Author: rb809rb

Team USA’s teen sensation Oliver Martin is just 17, but he’s one of the most exciting athletes on the slopes at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games. Martin is the youngest snowboarder to ever land a 2160 (that’s six spins) and the only snowboarder in the world who can throw a frontside and a backside 2160. (Meanwhile, my frontside and backside hurt just writing that.) If you want to catch Martin in action, he’ll be one of the competitors at the Men’s Big Air snowboarding final this Saturday, and you can catch all the action live on Peacock and USA starting at 1:30 p.m. ET. (A re-air will also be broadcast at 3:15 p.m. on NBC).

Read on for a complete schedule of every Team USA Snowboarding event at this year’s games, a rundown of who’s competing, and how to watch all the action. And if you want to learn even more about every event at this year’s Winter Games, here’s a guide to everything you need to know about the Milano Cortina Games.

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How to watch the Snowboarding Big Air Finals:

Date: Saturday, Feb. 7

Time: 1:30 p.m. (USA, Peacock), re-air at 3:15 p.m. (NBC)

Location: Livigno Snow Park

TV channels: NBC, USA

Streaming: Peacock, DirecTV, and more

Where can I stream Snowboarding at the 2026 Winter Olympics?

The Men’s Big Air snowboarding final will stream live at 1:30 p.m. ET on Peacock this Saturday, Feb. 7.

Where to watch the Big Air final on TV:

Men’s snowboarding coverage on Saturday will be split between NBC and USA, which you can stream on DirecTV, Hulu + Live TV and more. You can watch the Big Air final live on USA at 1:30 p.m., and a re-air at 3:15 p.m. ET on NBC.

Terrance Gore, who played in two World Series with the Kansas City Royals (and was a member of their 2015 championship team), has died at the age of 34. The Royals announced the news Saturday.

Gore played eight MLB seasons, five of them with Kansas City. Primarily utilized as a pinch-runner and defensive replacement due to his speed, he batted .216/.310/.270 with 43 stolen bases in 112 career games.

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His best season was in 2019, batting .275/.362/.373 with 13 stolen bases, two doubles and a triple in 58 plate appearances. Gore also recorded double-digit steals in 2016, when he swiped 11 bags.

During his career, Gore also played for the Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta Braves and New York Mets. He also won World Series titles with the Dodgers and Braves. For the 2021 season, Gore only appeared in the postseason with Atlanta, entering Game 2 of the National League Division Series as a pinch-runner.

[Get more Royals news: Kansas City team feed]

In the postseason, Gore appeared in 11 games, compiling five stolen bases and scoring two runs. He did not record a hit and only made two plate appearances.

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Gore died due to complications from a medical procedure, according to the Kansas City Star. His wife, Britney, posted a message regarding her husband’s death on social media. The couple had two sons together.

Born in Macon, Georgia, Gore was a 20th-round selection in the 2011 MLB Draft out of Gulf Coast State College. He reached the major leagues in 2014 after advancing from high Single-A to Triple-A in the Royals’ minor league system.

LIVIGNO, Italy — Japan’s Kira Kimura won the men’s snowboard big air gold medal on Saturday, dethroning defending champion Yu Siming of China who could not cleanly land his final run.

Siming’s score of 80.25 on an audacious trick was enough to edge out 17-year-old American Ollie Martin for the bronze medal. Siming appeared to touch the ground on his landing, preventing him from a repeat gold medal.

Kimura vaulted into first place on his final run with a switch backside 1980 with a mute grab. He held on over his countryman Ryoma Kimata, who took silver.

The U.S mixed doubles curling team of Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin lost their two matches on Saturday, first falling to Great Britain’s Jennifer Dodds and Bruce Mouat, 6-4, then taking a narrow defeat versus Kim Seonyeong and Jeong Yeongseok of South Korea in an extra end, 6-5.

Thiesse and Dropkin entered Saturday with a 4-0 record, but Dodds and Mouat were even better at 5-0 following their 7-5 morning win over Canada. However, the loss to South Korea was truly an upset as their team fell in its previous five matches.

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In the first match, the Americans fell behind 2-0 after the first end and Great Britain added two more to take a 4-1 lead halfway through the match. The fifth end saw Thiesse and Dropkin claw back, tying the match with a score of three.

Mouat and Dodds retook the lead in the sixth end and didn’t look back as the three-time World Mixed Doubles champions held on to improve to 7-0 and secure a spot in Monday’s semifinals.

Great Britain, who beat Canada 7-5 in earlier action on Saturday, is now 7-0. At 4-1, the U.S. squad sit second in the standings. The top four teams advance to the semifinals.

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South Korea came into its match with the U.S. having lost 9-4 to Czechia earlier in the day. Kim and Jeong had lost three of its previous five contests by five points or more. But they put Thiesse and Dropkin on their heels by taking a 2-0 lead through the first two ends.

South Korea held a 5-2 lead going into the eight end, but the U.S. rallied with three points force an extra end. Yet Thiesse and Dropkin struggled with their accuracy in the extra end and lost 1-0.

The U.S. will next face Estonia and Sweden in Round Robin sessions 11 and 12 on Sunday.

Both countries are seeking their first mixed doubles medal in the third Olympics since the event was added to the program.

Two days after Pat Spencer splashed a career-high six 3-pointers and scored a personal-best 20 points in a 101-97 comeback win on the road against the the Phoenix Suns, the Golden State Warriors converted the 29-year-old, two-way guard to a standard NBA contract for the second straight season.

The team made Spencer’s promotion official on Saturday, hours before a game in Los Angeles against the Lakers that could call for the former lacrosse star’s services, as Stephen Curry continues to recover from a right knee injury that forced him to exit a Jan. 30 loss to the Detroit Pistons in the third quarter.

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Golden State had two roster spots open after dealing Jonathan Kuminga, Buddy Hield and Trayce Jackson-Davis, and receiving Kristaps Porziņģis before the trade deadline.

While the Warriors converted Spencer to a standard contract last season as well, that was in March in the lead-up to the playoffs. This time, he’s a legitimate backup point guard and scoring option off the bench, and his contributions are finally making more headlines than his unconventional route to the league.

Spencer is posting 5.8 points, 2.9 assists and 2.2 rebounds in 14.4 minutes per game across 36 outings this season. In his five starts, he’s averaged 14.6 points, 5.4 assists, 5 rebounds and 1.4 steals while shooting 54.2% from deep.

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He’s been much more willing to pull from long range, and, at times, he’s taken over games. Perhaps most notably, during a Dec. 4 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers, he announced himself as “that motherf***er” and then two days later started and scored 19 points in a road win over the Cleveland Cavaliers that had head coach Steve Kerr agreeing with the declaration.

Famously, Spencer established himself as a college lacrosse great at Loyola (Maryland), where he won the Tewaaraton, the sport’s most prestigious award, before using the last bit of his eligibility to play basketball at Northwestern. He went undrafted in 2020 and then played overseas and in the G League prior to making his NBA debut with the Warriors in 2024.

Since, he’s persistently carved out a small role for himself within the organization. It’s never been bigger than it has been this season, though.

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Now he has the contract to show for it, and the injury-riddled Warriors need his help.

LIVIGNO, Italy — With a clenched face and a hand waving toward a group of fans chanting his name, Ollie Martin, the shy 17-year-old snowboarder from Colorado, walked right past a handful of American media members Saturday night without offering a comment on his fourth-place finish.

The explanation from U.S. Ski and Snowboard? Martin hates talking to reporters.

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But there was another element at play. Moments earlier, Martin lost out on the bronze medal when China’s Su Yiming, the defending Olympic gold medalist, was awarded enough points on his final run to pass Martin for third place despite landing with two hands on the ground. Japan’s Kira Kimura took first place and his countryman Kimata Ryoma finished second.

While Su attempted arguably the most audacious trick of the competition in an attempt to repeat as the gold-medal winner, Olympic judges typically penalize lack of execution. In the suspenseful minute before Su’s score was announced, it looked like Martin might end up on the podium. Instead, when the score flashed, Su received 80.25 points — enough to leapfrog the American teenager and push him off the podium.

Heartbreak.

“I won’t say anything about that,” Martin’s mother, Anne, responded when asked by Yahoo Sports if she was surprised at Su’s score.

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Maybe she didn’t need to. Message received.

But if the Martins were upset, they weren’t showing it as their son made his way through the media zone before he found a group of family members for pictures and hugs.

“I have an incredible amount of faith in Ollie,” Anne Martin said. “It was harder to get here to the Olympics. It’s like a celebration once you’re here.”

After all, this was merely the first of what will likely be several Olympics for young Ollie. And after failing to land his first run in Saturday’s final, he responded with two strong tricks including the frontside double 1800 with a mute grab that vaulted him from 10th place to second briefly.

In big air, competitors get three tries and are scored on their best two, making for a tense finish as the riders go off in reverse order from 10th place to first for the final run. Everyone knows where they stand and what they need to do. With that kind of pressure, the format usually leads to either brilliance or big mistakes.

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And Martin, needing to do something special to even get into medal contention, executed like a veteran. It was even more impressive in retrospect when his mother revealed that Ollie broke his right arm just two weeks ago training for the X Games.

“He’s had that front 18 since he was 15 years old,” Anne Martin said.

Then it was just a waiting game. As one rider after another failed to pass him, the Martins thought the dream of winning a medal might have a chance of coming true.

“I was surprised he was still there for so long,” she said.

But he was — until Su passed him.

Was it a fair outcome? That’s hard to say. A sport like big air is imbued with subjectivity. If Su had landed his final trick cleanly, he almost certainly wins the gold medal. But that little wobble on the landing, necessitating a stabilizing hand to keep him from falling?

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It’s questionable, at best. The judges rewarded Su for the attempt more than they penalized him for the landing — and they could have penalized him a lot more.

Maybe it was an Olympic champion and global superstar getting the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe it was simply a panel of judges that respected the attempt enough to put Su on the podium.

We’ll never know for sure. But the American contingent, including the media, all had the same question: Was Martin robbed?

He wasn’t going to answer that. But his silence spoke volumes.

MILAN — Even gods can have off nights.

Ilia Malinin was putting on a brave face, saying all the right things in the minutes after his good-but-not-great performance in the men’s short form component of figure skating’s team competition. Standing before a huge media scrum in the mixed zone beneath the bleachers of Assago Ice Skating Arena, Malinin appeared less like the “Quad God” and more like a 21-year-old realizing that there’s no way to truly prepare for the immensity of the Olympics.

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“I’ve got to buckle down and see what happens and get better next time,” Malinin said. “We will work it out.”

At his best, Malinin is as good as skating gets, but on Saturday night, Malinin wasn’t at his best. And all of a sudden, the United States’ chase for figure skating gold just got a bit more interesting. A gold medal haul, and a team defense of gold, that seemed so likely before the Games is now not quite such a sure thing.

After the men’s short program and the ice dance free skate, Team USA has amassed 44 points, with Japan in second with 39 and Italy in third with 37. Three events remain: the free skates of the pairs, women and men. Given the records of the United States and Japan, the five-point differential could tighten. Perhaps for that reason, Malinin was somewhat unexpectedly named the men’s representative for Sunday night’s free skate, even though his individual event is just two days later.

The ice dance duo of Madison Chock and Evan Bates, veterans of a combined nine Olympic Games, followed Malinin with an impressive routine. The married couple skated a brilliant bullfight-inspired free dance that earned a 133.23 and landed them atop the ice dance standings.

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But Malinin, the “Quad God,” had turned in an unexpectedly rocky performance — by his standards, at least — and finished second in the men’s short program division to Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama. Malinin’s final score of 98.00 was more than 10 points behind Kagiyama’s first-place 108.67.

“This team event is … about pacing myself correctly,” Malinin said. “I skated today at about 50 percent of my capacity. And that was the plan, in order to pace myself correctly for the individual event.”

Malinin skated into the Milan Cortina Olympics on a two-plus-year winning streak. He hasn’t lost a competition since November 2023, and he’s the two-time reigning world champion and four-time reigning national champion. He’s earned the nickname “Quad God” for his ability to throw down quads of all styles, and he sure seemed as close to invulnerable as an Olympian gets.

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But then Malinin has never skated in an Olympics before, and the Olympics does something to everyone. When there’s a gold medal dangling over your head, the lights seem a little brighter, the ice feels a little slicker, the crowd presses in a little closer, even if you’re a champion everywhere else.

“Being here, I try to enjoy every single moment and be grateful for everything,” Malinin said, “because there’s a lot of unexpected things that can happen in life and I’m taking everything to heart.”

The “Quad God” seeming ill at ease on the ice definitely qualifies as “unexpected.” His planned program led off with a quad axel into a triple toe loop, which, if executed, would have been the first quad axel in Olympic history. Instead, he could “only” manage a quad flip — again, judging by the standards Malinin himself has set — and he under-rotated his planned quad lutz. Even a backflip — the first legal backflip in Olympics history — wasn’t enough to salvage the program.

“It was fun,” Malinin said of his backflip. “I mean, come on, the audience just roared and they were just out of control. And that truly just helped me, you know, feel the gratitude of the Olympic stage.”

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The team event will conclude Sunday night with the free skates from, in order, the pairs, women and men. Shortly after the end of Saturday’s session, the United States announced that Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea will once again represent Team USA in pairs, Amber Glenn will make her Olympic debut as the team’s women’s skater, and Malinin will once again skate as the team’s men’s representative.

“I think our team is incredibly strong, arguably the strongest it’s ever been,” Chock said. “I have the utmost faith in them, and I’ll be proud of them no matter what the outcome is.”

MILAN — She didn’t have to do this. Lindsey Vonn was already one of the most decorated athletes alive, a World Cup winner dozens of times over, famous worldwide and an inspiration to girls, women, skiers in the millions.

She didn’t have to do this. Vonn spent decades and four Olympics fighting through waves of injuries that would have ended so many other careers. She had nothing left to prove to anyone.

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She didn’t have to do this. After retiring from skiing, Vonn reinvented herself, becoming an entrepreneur, hosting a reality TV show, writing a memoir, engineering charitable endeavors and investing time and money in worlds far removed from ski slopes. She transformed herself from a skier into an institution.

She didn’t have to do this. Un-retiring always brings the risk — for many, the certainty — that a legend should have stayed retired. Michael Jordan, Brett Favre, Willie Mays, virtually every boxer and MMA fighter who came back for one more turn in the spotlight … all returned diminished, a sad, faded reflection of their past glory.

She didn’t have to do this. After suffering a catastrophic wreck in Switzerland just one week before the Opening Ceremony, a wreck that ruptured her ACL, she could have accepted her heartbreaking fate and bowed out of the competition.

And yet here she is, not just a member of the U.S. Olympic ski team once again, but still winning races; not just sustaining injuries, but rallying back from them over and over. This month, Lindsey Vonn will once again don the stars and stripes, once again return to her beloved Cortina, and add an entire new chapter to a career that everyone — including her — believed was done years ago.

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“I’ve built a great life outside of skiing, but there will never be anything like skiing,” Vonn, 41, said in October. “I fully understand that, and I’m comfortable with that. But I’m definitely going to enjoy this last bit of adrenaline, because I won’t get it back.”

Two decades of Olympic achievement

When she clicks into her skis this month in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Vonn will compete in her fifth Olympics, and her first since 2018. It’s a stunning achievement, but perfectly in line with the arc of Vonn’s life. Born in Minnesota in 1984, she declared as a 9-year-old that she wanted to ski in the Winter Olympics … and eight years later, as a member of Team USA in 2002, she did exactly that.

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She didn’t medal in those Games, nor in 2006, where she crashed so severely in training that she had to be airlifted off the course. But in 2010, she claimed gold in downhill, the first U.S. woman ever to do so, and changed the course of the rest of her life. A 2013 ACL injury cost her a shot at the Sochi Games in 2014. At what she believed was her final Olympics, in 2018, she won a bronze in downhill and formally ceded the Olympic stage to younger skiers like Mikaela Shiffrin.

As she continued to pile up podiums around the Olympics, Vonn set her sights on Ingemar Stenmark’s record of 86 World Cup wins. She came close, very close, but stalled out in 2019 at 82 wins, decades’ worth of concussions, surgeries, fractures and assorted injuries finally catching up with her.

And for everyone — herself included — that seemed to be the end of Vonn’s story on skis. Shiffrin eventually caught and passed both Vonn and Stenmark in World Cup victories. The skiing world proceeded onward through the lockdown Olympics in Beijing. Vonn’s career exploits faded farther and farther into the distance.

The two factors that brought Vonn back

But even though she was done with skiing, skiing wasn’t quite done with her. The injuries from decades on the slopes dogged her daily life. She couldn’t hike, walk or even stand without pain. So in April 2024, Vonn underwent a partial knee replacement that completely upended her story — in the best possible way. She began hiking, working out, even skiing without pain.

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“I really thought when I retired in 2019, that was it,” Vonn said. “I had built an amazing life, I was really  happy. But then after the replacement, I knew things were really different. My body felt so good, and I just kind of kept pushing myself further and further to see what I was capable of, and racing seemed like the logical next step.”

Vonn announced that she would begin racing again in November 2024. She faced skepticism, disbelief, even scorn; two-time Olympic gold medalist Michaela Dorfmeister told Austrian TV that Vonn “should see a psychologist,” and wondered, “Does she want to kill herself?” Another Olympic gold winner, Franz Klammer, declared, “She’s gone completely mad.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not. At her first race back, at Copper Mountain in Colorado, Vonn finished 24th in a field of 45. Her finishes kept climbing, and last December, she finally won her 83rd World Cup race, finishing first in the downhill in St. Moritz. She added No. 84 just a few weeks ago, further solidifying the legitimacy of her return.

Which brings us to Cortina d’Ampezzo, the second motivation — along with the knee surgery — behind Vonn’s return. Vonn achieved her first World Cup podium at Cortina, as well as her 63rd victory, the one that gave her more downhill titles than any woman, ever. In all, she’s won 12 World Cup events at Cortina, and feels as comfortable there as anywhere else on earth.

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“I don’t think I would have tried this comeback if the Olympics weren’t in Cortina,” Vonn said. “If it had been anywhere else, I would probably say it’s not worth it. But for me, there’s something special about Cortina that always pulls me back, and it’s pulled me back one last time.”

Would Lindsey Vonn make the Olympic team?

Once Vonn started racking up podiums around the world, there was little doubt she’d make Team USA. U.S. Ski & Snowboard regulations offer plenty of latitude for subjectivity in the selection process, with a “discretionary” selection that can go to a “medal capable athlete” — which by U.S. Ski’s definition is any athlete achieving Top 30 finishes in World Cup events.

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The moment arrived two days before Christmas, when U.S. Ski made the expected but still impressive announcement: Vonn would be going to Milan-Cortina as a member of Team USA.

“I am honored to be able to represent my country one more time, in my 5th and final Olympics!” Vonn wrote. “Although I can’t guarantee any outcomes, I can guarantee that I will give my absolute best every time l kick out of the starting gate. No matter how these games end up, I feel like I’ve already won.”

Reckoning with the physical and societal implications of age drives Vonn’s comeback. Few examples exist of female athletes competing long after their peers have retired. Serena Williams, Dara Torres, even Simone Biles all extended their careers past the traditional breaking point, but they’re the outliers. Vonn leans into her age, shrugging off the “grandma” comments from competitors and embracing the wisdom that she’s gained along the way.

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“I bring up age because women don’t normally compete at my age, and I think that needs to change,” she said. “I think the perception of women competing older should change. Tom Brady’s done it. Lewis Hamilton, LeBron James, all of those athletes are and were competing in their 40s. It’s just not a common thing to see [from] women.”

The most fascinating element of Vonn’s comeback is that this isn’t some one-last-run tour, it’s a legitimate Olympic-level tour de force. In her eight races so far this season, Vonn has finished on the podium seven times, going ski-to-ski with competitors nearly two decades younger than her. If she manages to claim another Olympic medal, she’d top by eight years the previous record for the oldest alpine Olympic medalist, a record currently held by … Lindsey Vonn.

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“I like risk. I like going fast. I like pushing myself to the limit. I love being on the mountain,” Vonn said earlier this week in announcing her injury. “It’s an amazing feeling, and one I know I will never have again, because I’ve been retired, and I know I’m lucky that I even get this chance one more time. And every time I stand in the starting gate, I realize I’m lucky to be able to do something I love so much, and I don’t take that for granted.”

She has to do this. And she will, starting this week.

MILAN — When sports fans hear an athlete has torn their ACL, the immediate assumption is a year out of competition. Maybe nine months if everything goes well.

Lindsey Vonn is trying to win an Olympic medal in a matter of days.

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“No doctor could endorse a normal person to go skiing, let alone competitively so,” said Dr. Yair David Kissin, an orthopedic surgeon and knee specialist at Hackensack University Medical Center (N.J.).

But Vonn is not a normal person — or even a normal competitive athlete, which explains in part why sports medicine practitioners interviewed by Yahoo Sports said it is within the realm of possibility for her to race in the women’s downhill in Cortina on Sunday, just nine days after a devastating fall that required her to be airlifted to a hospital after a crash in Switzerland.

“From a purely physical or biomechanical standpoint, it’s possible if you’re an elite Alpine skier like Lindsey is to perform at that Olympic level,” said Dr. Catherine Logan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Joint Preservation Center in Denver who also works with U.S. Ski and Snowboard. “Alpine skiing is very different from your traditional field, cutting, pivoting sports. The movement patterns are relatively predictable in comparison so there’s less demand on the ACL when we’re trying to decelerate or change directions. There’s still an increased risk for secondary injury to the meniscus or her cartilage, but really her ability to generate force, maintain her edges and tolerate those speeds is not eliminated inherently just by having that ACL deficiency. So, despite all those things, she still has a great chance to perform well.”

Of the four main ligaments in the knee, the ACL is the one with the most impact on stability. It also doesn’t heal very well on its own, which is why the normal course of action is reconstructive surgery and a long period of rehabilitation for an athlete to regain the ability to plant and twist and change directions.

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“Think about being in your car and knowing when you make turns, it will stay on the road,” Kissin said. “If you take off a front wheel and make a turn, it’s kind of what the knee does where it isn’t there for you. It’s not trustworthy.”

But Vonn’s situation is atypical for two reasons.

First, people who tear ACLs typically suffer some type of loss of neuromuscular control in their surrounding muscles, according to Darin Padua, an athletic trainer and professor in the Department of Exercise and Sports Science at University of North Carolina with a research emphasis on ACL injuries. Vonn, thanks to her physical gifts and years of training as a world class skier to develop her quadricep and hip muscles, likely has enough strength built in to retain some control of them and provide compensation for the loss of stabilization the ACL was providing.

Second, Vonn at age 41 is likely looking at her last chance to compete in an Olympics. So while most people, or even most professional athletes, would have to factor in long-term considerations for their career and weigh risk of further injury, Vonn is in a different situation. It really comes down to whether she feels like she can do it.

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“This is going to be difficult, but she’s as tenacious as they come,” said Dr. Samuel Ward, a professor of orthopedic surgery and co-director of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at UC-San Diego . “There’s a little bit of mind over matter here, too. The combination of those things either provides her enough stability where she can do it or it doesn’t, and I think she’s going to figure that out. The average human being would be like, ‘I hurt my knee and I’m afraid of it.’ In her situation, she has the capacity to push past that whether or not the knee itself has the intrinsic stability to do what it needs to do during the race. I think nobody knows the answer to that until she races.”

Ward said that although the headlines made Vonn’s crash last week sound catastrophic, he interpreted it as good news that she managed to ski to the bottom of the hill before getting on the helicopter. All things considered, the fact she wasn’t immobile is a decent baseline to start from. And in her news conference Tuesday, Vonn said she was not suffering from any swelling.

That’s key since Ward characterized knee swelling as the “circuit breaker” that shuts off the quadriceps and would make it difficult to compete.

“When your knees are bent like when you’re skiing, your quadriceps are the shock absorbers of your knee,” he said. “They’re allowing you to crouch down in that position and manage the terrain of the course. So without strong quads, that’s not a reasonable task. That’s why the focus is on managing the swelling. The tendency after you get injured is to try to protect it and she’s going to have to go after it instead of protecting it.”

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Logan said the key from now until Vonn competes will be round-the-clock therapy and a testing protocol to ensure she has enough knee stability get out of the starting gate confidently. That starts with land-based assessments of her ability to jump, land and twist before getting onto the mountain and replicating movements she would make in the race.

“It’s a progression from testing on the table to dry land to the snow,” Logan said.

Still, trying to compete in a race so quickly after such a devastating injury isn’t the norm. Padua said it’s the shortest turnaround he’s aware of.

“There’s not a lot out there in terms of prior cases where you can look and say these three or four people have done something similar,” he said. “She’s certainly an outlier in the sense of what an amazing athlete she is. If there’s anybody who can be able to manage this injury and still compete at the highest level, she is that type of individual. Unfortunately, she’s had these injuries in the past so she knows kind of what to expect and how to manage it internally. She’s probably in that very, very rare group of individuals with that capability.”

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By attempting this, Vonn is probably risking some further damage to her knee, particularly to her meniscus or cartilage. But that’s where medicine is both art and science, with doctors providing both the best- and worst-case scenarios and ultimately working with her to come to a decision.

“It’s not always one answer is the only answer,” Logan said. “She’s consulting with multiple physicians and that’s a normal thing. There’s not just one voice, but the athlete should be in the end the driver of the decision.”

Ultimately, it just comes down to one thing: When it’s time to race, does Vonn feel her knee is stable enough to get her to the bottom of the mountain?

“Her body is so conditioned that most likely she’s got the compensatory mechanisms very few people in existence ever have and she may be able to do it,” Kissin said. “If she doesn’t feel like it’s a good idea I hope she has the wherewithal to stop and not risk something that is inevitable. In her case, if she thinks she can do it and her doctors may not disagree with her completely — I wouldn’t want to be them but at the same time I envy them — because she’s a different level of ACL patient and it’s a great example that every case needs to be individualized.”

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If Vonn were at the beginning of a long career, the calculation may be different. But after coming of retirement for one more run at Olympic glory, the risk-reward equation probably favors giving it a try.

“I’m not a betting person,” Ward said, “but I wouldn’t bet against her.”

The Atlanta Falcons are expected to release veteran quarterback Kirk Cousins before the start of the new league year in March and let him decide his future, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported Saturday.

The Falcons cutting Cousins would make him a free agent again, and that would allow him to choose where he wants to spend the 2026 campaign — if he wants to play, that is. Cousins, after all, will turn 38 before the start of next season and is 14 seasons into his four-time Pro Bowl career.

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Cousins, who was in Washington for his first six seasons, signed a four-year, $180 million deal with the Falcons in 2024 after playing for six additional seasons for the Minnesota Vikings from 2018-2023.

Saturday’s news follows last month’s ESPN report that Atlanta restructured Cousins’ contract, a move that reportedly set the Falcons up for more cap flexibility and put Cousins in position for a release that would give him more career options.

Modifications were made to Cousins’ 2026 base salary, dropping it from $35 million to $2.1 million. That $32.9 million difference was then added to his 2027 base salary, per Schefter.

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If Cousins is on the Falcons’ roster at the start of the league year in mid-March, his 2027 base salary — which is now reportedly $67.9 million — will become guaranteed.

But cutting him via a post-June 1 release would split the dead money on his contract over the 2026 and 2027 league years, according to ESPN.

The year he signed with the Falcons, he was coming back from an Achilles injury that cost him the back half of the 2023 season.

Although he worked his way back to the field in time for Week 1, he picked up shoulder and elbow injuries, struggled and was benched 14 games into his first go-around with the Falcons. Rookie Michael Penix Jr., whom Atlanta surprisingly took No. 8 overall in the 2024 draft, replaced Cousins and had a three-game runway to the 2025 campaign.

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Then-head coach Raheem Morris stuck with Penix as QB1 this past offseason. Although trade rumors swirled, Cousins wasn’t dealt before or during this season.

He wound up starting eight more games for the Falcons, though, including seven straight to end the season after Penix underwent surgery to repair a torn ACL.

Cousins led Atlanta to wins in its each of its final four games, posting a 7:2 touchdown-to-interception ratio in that span.

He would like to play next season, per Schefter, but he’s expected to have television opportunities. Cousins appeared on CBS’ pregame show during the playoffs.

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As for Penix, the Falcons haven’t made a commitment at the quarterback position since firing Morris and hiring a new leadership team that features president of football Matt Ryan, general manager Ian Cunningham and head coach Kevin Stefanski.