Things of Beauty Olympic Edition 2026

What if the moments that make us cry at sports aren’t about the scoreboard at all, but about who we become when the clock is still running? We dive into a week of winter sports that felt like a lifetime: the stark courage of a legend risking one more run, a young skier laying down his poles to grieve, and a master technician turning anxiety into a gold-medal rhythm.

Transcript

Paying Athletes Extends Careers

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On the things of beauty make me cry from the Olympics. One of the things I was so impressed by, the two 40-year-old moms, the hockey players had their kids with them out on the ice, both the men's and women's team. Very impressive. And as I talked to several my students who don't remember this, but back in the day, Olympic athletes couldn't get paid at all. So most Olympic athletes would do one, maybe two Olympics, because they had to make a living. They couldn't afford it. And now they're allowed to be paid. And what that has done is it's transformed these careers from one or two Olympics to four or five Olympics. That you can, there's not really an ending point, and some of the curlers are older than me, not quite older than me, but they're up there. And I really like that and support that, that these they should get compensated and be able to compete. And you are seeing older athletes that are doing amazing stuff. Of course, I'd have to mention Lindsay Vaughan here from Colorado, who is kind of controversial. A lot of people have mixed feelings about her deciding to come back in her 40s and rekindle her career and try to win an Olympic gold. And I watched it live, and on the very first poll she had to go around, she made just a beginner's mistake and clipped it with her ski pool and went down and just shattered her leg. Yesterday she said in a news article that if they hadn't done surgery on her immediately, she would have had her leg amputated. She's back in the States now having more surgeries. But the scene of her getting lifted on a stretcher by a helicopter and wrapped up in a blanket and being taken off in a helicopter, it was bone chilling. Just holy shit. That's really creepy. So I do wish her well for her recovery, and you got to give it to her for trying, but that was something else. Another one that really caught my attention was this Norwegian skier, I think it was in the slalom, as I recall it. It was either Slalom or downhill, and he was going for gold. And his grandfather had recently passed away. And he missed one of the poles. So he missed the gate. And he stopped, he fell down, he threw off his he took his poles off and threw them up off the course, took off his skis, and just walked across the slope, through the fence, and across, halfway across the mountain, through another ski slope, where nobody was, and into the woods, right to the edge of the woods, and he just laid down next to the fence and he took off his gloves and he cried. And I'm sure he was thinking about his grandpa. That one was quite moving to see his desires end with a crash, but thinking about his grandpa. And then, of course, from Colorado is Michaela Schifrin, who is the greatest skier of all time, male and female. She has the record for most wins. She's incredible. I've loved finding her career at the Olympics two times ago, so eight years ago, then expose on her about her having anxiety before she races and how she deals with that through breath work, and she visualizes herself on the course before the race. She actually stands outside of the warm-up hut and is out there by herself on the mountain, and she moves her body like she's going down the course as she visualizing it, but is able to overcome that. Now, this one, she had all this weight on her shoulders because four years ago she didn't win any medals, she crashed, didn't do anything. So there's all this pressure. Is Michaela Schiffer going to get gold finally again? She did eight years ago, but is she going to get the monkey off her back? And in her first race, she didn't and finished 12th with her teammate. It was a partner's race. And she came down to her last race of the Olympics. And a couple nights before, she posted on Twitter or some social media, and I don't remember the first line. The other two, this second line she had, I thought was amazing. She said, tread lightly on uncertainties. So she wasn't sure if she would win or not, but she didn't want to go down a deep hole of obsessing about it. And that is a great advice. I've used that line several times with my kids this last couple weeks. That when life's uncertain, we don't know what's going on, we can really go down deep holes thinking about this and that, and what if it doesn't happen, what, what? And just tread lightly on it and show up and give your best. And she did, and she took the gold medal. And I couldn't have been happier, just exhilarating. But great advice for all of us. I get a lot of life knowledge just from sports. Okay, U.S. men's hockey team. Little backstory. In 1980 was the famous game. They called it the Miracle on Ice. They made a movie out of Mike Rizzioni, I think, was our captain. We won the gold medal in 1960, and then again in 1980. And it was the semifinal game, the U.S. versus the Soviet Union. And if you're old enough to remember the Cold War and the Soviet Empire, they basically were an athletic machine. They produced pro-quality players for their hockey team and all their sports. And they've been canceled out of the Olympics for several of them now because of drug doping and all that. But, you know, this was the highlight of the head of the Cold War. And it's us versus the Soviet Union, their pro hockey team versus our college guys, because we didn't have paid athletes, so we couldn't have pros. So it's just ragtag hockey guys from college. And I was at the time, my buddy John Pettigrew and I, he's now departed. We're in Brighton, England. We traveled down to Brighton and Southern England for the weekend, and we were in a pub watching it. We were the only Americans. And of course, the Brits were pulling for the U.S. because Margaret Thatcher and the U.S. were close. And we won. And they picked us up in the air, celebrating, and bought us more beers than we could ever drink. But I'll never forget them picking it up and cheering for the Yanks that we won. And then they went on to win the gold medal in the next game. That was like the start of, so I was 20 years old, 21, like that capped to the start of my adulthood, basically. And the win last week in 2026 was a cap to my adulthood. Like those all those years that covered my life. So that was very special to me. And another special point was in 2022 at the Winter Olympics. My son and I and brother were at the opening ceremonies when they brought the flag from 9-11 from the World Trade Center out on the stage, which everyone was crying. And then that miracle and ice team came up to light the cauldron. So pretty amazing. And they did it in this just tremendous, dramatic fashion. Our goaltender was lights out, made some just unbelievable stops. There was a minute and a half during the third period where we were two, we had two men in the penalty box. If you don't know hockey much, you usually have five skaters and one goalie. This case, Canada had five skaters and a goalie. We had a goalie and three skaters. And usually, if you were going to bet on that, that's a good bet that Canada would have scored. It's almost impossible to stop. And they did. And then one of the Hughes brothers, there were two sets of brothers for the U.S. team. He got his teeth, front teeth, knocked out and blood coming down at the end of the third period. It goes to OT and he scores the winning goal to put the U.S. over. Now that was exhilarating enough and so much fun. And then some of the backstories. So one was Brock Nelson, who plays for the Colorado Avalanche. His grandfather was on the 1960 gold medal team. His uncle was on the 1980 team. So his family lineage, they had two of those two gold medals were in his family, and he got the third one. So now they have three family members that have won those three gold medals, which is incredible. And another thing that really just made me so pleased was when my grandson was over, I was, I showed him the highlights of the game, and it ended early in the morning, and we were watching in the player interviews, and one of the players talked about how he did how he was playing for our country. And then he said the generation before us and the generation to come. And my grandson plays hockey. He loves it, loves the sport. And I said, Hudson, he's talking to you. He wants you to do it now. That was very special. Now, the one that just, it's almost too hard to explain. But several years ago, Johnny Goudreau, who was an NHL star, and his brother, who also played hockey, went out for a training bicycle ride. I think it was a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. And they were run over by a drunk driver and both were killed. Their parents lost their two sons that afternoon. Their daughter, they still have a daughter, and Johnny, I don't know if his younger brother was married. Johnny had a wife and two children. And he was friends. All these U.S. players were friends with him. And so we're used to seeing our star athletes battle on the field. But what most people don't realize is that off the field, a lot of these guys are friends. They golf together, they hang out together, they go to different teams, they play for this team. In this case, they're all unified to play for the U.S. And at the end of the game, two of the players brought out a small U.S. jersey that said Goudreau on the back with his name on it. And when they did the team picture, we're all kneeling on the ice. They took that picture with his jersey and they skated around the ice with that jersey. And then, of course, the camera was showing Johnny's wife and his two toddlers, toddler preschooler, and his wife and the parents. And then on the next picture, one of our hockey players went over, I think it was Keith, uh Keith Kachuk's kid, one of the Kachuk kids. I saw their father play years ago, skated over and took Chinese kids in his arms and brought them on the ice, little boy, little girl. And two of the players, they held each elder child for the team photo. Just incredible. And it it's that resiliency out of devastation. And to see them honor their teammate, their friend, his family, his wife, and his kids was just truly moving. Just a beautiful thing. And that's mostly what makes me cry is when I see resiliency out of devastation. Just a beautiful thing. That's my hockey edition. Sydney, I gotta clean off a few tears here. Oh we want to thank you for tuning in. And if you liked it, please share it with a friend. And as always, as a parent, relax and remember you just have to be the side of good enough. Thank you.