Winter Olympics 2026: Italy pulls Steph Curry ‘night, night’ celebration after beating U.S. for gold in team pursuit

MILAN — They’ve trained together almost every day for years, sometimes sacrificing their own individual ambitions in speed skating for the good of the team. They’ve learned to glide around the ice almost perfectly in sync, skates lifting off the ground at the same time on every stride, bodies tilted at the same angle as they scream into the curves.

It was worth the grind for Casey Dawson, Emery Lehman and Ethan Cepuran — even if the Olympic medal earned by the American trio isn’t the one they coveted most.

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Dawson, Lehman and Cepuran settled for silver medals on Tuesday afternoon after advancing to the final of the men’s team pursuit competition but fading in the second half of the race against host Italy. The Italians clocked a winning time of 3:39.20, coming from behind to win the eight-lap final by more than four seconds.

“We came out here to win,” Dawson said. “The last four years, the dream was to get gold at these Games. But today we tried our best. We put it all out there on the ice. I’m just proud of these boys.”

The margin was wide enough that Italy’s Andrea Giovannini had time to hit Steph Curry’s signature “night, night” celebration as he crossed the finish line. That didn’t faze the Americans, who experienced a Russian speedskater giving the double bird to the pro-American crowd after beating the U.S. in the semifinals at the 2022 Beijing Games.

“It’s better than getting two middle fingers from the Russians four years ago,” Lehman said.

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“They’re celebrating, they put in the work, good for them,” Dawson added.

The outcome was bittersweet for a U.S. team that entered the Olympics ranked No. 1 in the world and that had recently dominated the team pursuit discipline. The Americans had skated to three world records, five straight World Cup season-long titles, world championship gold and Olympic bronze over the past five seasons.

“You can’t just be the best going in,” Lehman said. “You have to be the best on the day you compete and Italy was the best today. In every round they had the fastest time. So you could say we lost gold, but I just think they were more prepared at the Olympics.”

The U.S. also advanced to the medal round in women’s team pursuit but came away empty-handed Tuesday evening. Giorgia Birkeland, Brittany Bowe and Mia Manganello fell more than four seconds short against Canada in the semifinals and lost by more than three seconds to Japan in the bronze-medal round.

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For the U.S. men, the path to Olympic silver began in an aerodynamics science lab nearly eight years ago. Ingmar Jungnickel, the chair of U.S. Speedskating’s sports science commission, developed a revolutionary new approach to team pursuit that allowed the Americans to shave precious seconds off their fastest times.

Traditionally in team pursuit, the lead skater would peel off the front of the train every lap or two and reattach at the back, eager to have a teammate share the burden of fighting through wind resistance. Through aerodynamic modeling, Jungnickel showed that teams could go faster by leaving one skater at the front for the entire eight-lap race with his two teammates pushing him from behind with their outstretched hands to maintain his momentum.

The U.S. men debuted this new technique at the 2020 World Championships and finished an encouraging fifth, less than four seconds behind the first-place Dutch. The Americans’ time was 12 seconds faster than two years earlier at the Pyeongchang Winter Games when they posted the slowest quarterfinal time and did not reach the medal round.

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By the 2022 Olympics, the rest of the world had caught on. All three medaling teams used the technique pioneered by the Americans. Dawson, Lehman, Cepura and Joey Mantia took bronze, the second Olympic medal that the U.S. men have ever won in the event.

“It was a crazy idea that was brought to us,” Lehman said. “We were the guinea pigs. It will be cool in 50 years when they’re breaking 3:30 or maybe 3:20 in the team pursuit and they’re still doing that same technique.”

Over the next four years, the U.S. men blossomed into the top team in the world by prioritizing team chemistry on and off the ice. Dawson, Lehman and Cepuran see each other as much as they see their families. They even compete in the same fantasy football league, as evidenced by the unusual items that Dawson has been hauling around this World Cup season.

Dawson is easy to spot in a crowd because of his pink, heart-festooned schoolchild’s backpack and a plastic foot attached to his phone.

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“I lost fantasy football back in the States,” he explained sheepishly soon after he arrived in Milan. “We have a league with all our skaters, and I got last place.”

Thankfully for Dawson, he’s a little better at skating than he is at fantasy drafts and waiver-wire pickups, so much so that he now has another attention-grabbing accessory to show off.

He’ll return home with an Olympic silver medal around his neck.