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Alyssa Roenigk
Multiple Authors
GUS KENWORTHY DIDN’T know if he would ever say it out loud. Three years after retiring from professional skiing and less than a year ahead of the 2026 Olympics, a radical thought tugged at his mind: At 34, he wanted one more shot at competing on his sport’s biggest stage.
The three-time Olympian had already walked away once. And in the years since the 2022 Beijing Games, he had curated an enviable life working as an actor, model and LGBTQ+ advocate. He traveled the world and was a popular fixture on red carpets and at glitzy Hollywood parties. He didn’t need skiing. But he started to feel like an imposter in his own life.
“I’d be at a party, and someone would ask, ‘What do you do now?'” Kenworthy says. “And I wouldn’t know how to answer. Saying anything other than, ‘I’m a professional skier,’ felt wrong coming out of my mouth. I felt a loss of my sense of identity.”
But he was scared. What if his body failed him? What would his competitors, many of whom were nearly half his age, think? What if his life didn’t wait for him?
Then he saw Lindsey Vonn return to the podium of a World Cup race in Sun Valley, Idaho, in March 2025, five months after her 40th birthday and six months after she returned to skiing from a six-year retirement, and he saw what could happen if he pushed beyond his fears.
“Anything’s easier when you watch someone else do it,” Kenworthy says. “I know that Lindsey would’ve had to go through all the same thoughts and emotions and fears that I went through. And despite all of that, she decided to give it another go. To see her do that and it pay off, and her prove she’s still that girl, I was like, ‘I’m still that girl, too.'”
Kenworthy laughs, but the look in his eyes makes it clear on this rainy October day in New York that he believes those words. This comeback has not been easy. His knees hurt and he’s away from his friends and family more than he would like. But he has made a promise to himself to chase his unfinished dreams, to join the ranks of several older athletes who have come out of retirement for these Olympics. Not just Vonn, but freeskier Nick Goepper, who staged an improbable return to his sport — in another discipline — and Maddy Schaffrick, 31, who returned to halfpipe snowboarding after a decade to make her first Olympic team.
Like Vonn, Schaffrick and Goepper, Kenworthy knew the risks — failure, injury, criticism — but still he chose to move forward. They all understand that sports have changed, and they’ve changed, too. It might be harder this time around. Recovery might take longer and their joints might be sore. But they’re not the same competitors they were before. In many ways, they’re better.
1:29
Lindsey Vonn on the joy and drive behind her comeback
Lindsey Vonn opens up about what it means to potentially end her career in Cortina — the mountain that shaped so much of her legacy.
TEN YEARS AGO, Maddy Schaffrick was a plumber’s apprentice in Steamboat Springs, Colo., trying to forget she was once one of the most promising halfpipe snowboarders in the country. A prodigy who had spent seven years competing on the U.S. halfpipe team, she retired in 2015 after a string of knee surgeries. At just 20, she was burned out and disillusioned with the sport.
She had become so anxious during contests that she barely remembers her performances now. At the top of the halfpipe before dropping in for her runs, she would spiral into a pattern of negative self-talk and look for teammates and competitors to dance with to distract her mind and distance herself from the moment.
“I would just dissociate,” Schaffrick says. “I didn’t land a lot of runs those last few years because I felt fear.”
After she retired, she was angry and resentful. She wanted to figure out who she was outside of snowboarding, so she started learning the trade from a friend who owned a plumbing business. But about a year later, she was offered an opportunity to coach youth snowboarders at her hometown club in Steamboat Springs. At first, the job was a means to a free season pass. But over the next several years, riding with the athletes she coached and traveling to contests with them helped her to heal and reconnect with what she loved about snowboarding as a kid.
In those years, the conversation around mental health shifted. So too did ideas around longevity and how much autonomy athletes should have over their lives and careers. By choosing to prioritize their health and well-being over winning, and speaking publicly about their struggles, athletes such as Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles and Mikaela Shiffrin gave other athletes permission to do the same.
Schaffrick says each generation has made it easier for athletes like her to prioritize their wants and well-being while chasing their dreams. “My parents’ generation, they were told their life path, what was accepted and appropriate and on what timeline,” she says. “That took away their autonomy. Now we’re in an era of believing, ‘I can create the world I live in.'”
In 2022, Schaffrick rejoined U.S. Ski & Snowboard as an assistant coach for the men’s and women’s pro halfpipe teams. She hadn’t followed the sport closely — “It was too painful,” she says — so she was surprised to learn during her first training camps that the women’s program lacked depth. The tricks weren’t progressing as quickly as they had when she was competing. “I was like, ‘There’s space here,'” Schaffrick says.
She had continued to snowboard throughout her retirement and even dropped into halfpipes on occasion. Once a year, she threw a cab 720 — also known as a Haakon flip — just to remind herself she hadn’t become a coach because she couldn’t snowboard herself. “I wasn’t Bela Karolyi just coaching from the sidelines,” she says.
Her body felt as good as it had in years. In summer 2023, she went to Mount Hood, Oregon, to see if her body and mind could withstand a week in a focused training environment. Thirty minutes into her first session, she fell on a straight air and broke her collarbone. Something about that injury lit a fire she couldn’t explain at the time. But as her collarbone healed and she dedicated herself to physical therapy, all she could think about was getting back into that halfpipe.
At first, she kept the thought mostly to herself. She loved developing athletes, passing along the kind of wisdom she wished someone had shared with her when she was young. She wasn’t sure she was willing to give that up to pursue a long-forgotten dream, not to mention walk away from her only source of income.
But after spending nearly a decade teaching young athletes how to deal with butterflies on contest day, the pressure of a final run, and the disappointment of receiving an underwhelming score, she realized she now had the tools to handle those moments herself.
After testing the waters at a couple of amateur contests, Schaffrick dropped into her first World Cup contest in Beijing in December 2024. During qualifiers, she found herself falling into old patterns of negative self-talk and anxiety. She looked around at the top of the halfpipe for someone to dance with. But then she stopped. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to think or feel this way anymore,'” she says. She placed her hand on the ground and closed her eyes.
A young athlete she had coached for years, Jesse Hamric, had done the same. Before contests, Hamric would lay on the ground to shift his energy and quiet his mind. When Schaffrick told him in late spring 2024 that she was considering coming out of retirement, he had made her a bracelet with the word, “TRY.” Hamric, 18, died a few months later in an accident. Schaffrick had those three letters tattooed on her right wrist.
Before her second run in Beijing, she pulled back her glove and looked at those letters. “Just try,” she said to herself. She allowed herself to feel everything — the nerves, the fear, the self-doubt and discomfort — took a deep breath and dropped into the halfpipe. She finished third in her first World Cup contest in a decade.
“I feel like I’m finally figuring out how to be the person I’ve always wanted to be,” Schaffrick says.
1:58
From slopestyle star to halfpipe contender: Nick Goepper’s next chapter
Nick Goepper says retiring never really felt right — he just needed something new. Switching to halfpipe gave him that spark, and once he started landing big tricks and winning, he knew he belonged.
GOEPPER STOOD AT the top of the 2024 X Games Aspen halfpipe wearing jeans, a red Carhartt hoodie and Kool-Aid red hair beneath a bright red helmet with flames along the sides. He had no sponsors and few expectations. On the back of his helmet, in stick-on letters, he’d written: “THX MOM & DAD.”
“I was a blank slate,” Goepper says. “And I was like, you know what? F— it, I’m gonna be myself, wholeheartedly.”
During his years as a slopestyle competitor, Goepper never felt he could be himself. He had sponsors to satisfy and a fan base to grow. He did his best to fit the cool-guy action sports image he believed people wanted to see. But that took its toll. He became depressed and anxious, drank too much and eventually spent time in rehab. He retired after his third Olympics, in 2022. “I knew I was done competing in slopestyle,” he says.
But his time away from competition started to feel more like a pause than an ending. A three-time Olympic medalist in slopestyle, he saw an opportunity in halfpipe, a discipline in which he had never competed. “To pick a similar discipline and try to master it felt like a fun project for me. And that’s really what I love: mastery.”
Few skiers have excelled in both slopestyle and halfpipe, and those who have, like Kenworthy and Eileen Gu, an American-born skier who competes for China, have done so simultaneously. “But it’s unprecedented to do an entire career, take a year off, and then come back for this second rebirth,” Goepper says while sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck outside Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge. He’s here in July 2025 training in the halfpipe and coaching young campers.
Just last week, he landed a trick no other skier has done in a halfpipe. Schaffrick is here, too. This afternoon, she landed a trick that’s new to her. The two fed off one another’s energy all day and now, as he takes off his ski boots and winds down, Goepper is thinking about Milan Cortina. He challenged himself to make the 2026 Olympic team in halfpipe skiing, and this time, he wants to approach his career honestly.
“I’m a nerd. I read books. I don’t care about trends or the latest fashion,” Goepper says. “I want to be the awkward Midwestern kid in an emo wig talking about anxiety and depression.”
Early in his comeback, he began making social media videos spoofing his lack of sponsors — sometimes wearing that emo wig and talking about depression — and skiing with unbridled confidence. He won the X Games in halfpipe in 2025 and qualified for the Olympic team wearing American flag pants and a cat T-shirt beneath his hoodie. He says if he is leading the halfpipe standings in Italy after two runs, he’ll ditch his Team USA uniform and take his final run wearing jeans and a Cincinnati Bengals jersey.
“I had to figure out who I was and what I represented,” he says. “I’m not just somebody with logos all over me. I’m a real person with real values.”
Like Goepper and Schaffrick, Vonn and Kenworthy also say they are happier now that they are competing authentically on their terms.
“I’ve always loved ski racing. I wouldn’t have come back as many times as I did if I didn’t love it,” Vonn says. “But I’m enjoying it in a different way. I’ve lived a lot in the last six years. And it gives me a clearer lens to see life through.”
In Milan, at his fourth Olympics, Kenworthy will be skiing for himself for the first time. At his first Games, where he shared a podium with Goepper, he was hiding his sexuality. At his second, after he came out publicly as gay in a cover story for ESPN The Magazine, he felt pressure to represent the community for which he had become a public face. At his third, he represented Great Britain, his mother’s home country, and he wanted to make his mom proud.
This time, he’ll still be embraced at the bottom of the halfpipe by his family and fans waving rainbow flags, but he knows they will be just as proud if he finishes first or last. The only person he has to make proud this time is himself.
“I made a really deliberate choice to come back and put myself and my body on the line again,” Kenworthy says and wipes tears from his eyes. He hadn’t expected to cry talking about this.
“I’m proud to have made that decision. I feel like this Olympics — this one’s for me.”
2:40
Why Gus Kenworthy chose to come back
Gus Kenworthy reflects on why he returned to halfpipe skiing after retiring in 2022 — and why he made a deliberate choice to put himself back on the line and compete entirely for himself.
WHEN SCHAFFRICK LEFT her coaching role to return to competition, not everyone was happy for her. Some parents and athletes posted on social media questioning her motives. People accused her of taking opportunities away from their children, of abusing her power as a coach and having an unfair advantage. She was told several people filed complaints with the sport’s governing body, although she never faced discipline.
“Their view is that what I’m doing is unethical,” Schaffrick says. “I get how what I’m doing is confusing for some people. I feel terrible if their anger comes from a sense that I took something away from them or their child. That was never my intention. If anything, I hope I can inspire your daughter.”
For the first time in her life, Schaffrick was mentally strong enough to let go of what other people think. She had spent so many years wondering how she could have done things differently. A self-described people pleaser, she realized the person she wanted to please most is 19-year-old Maddy Schaffrick.
“When I realized that my inner voice is never going to go away, but all the outside voices eventually will, that’s when I was like, ‘I can’t turn my back on this because I’m the one who has to live with my choices and the regret and shame of the past,'” she says.
She offered to share her story with the athletes on the U.S. team in the hopes they would understand. “I told them, ‘I always have your back,'” Schaffrick says. “‘I want you to know I’m doing this for me and not against you.'”
Vonn’s comeback also triggered fierce criticism. One ski racing legend called her “mad,” another suggested she see a psychologist. Some people said she was only returning to racing because she had nothing else in her life. She too had to remind herself only she knew why she had returned and how far she could push herself in the process.
“I can’t pretend like I have thick enough skin to not have some of that stuff get through,” Vonn says. “But at the same time, I’m not doing this for anyone else. I’m doing this for myself. I know what I’m capable of. So, while those comments hurt, it is no reflection of me. It’s more a reflection of them.”
She also knew something her critics didn’t: Her body was as strong as it had been in years.
Before retiring, none of these athletes had taken considerable time off. Time away had allowed them to heal, and modern medicine could fix what was broken. Within a month of undergoing a partial knee replacement in April 2024, Vonn could straighten her leg fully and perform exercises she hadn’t done in years. She could ski without pain.
As a coach, Schaffrick learned the value of working out, rehabbing injuries and resting. “I didn’t know any of that when I was a kid. I had five knee surgeries before I was 18,” she says. “At that time, there wasn’t as much care and attention going into the recovery process before I was put back on snow.”
Kenworthy and Goepper, both in their 30s, say they have been smarter about how they train, prioritizing rest and recovery as much as training sessions in the halfpipe. “Sometimes I wake up and I’m sore, and I’m like, ‘Man, my competitors are 18,'” Goepper says. “But then I look at my track record and realize, ‘Whatever I’m doing is working. I won the X Games for a fifth time at 30.”
IN DECEMBER, VONN won her first downhill race in eight years — by nearly a second. Two weeks later, she clocked 81 mph in another win. “I try to enjoy every single second I am out here because it is just so fun to go fast,” she said afterward.
Kenworthy earned his first podium in six years at The Snow League stop in Beijing in December, and Goepper won silver at X Games Aspen the next month. Schaffrick has podiumed four times since 2024 and locked up the 2025-26 national halfpipe title with a second-place finish at January’s Aspen Grand Prix. After the medal ceremony, she was mobbed in the finish by her parents, cousins and girlfriend, many of whom had never watched her compete in person. They had never seen her look so proud.
Goepper could become the first freeskier to medal in four Olympics on Feb. 20. He could even share a podium with Kenworthy again. For Kenworthy and Schaffrick, both medal hopefuls, success is making finals and landing runs that make them proud.
On Tuesday, Vonn sat down in front of a microphone in Cortina to tell the world she would still compete at the Olympics despite rupturing the ACL in her left knee — the one that wasn’t recently surgically repaired — in a crash a week before the Games. Dressed in a white Team USA puffer jacket, she was calm and matter of fact about her injury, just one of countless setbacks she has dealt with in her long career.
“What’s 90 seconds in a lifetime? It’s nothing,'” Vonn said, referencing the advice that her longtime coach, Erich Sailer, gave her ahead of the 2019 World Championships. “You can do it.”
That she is lining up at all says everything about how much this return means to Vonn. She knows her chances to become the oldest skier to win an Olympics aren’t the same as they were before the knee injury, “but as long as there’s a chance, I will try,” she said.
“I will be in the starting gate. This has already been one of the best chapters in my life so far. This would be the best comeback — definitely the most dramatic.”
When Vonn announced her return, she said that while she was inspired by her friend Roger Federer as well as athletes such as Lewis Hamilton and Tom Brady who have competed into their 40s, she wanted to be a role model for future generations of women in ski racing.
“I draw a lot of inspiration from women, too,” Vonn says. “But in ski racing, there isn’t that example. That’s why I hope I can change that perspective within our sport.”
Seeing Federer play until he was 41 helped Vonn listen to her inner voice. Seeing Vonn on a podium again helped Kenworthy listen to his. When she lines up in the start gate Sunday, Vonn knows she isn’t just racing for herself, but for all the athletes who will see her and one day listen to the voice in the back of their minds, too.
Seven months before the opening ceremony, Schaffrick was already thinking about how she hopes this moment will be remembered.
“When I heard about each person making a comeback — Nick, Lindsey, Gus — it was inspiring to know there’s a group of us listening to our internal calls and taking action on them, no matter what people think,” Schaffrick says. “It takes a lot of courage, and I’m hoping we’re living in an era of courage.”
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