No matter how many World Cup races won, records broken, goals scored or tricks landed, the Olympics provide every athlete with a clean slate.

With countless hours of hard work and a dash of luck, even the most unlikely of competitors can ascend to glory — and the brightest of stars can fall short.

Here are some of the most surprising upsets of the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.

Ilia Malinin, 21, has dominated men's figure skating since making his senior debut in 2021. As the first skater in history to land a quadruple Axel and the men's free skate world record holder, Malinin's performance in the team event was critical in leading the U.S. to gold. After the individual short program, he had a five-point cushion over Japan's Yuma Kagiyama.

But the immense expectations came with intense pressure that the "Quad God" couldn't shake in the free skate. Malinin fumbled numerous of his planned quad jumps, instead executing a single Axel, double loop and double salchow.

Meanwhile, Kazakhstan's Mikhail Shaidorov — who had placed 5th after the short — glided to a near-perfect program featuring five quad jumps and only one minor error. His score of 198.64 blew the competition out of the water, resulting in his nation's second Winter Olympic gold. 

Riding the wave of back-to-back Olympic gold medals, Chloe Kim overcame a shoulder injury less than a month ago to compete for her third straight title in snowboard halfpipe. Her Run 1 score of 88.00 points stood as the highest for the majority of the final. 

Olympic rookie Gaon Choi of South Korea was projected to be a top contender, but a brutal crash on her first run made the medal outlook bleak. 

Choi persevered to return to the snow and, on Run 3, put together a clean showing for the top score of the day: 90.25 points. It all came down to Kim's final drop into the halfpipe to see if she could outscore Choi, but she took a tumble that sealed her silver medal.

With the underdog win, Choi became the youngest snowboarding champion in history at 17 years, 101 days old. 

From his World Cup debut in 2017 until the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics, Australia's Cooper Woods had only ever recorded one podium finish in men's moguls: a 2nd-place performance in 2024. 

It was Mikael Kingsbury out of Canada who was expected to reign supreme in the Olympic final. The most decorated freestyle skier of all time, he has an astonishing 100 World Cup victories under his belt. 

Woods and Kingsbury skied to identical scores of 83.71 points in their final runs in Livigno but, after the tiebreaker came down to their scores on turns, the Aussie was awarded the grand prize.

The U.S. team made up of Casey Dawson, Emery Lehman and Ethan Cepuran was riding a six-race undefeated streak as they approached the men's team pursuit final. With multiple world record times, it would be a tall order to out-skate the trio, but Davide Ghiotto, Andrea Giovannini and Michele Malfatti of Team Italy were up to the challenge. 

Up until the halfway point of the race, both teams were going stride for stride, trading the lead and remaining separated by razor-thin margins.

With four laps to go, the U.S. was 0.65 seconds up on Italy. The host country rallied over the second half of the race as the Americans fell out of sync, resulting in a 4.51-second disadvantage by the time they crossed the finish line. It was the first team pursuit gold for the nation since the last time Italy hosted the Winter Games in 2006.

Entering the Olympics, Slovenia's Nika Prevc was far and away the favorite to win gold in women's normal hill. The 20-year-old is the youngest in a family of Olympic ski jumpers, and she had been ranked No. 1 in the women's World Cup standings for three straight years.

The last time Norway's Anna Odine Strom won a World Cup event in normal hill was in 2023. But her first jump in Italy reached 100 meters, two more than Prevc. Strom built on that with a 101-meter distance in the second and final round, and Prevc couldn't match that distance despite sailing 103 meters during the trial run earlier in the day. Just 1.1 points separated Strom's victorious score from Prevc's 2nd-place finish.

Jordan Stolz had already set two Olympic records en route to gold in the men's 500m and 1000m events in Milan, and the odds of adding a third were in his favor approaching the 1500m.

After all, Stolz swept the top of the podium in all three distances at the 2024 World Championships and sat atop the World Cup standings in back-to-back seasons.

But in the penultimate race of the final, China's Ning Zhongyan set a new Olympic record with a time of 1:41.98. That mark proved to be insurmountable for Stolz, who ended up with silver. 

The Canadian women's curling team won two straight world titles and entered the semifinal against Sweden ranked 1st in the world with five consecutive wins at the Olympics.

Team Sweden, on the other hand, won bronze at Beijing 2022 after failing to defend their gold from PyeongChang. They were ranked 12th overall by World Curling leading up to Milan Cortina.

In the semifinals, the first five ends were tightly contested, with the teams tied 2-2 heading into the back half. But Sweden powered to a strong finish, leaving Team Canada stunned in the 6-3 win. The Swedes went on to secure the Olympic title in a tight 7-6 victory over Switzerland, while Canada took down the U.S. team to finish 3rd.

France, Norway and Sweden are a powerful trifecta in the men's 4x7.5 km biathlon relay. The three nations are consistently at the top of the world standings, with Norway historically leading the pack. The reigning world champions previously defeated France by 51.9 seconds en route to their 2025 world title.

Things wouldn't be as clear-cut at the Olympics. Each of the three teams held a lead at different points of the race, and as the event began to wind down, it came down to the final shooting section. Eric Perrot of France broke out with the lead and crossed the finish line 9.8 seconds ahead of Norway. 

It was the first time in history the French were able to claim the Olympic title in the men's relay, defeating the world's all-time leader in Olympic biathlon medals along the way. 

Days after Breezy Johnson earned gold in the women's downhill, she was back on the slopes with teammate Mikaela Shiffrin competing in the women's combined team event. The duo had won the most recent world title together and, after Johnson posted the fastest time in the downhill leg of the event in Cortina, it was up to Shiffrin to seal the deal.

The pair was up 0.06 seconds on 2nd-place Austria as Shiffrin left the gate, but a slightly under-pace run left the team off the podium 0.31 seconds behind Austria.

Shiffrin would complete her redemption arc with a gold medal win in the women's slalom event later at the Olympics.