The Green Mountain State has two more winners at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games in Italy.
Vermont-schooled skier Mikaela Shiffrin continued her redemption tour after a 2024 crash at the Killington World Cup by winning gold Wednesday in the women’s slalom.
Shiffrin, a 30-year-old Burke Mountain Academy graduate, is the most decorated Alpine racer in history. But she didn’t place on the podium in the 2022 Olympics nor in her first two events of the current games.
Snapping that streak Wednesday, Shiffrin tearfully finished the race and, without saying a word, fell into an embrace from her mother.
Just before, Landgrove cross-country skier Ben Ogden won his second silver — a week after becoming the only second U.S. man to medal in his sport (and 50 years after fellow Vermonter Bill Koch was the first).
“Unbelievable!” Ogden could be heard saying on live televised coverage, having won his first medal Feb. 10 in the men’s individual sprint and his second Wednesday with fellow U.S. racer Gus Schumacher in the team relay sprint.
Both Shiffrin and Ogden’s victories come with backstories.
Shiffrin graduated from Burke — a grade 8-12 ski school in the Northeast Kingdom — in 2013, the same year she became the youngest U.S. woman (at 17) to win a slalom world championship. Moving on to the Olympics, she scored slalom gold in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, and giant slalom gold and Alpine combined silver in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, before failing to medal after three falls in 2022 in Beijing, China.
Shiffrin last skied in Vermont on Thanksgiving weekend 2024, when she snagged the lead in the first of two Killington giant-slalom runs. Seemingly a minute away from scoring an unprecedented 100th World Cup win, she instead followed up by slipping, striking two gates, somersaulting and slamming into a fence 12 seconds from the finish line — all at 50 mph on live national television.
Receiving treatment at the nearby Rutland Regional Medical Center, Shiffrin miraculously went on to win a combined event three months later at the February 2025 world championships in Saalbach, Austria, before finally scoring her 100th World Cup victory a week later in Sestriere, Italy.
Over at the cross-country course, Ogden and Schumacher finished 1.37 seconds behind Norway, with Italy taking bronze.
Ogden, a 2022 University of Vermont engineering graduate set to turn 26 on Friday, is a member of Stratton’s SMS T2 elite training team co-founded by Koch. He’s also the fourth generation of family to hail from the Bennington County town of Landgrove — population 177 — since his great-grandfather, Samuel R. Ogden, happened upon the once desolate hamlet just before the 1929 stock market crash and bought 15 buildings for $4,500.
Ogden’s mother Andrea — Landgrove’s treasurer, assistant clerk and trustee of public funds — has witnessed both of her son’s wins in person.
“I just didn’t expect any of it to play out that way,” she told the New York Times after Wednesday’s team event. “I’m just so excited for them.”
U.S. Olympians with Vermont ties have now medaled seven times this month:
— Ryan Cochran-Siegle, a 33-year-old second-generation Alpine racer from Cochran’s Ski Area in Richmond, repeated his medal-winning feat of four years ago by snagging silver in the men’s super-G.
— Mac Forehand, a 24-year-old Stratton Mountain School graduate from Winhall, won silver in the men’s free-ski big air event.
— Stratton-trained athlete Jessie Diggins, the most-awarded U.S. cross-country skier of all time, nabbed bronze in the women’s 10-kilometer freestyle.
— And Paula Moltzan, 31, of Waitsfield earned bronze in the women’s Alpine combined event.
