Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy
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Selected to carry her home country’s flag in the opening ceremony here, Federica Brignone needed an assist.
Her surgically repaired leg – shredded in a horrific crash in April 2025 – hurt so badly from standing that she asked the 6’6” curler, Amos Mosaner, for a lift. He obliged, lofting Brignone on his shoulders, where she could enjoy the view and ease her achy joints.
She clearly enjoyed the view from the top. Brignone, who rated herself “not even 80%” when these Olympic Games began, won her second gold medal in five days, claiming the giant slalom title to go with her top finish in the Super G.
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Her skiing compatriots bowed to her – tying silver medalists Sara Hector of Sweden and Thea Louise Stjernesund of Norway, dropping to their knees in the finish area after Brignone won – and her countrymen and countrywomen celebrated her with gusto. High above, a collection of smaller versions of the Italian red-green-and-white-clad fans in the stands unfurled a huge Italian flag and chanted, “Fed-e, Fed-e” before joining Brignone in a rousing rendition of the national anthem. The effervescent 35-year-old grinned from first note to last, triumphantly raising her arms above her head as the song ended.
Her victory continues the comeback theme – a narrative of paths conquered, attempted, thwarted and ongoing – that has come to define the alpine women skiers of these 2026 Games.
Last Sunday, Breezy Johnson won downhill gold on the same Olimpia delle Tofane that took her out of the 2022 Games in Beijing and Lindsey Vonn, back from retirement, stepped into the starting gate with a torn ACL only to leave with a shattered leg via helicopter. Mikaela Shiffrin, recovering from the trauma of a puncture wound and seeking to put her failed 2022 Olympic Games in the past, has one more chance to find the podium after finishing 11th in the same GS that caused her such mental anguish.
And then there is Brignone. On the same day that Vonn headed back to the United States to continue her lengthy recovery, Brignone skied on a leg that was once every bit as compromised as Vonn’s.
In the Italian championships in April 2025, Brignone fell on her second giant slalom run, tumbling through two gates. Helicoptered to a hospital in Milan, she endured two surgeries, 42 stitches and months of rehab. She didn’t walk at all for two months, didn’t walk properly for five months and spent 300 days out of competition. Even now she says a complete recovery is “not possible.’’
Before her crash, Brignone stood atop the overall World Cup standings, having won 10 races across three different disciplines – downhill, giant slalom and Super G.
Three weeks ago, in her first race back, she was giddy to finish sixth. She came to these Games with absolutely no expectation.
“It was already a miracle to be here and to carry the flag,’’ she said. “This was one of the biggest things that I wanted and I was missing in my life. Not the gold medal, I didn’t care. I had medals. I had everything I wanted in my life. So I came here just to enjoy and try my best and be grateful to be here at home. And I think this is why I won.’’
It seems a backward mentality to win a medal by not caring about winning one, and yet, considering what has and has not happened in the Olympics, it might truly be the secret to success. There is a strange freedom in not thinking for an athlete. It’s the difference between the 3-point shooter who sinks a shot with a hand in his face and the one who clanks it when he’s wide open. It is that almost magical place where muscle memory takes over and the brain gets out of the way.
It does not, in fact, pay to be a thinker. In these Games, we have watched pressure do funny things. It consumed Ilia Malinin, a figure skater who seemed unbeatable, and freed up Breezy Johnson, who skied into the abyss of the attention missile directed at Vonn. Brignone had nothing to lose and won everything.
Which leads us back to Shiffrin, who is yet to win anything here. She is now 0 for her last eight Olympic events, an unfair summary of a career that is far more of a success than it is a failure.
She, too, has been through some stuff. She suffered a scary puncture wound in a GS race in Vermont that required abdominal surgery to heal physically and time to mend mentally. She did not return to the podium in the giant slalom until January of this year, a near two-year hiatus. Her joy in simply finishing the GS here was real. She talked about standing in the starting gate, staring down at the course with an almost, “here I go” mentality.
“‘I’m really proud of the progression,’’ she said. “Maybe it’s not the lights-out speed that it takes to win races yet, but I’m getting closer. When I think about where I was last year, like I didn’t race the World Cup finals, and I was like, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll never race GS again.’ So here we are in a totally different position and it shows that you can fight.’’
But she was four-hundredths of a second out of the race, but nonetheless 11th. Packaged with her disappointing finish in the team combined – her 15th out of 18 slalom turned Johnson’s first-place downhill run into a fourth-place finish – her performances begs the question if she is too cerebral. She is a thinker, that much is clear and she speaks frequently about the technical aspects of skiing, making it obvious that she is very deliberate in her approach.
It would be ridiculous to question it. Shiffrin owns a record 108 World Cup records but this is the way the world goes. When one miss piles on top of the next, stacking up to eight, it is impossible not to wonder if the problem isn’t being able to meet the moment.
Her final shot comes in an event that she has dominated. Of those 108 World Cup victories, 71 have come in the slalom. Until the downhill combined, she had won six consecutive races, spanning all of 2025 and the first race of 2026.
She will be expected to win.
Federica Brignone was not, and yet she is bopping around Italy with two brand-new gold necklaces dangling from her neck.
“My mantra was, ‘Tomorrow is better,’’’ Brignone said. “I had no pressure because it was amazing just to be here. And it’s crazy because I’m here, home of the Olympics. I think if it was last year, i would have been making too much of it. But I was just happy, really happy to be here.”
