds for Canada Three decades ago, Alain Dandjinou immigrated to Quebec from Ivory Coast and found work as an ice maker. Fast-forward to find his son, after having missed the 2022 Canadian Olympic team by one spot, becoming the world’s best short track speed skater. Inside Montreal’s Maurice Richard Arena, where the dominant Canadian men train, the words “five Olympic golds” were written this year on a locker room board — a clear team goal to sweep the short track events in Milan. They combined to win all five golds at March’s World Championships (including as part of a mixed-gender relay), with Dandjinou’s haul three golds and a silver. Lauren might not be the only Macuga at the Olympics Lauren Macuga grew up idolizing Lindsey Vonn. Now, with Vonn unretiring for one last Olympic bid, Macuga could find herself competing against Vonn for medals in the downhill and the super-G. Macuga, born July 4, 2002 (five months after Vonn’s Olympic debut), went into last season merely hoping to make the U.S. team for the World Championships. She did much more. Macuga became the youngest American to win a World Cup speed race since Vonn in 2007. Then she became the first American to win a medal in her World Championships debut race since 1993, sharing super-G bronze. Macuga’s older sister, Sam, hopes to make the Olympic team in ski jumping. Her younger sister, Alli, is trying to do it in moguls skiing. If even two of the three make it, it will be the first time siblings compete on the same U.S. Winter Olympic team in distinctly different sport disciplines. Adeliya Petrosian can extend Russian figure skating reign Select Russians — technically individual neutral athletes in Olympic jargon — will be at the Milan Cortina Games, possibly only in skating sports. The most notable is Adeliya Petrosian, who will try to become the fourth women’s singles skater from Russia to win gold in a four-Games span. She is coached by the steely Eteri Tutberidze, who also guided the last two gold medalists. Petrosian, 18, hasn’t yet competed on the top international level because of restrictions on Russian athletes outside of the Olympics. But if her domestic competitions are counted, she was believed to be the only senior women’s singles skater in the world to land both a clean quadruple jump and a clean triple Axel last season. That instantly makes her a medal contender and, depending how the next three months go, possibly the outright favorite. Connor McDavid is what Olympic hockey has been missing For all McDavid has achieved — including three NHL MVP awards, plus leading the Edmonton Oilers to the last two Stanley Cup Finals — he has yet to skate at an Olympics. McDavid missed out because NHL players didn’t participate in the last two Games in 2018 (Olympic and hockey officials couldn’t agree to terms) and 2022 (Covid-19 disrupted the NHL season). Now that the NHL is back in the Olympic fold, McDavid is already taking center stage for Team Canada. He scored the golden goal in the 4 Nations Face-Off final win over the U.S. in February. He was among the first six players named to the Canadian Olympic team, a group that includes Sidney Crosby, who already has gold medals from 2010 and 2014. Deanna Stellato-Dudek competed with Michelle Kwan Stellato-Dudek, a 42-year-old Canadian, is set to become the oldest Olympic figure skater since World War II and possibly the oldest figure skating medalist since the sport was held at the Summer Games in 1920. She formerly skated singles for the United States, competing against Michelle Kwan and Sarah Hughes (the 2002 Olympic champion, who is younger than Stellato-Dudek), before she retired in 2001 after several hip injuries. More than a decade later, on a work retreat, she was asked to write down what she would do if she knew she couldn’t fail: Return to figure skating. That led to one of the wilder comebacks in sports history. Last year, Stellato-Dudek won the World Championships with Québécois Maxime Deschamps and gained her Canadian citizenship, making her Olympic-eligible.
