Late Saturday afternoon in Milan — late morning in the U.S. — the most decorated American athlete at the 2026 Winter Olympics, 21-year-old speed skater Jordan Stolz, quietly exited the Games with a 4th-place finish in the mass start event, narrowly missing bronze. He is the only U.S. athlete to win two individual gold medals at these Olympics, and the only one to win three total medals, making him statistically the most successful American athlete who competed in Italy. But modern Olympic success is not so easily quantified and is broadly measured by more ethereal factors: impact, market penetration....and because the Olympics are, for the heavy majority of consumers, a television show, drama.

And the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics have been wildly dramatic. Soaringly, joyfully, painfully, awkwardly, relentlessly dramatic. They were dramatic on Friday night when Alysa Liu, whose story of figure skating rediscovery and personal reinvention represents a form of Olympic narrative perfection, performed a free skate of such ebullience that it seemed to lift the entire Games into the night air like one of her triples, and which carried into the post-event festivities, during which Liu batted aside questions about fear and pressure and laughed and smiled her way into hearts and history.

They had been dramatic 90 minutes before Liu, when American teammate Amber Glenn, whose own story of perseverance and growth was nearly as compelling as Liu's, delivered a free skate that was almost angry in its grace and power, trying to symbolically right the wrong of a single mistake in the previous night's short program that surely ruined her chance at a medal (itself, a moment of agonizing drama). She cried afterward, and said, "I've had the moment I always dreamed of."

They had been dramatic for the two weeks of the Games. They were dramatic when 41-year-old Alpine ski racer Lindsey Vonn tore her ACL a week before what seemed likely to be the stunning culmination of a comeback on a partial knee replacement after five years in retirement; and they were dramatic when she raced just the same, and crashed violently 13 seconds into the downhill and was airlifted off the mountain against the backdrop of the grey Dolomites and a blue sky, a visual for the ages. 

They had been dramatic when figure skater Ilia Malinin, a transformative athlete with an angel's face, repeatedly, and shockingly, fell during his free skate and grimaced afterward in a pain that raced past disappointment to shock. They had been dramatic when bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor won her sixth Olympic medal — and first gold — in the women's monobob competition and shared it with her two small sons; when Mikaela Shiffrin, the most accomplished Alpine skier in history, ended a run of eight consecutive Olympic races without a medal by winning a dominant gold in the slalom and afterward, explained how she finally learned to share the moment with her father, who died in an accident six years ago. There has been drama in all forms.

Stolz's Games have very much not been dramatic. He first won the 1,000m last Wednesday, using a blistering final lap to skate down Jenning de Boo of the Netherlands; in victory he pulled off the hood of his speed suit, put his glasses on his head (all speed skaters do these things), and gently shook his right fist. Afterward he said, "When [De Boo] was ahead of me, I thought he might win. Then I thought, I can't let that happen." Simple.

Three days later he again skated down De Boo to win the gold medal in the 500m. Afterward he was asked about Olympic pressure, which had become a powerful topic after Malinin's and Shiffrin's struggles. Stolz brushed it off. (I typed this quote earlier in the Games, but it's worth a second look). "I definitely felt [pressure] before the 1000. Sometimes you just have to deal with [pressure] and get it out of your mind if it's going to affect your racing. You only have one chance to win. You have to just put it out of your mind." Also simple.

It's not fair to compare one athlete's relationship to competition pressure with another's; they are as unalike as snowflakes. But it's noteworthy here because this is who Stolz is. He is a pragmatist who drills down into the details of training and racing, but keeps the emotional part contained. If he had fallen to the ice in tears after either of his two golds, his narrative would have grown. There was no chance Stolz was going to do that. It is not him.

His third race was the 1500m, in which he has been undefeated during the current World Cup season and was a heavy favorite. Instead, Ning Zhongyan of China tore down the Olympic record and Stolz finished 2nd, more than three-quarters of a second behind, a country mile in this sport. Stolz endured the upset with aplomb. “[Ning] was just really good today. I was attacking as hard as I could. I thought it was going to be close, but he was just better. Either way, good race, happy with silver, and I still have two golds." More simple.

Saturday's mass start was a quirky event, heavily strategy- and draft-dependent, more akin to cycling than the two-at-a-time setup for conventional speed skating medal events. Sixteen skaters race together over 16 laps, or 6400m, about four miles. The field is generally comprised of distance skaters, who benefit from a long, grinding race; and sprinters like Stolz, who prefer a slow pace that devolves into a late sprint. Saturday was two races, one of each. Distance specialists Jorrit Bergsma of the Netherlands, a mulleted 40-year-old friend of Stolz’s — the two were teammates on a Dutch professional team — who took the bronze medal in the 10,00m; and Viktor Hald Thorup of Denmark, broke away from the pack early.

This left Stolz with two options. One, chase Bergsma and Thorup. But they are long-distance athletes, which Stolz might someday be, but is presently not trained that way. "If I pulled [the pack] back to the leading group, I would have no chance of getting a medal." He would have been too tired from racing in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar aerobic zone. "I thought the other guys would take pulls," Stolz said. "But they decided to follow me." Absent context, Stolz could be talking about cycling, and he is a strong and avid rider who talks of someday racing grand tours. Without help, he was in no position to chase what cyclists would call a breakaway. Instead: "At some point everybody decided to settle for 3rd place."

In the race for bronze, Stolz was the target. It would have helped if Stolz had a U.S. teammate to share drafting, but Ethan Cepuran missed the final by one spot. "I tried to pick up the pace a little bit," Stolz said, "but if I did all the work, everyone in the draft was just going to blow by me [at the end]." Stolz chose an intermediate option and pushed with 600m left, still a long pull. He nearly made it: Italy's Andrea Giovannini caught him in the final two strides to get bronze. It's difficult to reverse engineer a strategy that would have put Stolz in a better medal position.

Perspective is needed. Stolz won two gold medals and a silver. "Pretty good," he said to media afterward. "Two golds and a silver." And lessons. "There are things I can improve on. I'll work on that for four years." The Olympics do not promise encores, but Stolz is young and seems to be just getting started, almost like Michael Phelps in 2004, when he won six gold medals in Athens, a prelude to 17 more. Stolz told me last fall in Wisconsin he plans on competing in 2030 in France and 2034 in Salt Lake City. "I'll only be 29, right?" Right. And he also told me he'd like to make a run at Eric Heiden's heretofore unassailable sweep of five golds at one of those Games, an effort Heiden has encouraged.

Even the attempt would be — there's no better word — dramatic.