CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Nine days into the Games, the women’s giant slalom crowd had settled into a kind of community. The Olympic families had arrived in force, turning sections of the finish area into extensions of home.
Crowd ingenuity reached an all-time high. Some flattened beer cartons into makeshift footstools, while others smuggled in pocket-sized camping chairs to use between events. With it came barely intact feather boas, muddied neon overalls, the same beer-stained hockey jersey and inflatable dinosaur costumes with a hole in the side.
Brennan Vaughan was making his way back to the rabble with a handful of drinks for his friends when a face-painter accosted him with an Italian flag stamp to the cheek. It was quickly followed by an American flag on the other. No words were exchanged save for a quick, surprised thumbs up at the end.
Vaughan was wearing a bright American flag onesie that has carried him through the past decade of Olympic spectating, just one of the many traditions he continues with his friends at the Olympics.
It’s his fifth Winter Games.
“It all started in Park City,” his friend, Mark Reynolds said. “And I was there and it was such a great experience, now we can’t ever go back. I’m hooked, and I got these guys hooked too.”
Vaughan has been to the Salt Lake, Vancouver, Sochi and PyeongChang Games. He arrived in Cortina just 18 hours earlier, flying in late to make it in time for the women’s giant slalom on Sunday. Already, he said, Cortina has reached the top of his rankings.
He gestured out toward the Dolomites glowing under the clearest sky the alpine center had seen all week.
“This weather, this view is beyond anything else,” Reynolds said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Reynolds and Vaughan stood beside the Moltzans, more than 40 strong, all in coordinated hockey jerseys in support of Team USA’s Paula Moltzan. Even the youngest toddler had a matching blue jersey on, with the family sending up chants and cheers for Moltzan and her teammates all morning, as they staked out their territory at the finish.
The jerseys sparked more than a little friendly rivalry among the ski families. The Moltzan army was matched only by teammate Nina O’Brien’s, whose supporters sported hats with a neon pink “NINA” printed on the front and matching red flannels.
The flannels were a last-minute addition by Nina’s mom, Dana O’Brien, who couldn’t let the Moltzans get away with the visual advantage. She ordered flannels for every family member there, at least 30, though by race morning no one could quite land on an official head count.
The crew rushed to get them on before the rest of the Moltzans arrived, half of them buttoning their shirts up crooked in the morning rush.
One family member went rogue and let the spare “NINA” hats start circulating into the crowd, slipping onto the heads of nearby spectators who may or may not have personally known Nina just five minutes earlier.
Pink-lettered hats spread through the crowd and up the bleachers. By the end of the day, the O’Briens just might have beaten the Moltzans in numbers, if not by relatives and, then, recruits.
For Paula Moltzan’s mother-in-law, Jennifer Mooney, having the army of support behind Paula is the one thing they can do to help make these events a little easier.
The O’Brien section carried the excitement of finally being here in person and the nervous energy that comes with watching someone you love do something high stakes at high speed.
“It is so nice. None of us can do this without our family. They’re the ones who drive you to the mountain every day as a kid, and they’re the ones who I still call when I’m on the road all this time. It means so much that they came out here to watch and cheer,” said Nina O’Brien.
For many of them, being in Cortina felt necessary after being unable to attend Nina’s Olympic debut in Beijing, when travel restrictions and COVID protocols kept them watching her on the TV.
“When she skied in Beijing, none of us could go, and so there are a lot of us out here,” said Chris Smith, Nina O’Brien’s cousin. The group is definitely nervous excited. There are always nerves no matter what it is. We want her to be healthy and succeed. But it will be so fun.”
For Smith, his first Olympic experience, as much as it was about supporting Nina, was also about simply being in it, surrounded by the chaos and the joy of the crowd.
“It’s fun just seeing all the different countries and gear walking around town,” he said. “Even just yesterday, I went to a skeleton event, and Brazil showed out louder than anyone else. I would not have expected that, and it was just fun to watch.”
And surrounding all of it were the fans who weren’t technically Olympic family but might as well have been — the ones who had raced themselves, coached national teams or followed the World Cup circuit across the world.
“The Winter Games are just a little more intimate,” said Vaughan. “So many times, the bobsled team from another country is right next to you, and before you know it, you’re conversing and having a ball and making new friends. It’s pretty cool.”
Earlier that day on the bus, Vaughan’s group struck up a conversation with the parents of Ireland’s lone alpine athlete, Anabelle Zurbay, and got to cheer her on from the finish beside them.
“You’ll start seeing people at every Olympics that you recognize from the year before and from previous events, and you build a whole community here of people from the athletes to those families who’ve never skied before,” said Vaughan.
Sisters Cody and Casey Ryder came to Cortina with their mom, Paula Kimball, as a three-generation ski racing unit. All three raced in college, and Casey coached for the Telluride Ski Team before moving to coach in New Zealand.
“The coolest part I think about ski racing is that not only are the families within the teams close,” Casey said, “but then all of the athletes from all of the countries go out after races together, and I think there’s something particularly cool about skiing that makes that happen and seeing that happen at the Olympics just makes it even cooler.”
Kimball joked: “She was doing a little jig just walking up here. She couldn’t slow down even to keep up with her mom.”
The three had each found the face-painter, and similarly chose to sport the American flag on their cheeks next to a handful of red, white and blue rhinestones, but in their hands they each held three flags, one for the U.S., one for New Zealand and one for Italy.
Scott and Rachel Humphrey had flown from Atlanta with their daughter, Samantha, having planned out their Olympic pilgrimage for years.
“I’ve always wanted to go to the Olympics for my whole life. We have planned this for a long time coming. We’re just super excited to be here. It’s really fun,” said Scott.
Samantha still looked slightly stunned to be standing at the finish corral of an Olympic giant slalom course, even after years of planning the trip, and she couldn’t stop smiling. She had gotten into pin trading in the host city of Cortina and between runs. Her eyes scanned lanyards, looking for one she didn’t already have.
“This is just incredible. I don’t want it to be once in a lifetime. But this is pretty once in a lifetime,” she said.
The Games weren’t technically Nick Fischer’s first, but they may as well have been.
A member of the Park City High School class of 2000, Fischer was in college when the 2002 Winter Olympics came to Utah. He came home while the world descended on the town he grew up in, but he never stepped inside a venue.
He spent his time on Main Street with friends instead, soaking in the atmosphere but never sitting in a grandstand, never watching a medal decided in real time. At the time, that felt like enough.
More than two decades later, he finally made it, arriving late on Saturday night to make it to town in time for the women’s giant slalom race on Sunday. Coming up the mountain to the Tofane Alpine Skiing Center was the first he had seen of the town in the daylight. On the ground less than a day, and in the Olympic crowds for less than an hour, he said he was already booking tickets for France 2030.
“It’s only been like 12 hours since we landed. I’m all in,” he said.
Though he now lives in Phoenix, Arizona, Fischer quickly found other Park City faces in the crowd. By the end of the race, he was talking with Park City Councilor Tana Toly about what 2034 might look like when the Games return to Utah.
