The 2018 Winter Olympics are nearly a month away, and while fans are certainly stoked to see more than two weeks of events including skiing, bobsled, and hockey, it’s the 2018 Winter Olympic athletes looking to compete in PyeongChang that make the wh…
The 2018 Winter Olympics are nearly a month away, and while fans are certainly stoked to see more than two weeks of events including skiing, bobsled, and hockey, it’s the 2018 Winter Olympic athletes looking to compete in PyeongChang that make the whole thing possible. Athletes will compete for 102 medals in 15 disciplines, including, for the first time, » Big Air in snowboarding, mass start in speed skating, mixed doubles in curling, and a team skiing event,» according to CBC. These 10 female athletes — who’ve made major waves in sports like snowboarding, bobsled, ice dancing, and more — will be among the many to watch in PyeongChang when the games begin in February.
While the official Olympic teams won’t be announced until Jan. 22, there are plenty of athletes coming out of the woodwork who are strong Olympic contenders. Female athletes will be competing in disciplines across the board in 2018, including bobsled, for which Nigeria’s dynamite all-women team qualified, and hockey, where the U. S. women’s team will compete, hoping to win its first gold medal in 20 years .
These 10 female athletes are just like us — except for, you know, how incredible they are in their respective fields. Ahead, learn a little bit about what each woman is hoping to bring to the Olympic table.
Skier Mikaela Shiffrin is a familiar face to the Winter Games. In 2014, at age 18, she became the youngest athlete in history to win an Olympic slalom gold medal. She’s been touring the world cup circuit since, and has racked up 36 career world cup wins across three disciplines. Currently, she’s on her third straight world championship title in slalom.
For Shiffrin, the hardest part of prepping for the Olympics is «the constant training in grueling conditions,» she tells Bustle. «Sometimes we have really nice, sunny days, with perfect snow conditions, and you couldn’t ask for anything better, but it is often freezing cold, raining, or a blizzard, and you really have to dig deep to get the most out of the session.»
And much of the time she spends in those dour conditions isn’t actually practicing the physical actions of the sport, she says. Her training sessions are around five hours long, but that equals out to «about seven to 10 minutes doing my actual sport, because the rest of the time is spent on chairlifts, doing video analysis, taking a rest,» she says. «In ski training, you literally can NOT be on snow training enough because the time [spent on the slopes] is so limited.» Shiffrin has qualified for the 2018 team.
Snowboarder Chloe Kim is only 17 years old, but she’s already made such a name for herself that she was only unable to enter the 2014 Olympics because of age restrictions. Instead, she became the only athlete in X Games history to have won three gold medals before the age of 16, and took the women’s halfpipe and slopestyle titles at the 2016 Winter Youth Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway. Now, she’s planning to head to Pyeongchang to compete in halfpipe snowboarding.
Her parents, who are South Korean, have been «so influential,» she tells Bustle, and critical to her success. Her dad was the first person who put her on a snowboard when she was just four years old, and «he especially devoted a lot of his time to making sure I got to my practices,» she says. Kim tells Bustle she’s excited to get the chance to compete in front of her parents’ family that still live in South Korea. Kim has qualified for the 2018 team.
Jamie Anderson is another familiar face for winter sports fans: She won gold at the 2014 Winter Olympics, then went on to win an X Games silver medal in slopestyle. She also won three world cup events, and World Snowboard Federation’s World Championship titles in both slopestyle and big air. In this year’s Olympics, she’ll be aiming to grab the gold and defend her title.
For Anderson, an essential part of training for her events involves making sure her diet is healthy, full of «pure, organic, whole foods,» she tells Bustle. «You have to make sure you’re taking in a lot of extra vitamins and minerals. I drink a green shake that’s filled with amino acids [and] has over 100 superfoods like spirulina, goji berries, all kinds of different grains.»
«Giving yourself the right ingredients is for your body, what positive affirmations are to the mind,» she says.
Anderson has qualified for the 2018 team.
Jessica Kooreman is a veteran speedskater who won gold at the 2014 Olympic Team Trials in the 500,1,000, and 1,500 rounds. She also had the best finish among U. S. women in the 2017 World Short Track Speedskating Championships. She qualified for the 2018 Olympics on the last day possible, and will be on the U. S. women’s short track speedskating team.
Kooreman says her parents have been hugely influential for her. «When my parents had me at the age of 20 my dad changed his focus to helping me chase my dreams,» she tells Bustle. «My mom also skated in her early teens. She wishes she had started earlier and so by the age of one she put me on skates and I haven’t looked back since.»
«I have an internal drive that is fueled by the inspiration I get from my parents when I think about the sacrifice and work they have put into helping me become who I am today,» Kooreman says.
Ashley Wagner, a three-time U. S. champion figure skater, also competed at Sochi and took bronze as part of the U. S. team, in addition to placing seventh individually. Since 2014, she’s won her third U. S. title and took the silver medal at the 2016 ISU World Championships. 2017 saw her finish second at nationals and seventh at the world championships, and she hopes to carry her momentum into PyeongChang.
Wagner is a self-described «Army brat,» she tells Bustle, and her childhood involved a lot of motion, which allowed her to create «a very unique relationship with skating,» she says. «I never was familiar with my surroundings and the rink was the one place that really felt like home to me because it always gave me this sense of comfort and familiarity.» Should she qualify, it will be exciting to see how she follows up her bronze medal from 2014.
Nagasu has been competing in high-level figure skating circuits since 2008, when she won the women’s U. S. national title at just 14 years old. That made her the youngest woman since 1997 to win the U. S. title, and the first woman since 1938 to win back-to-back junior and senior national titles. She made her Olympic debut in Vancouver in 2010, but missed a spot on the 2014 team. She hopes to come into the 2018 Winter Games after fourth-place U. S. championship finishes in both 2016 and 2017.
Nagasu says her earliest memory of her sport involves her number one inspiration: «Definitely watching Michelle Kwan be amazing in Nagano,» she tells Bustle. «She was and is my role model.»
Maia Shibutani has competed in ice dancing with her partner and brother Alex Shibutani since 2004. They debuted together on the senior level in the 2010-11 season, and took bronze medals at both the 2010 NHK Trophy, and the 2011 ISU World Championships. Their road to the 2014 Olympics was paved by another bronze medal at the 2014 U.
