Alysa Liu and ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates headlined a cast of Americans who won top-level international competitions this past weekend as the Winter Olympic season ramped up.
Liu and Chock and Bates, reigning world champions, each prevailed at Saatva Skate America in Lake Placid, New York, and qualified for December’s Grand Prix Final.
Liu, who ended a two-year retirement last season and then won a surprise world title, earned her first victory of the Olympic season.
At the Grand Prix Final, she will face a field including three-time world champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan in a mini preview of the Olympics.
Chock and Bates, three-time world champions, won a record-tying fifth Skate America ice dance title with the world’s top score this season.
At the Final, they will likely face France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron for the first time this season. The two couples are part of the same training group in Montreal.
Cizeron, a 2022 Olympic gold medalist with former partner Gabriella Papadakis, and Fournier Beaudry teamed up earlier this year and rank second in the world this season by best score.
In Alpine skiing, Mikaela Shiffrin won the first slalom of the World Cup season with her largest margin of victory in any race since December 2023.
Shiffrin prevailed in Levi, Finland, by 1.66 seconds — greater than the margin separating second place from 10th place. She extended her records with a 102nd Alpine World Cup win and 65th in slalom.
Shiffrin focused on giant slalom in preseason training, yet maintained her dominance in slalom coming off a season where she missed two months due to injury.
She next races another slalom this Sunday in Gurgl, Austria, live on Peacock.
Slovakian Petra Vlhova, the 2022 Olympic slalom gold medalist and Shiffrin’s primary rival for most of the last decade, has been sidelined since a January 2024 race crash and ensuing knee surgery. Vlhova has resumed on-snow training but hasn’t announced a return date yet.
In speed skating, Jordan Stolz clocked the second-fastest times in history in the 1000m and 1500m at the season’s first World Cup at the Utah Olympic Oval.
He also placed first and fourth in a pair of 500m races at the world’s fastest venue given its elevation and thin air.
Stolz, bidding to become the second American to win three gold medals at a single Winter Olympics after fellow Wisconsin speed skater Eric Heiden, swept the 500m, 1000m and 1500m at the World Championships in 2023 and 2024.
Three world records were set at the Utah oval, including one by the U.S. men’s team pursuit squad of Ethan Cepuran, Casey Dawson and Emery Lehman. The trio, which won the world title last March, lowered their own world record.
Fellow American Erin Jackson skated personal-best times to place second in the 500m (behind Dutchwoman Femke Kok, who broke the world record) and eighth in the 1000m. Jackson, who won the 2022 Olympic 500m title, said she has raced this month with her back feeling well for the first time in three years.
Finally in curling, a team led by Danny Casper won the Olympic Trials, dethroning 2018 gold medalist John Shuster, who was bidding to tie the U.S. record across all sports with a sixth Winter Olympic appearance.
Casper’s team isn’t qualified for the Milan Cortina Games yet. It must finish in the top two of a last-chance global tournament in Canada in December.
The women’s trials winner — a team led by two-time Olympian Tabitha Peterson — must also go through the last-chance qualifier.
Two athletes who did qualify for Milan Cortina over the weekend were Laura Dwyer and Steve Emt. They won the curling trials for the new Paralympic event of wheelchair mixed doubles, becoming the first athletes named to the 2026 U.S. Paralympic team.
