Skiing got its Bud Greenspan moment here at these 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Games. In men’s slalom, India’s 35-year-old Arif Khan, with back pain and more, finished dead last. In a sport in which races are won by hundredths and sometimes thousandths of a second, Khan finished nearly 48 seconds behind the winner, Switzerland’s Loic Meillard. 

But — Khan finished. 

In conditions that knocked more than half of those who started out of the race, among them Norway’s Atle Lie McGrath, the first-run leader who after missing a gate took off his skis and literally walked into the woods, distraught, Arif Khan finished. 

MILAN — The first-ever Israeli bobsled team in Olympic history runs this week at these 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Games. 

Five Jews, a Druze and a dog. The dog, Lulu, will not be in the sled.

Even by the standards of the 2026 Winter Olympics, where the unusual has become the norm, the Israeli bobsled team stands out. Just — for being here.

MILAN — Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Ukrainian skeleton racer disqualified for insisting he wanted to race in a helmet adorned with the faces of athletes killed by Russia, had said he was hoping for a new “miracle on ice.”

Instead, and predictably, came this ruling: the IOC was right to disqualify him because Olympic rules “state that freedom of speech is a fundamental right of any athlete competing in the Olympic Games, but limit the right to express views during competitions on the field of play.”

MILAN — The International Olympic Committee had no choice, really, but to disqualify the Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. Rules are rules.

For his part, Heraskevych, by putting himself at the center of a frenzy he could know with unequivocal certainty would explode to become the centerpiece of this first week of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games, delivered a master class in orchestrating a media strategy to maximum effect.

This controversy threatens to become one of the defining storylines in the history — the telling — of the 2026 Winter Games. If it’s about rules, it’s equally — if not more — about narrative and, in this context, narrative’s increasingly frequent traveling partner, raw emotion.

MILAN — For those who know about California, and those who don’t: Oakland is east of San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge. The author Gertrude Stein grew up in Oakland. She would later write, famously, about her hometown: there is no there there.

In Milan, as it relates to the 2026 Winter Games: there is no here here. 

These Games have, like, zero buzz.