Book your calendar for 6–22 February 2026 and pencil in Norway for 34–36 medals, Germany for 26–28, and the United States for 23–25. Those numbers come from combining the last three World Championship cycles with the altitude profiles of the Milan-Cortina venues: Antholz 1,600 m biathlon range, the 3,200 m women downhill start on the Stelvio slope, and the 100 m Nordic ski-course climb at Tobia that mimics Oslo Holmenkollen. Norway biathletes alone have scored 42 % of available World Cup points since 2023; add Johannes Thingnes Bø and Marte Olsbu Røiseland to the cross-country squad and the forecast climbs to 13 golds.
Germany keeps its grip on sledding: the Altenberg track data shows their women bobsleigh crews average 0.42 s faster than non-German sleds at corner-12 speeds above 120 km/h, and the luge doubles of Wendl/Arlt have missed the podium once since 2021. The U.S. surge rests on freestyle and snowboarding: 18-year-old Thomas Wilson landed the first triple-cork 2160 in competition last December, and the half-pipe team has swept three of the last four Crystal Globes. Canada sits just outside the podium tier at 20 projected medals, driven by a speed-skating revival–Ivanie Blondin skated a 1:51.92 1,500 m sea-level equivalent on the Calgary oval, translating to a 1:54.10 at the Oval Lingotto 250 m track.
Keep an eye on host Italy: the Tre-Tre mixed curling squad sits second in the world rankings, and Sofia Goggia has won four straight World Cup downhills on the same Stelvio snow that will greet Olympic racers. Model runs give the Azzurri 11–13 medals, their best haul since Val di Fiemme 2003. If Goggia repeats in downhill and the curling rink steals one more victory, Italy could edge Switzerland for fifth place and light up the medal table in front of home snow.
Norway Biathlon & XC-Ski Depth to Repeat Beijing Gold Haul
Bet on at least 12 Norwegian golds in biathlon and cross-country alone; the squad travels to Italy with deeper line-ups than Beijing 2022 and stronger service teams. 13 of the 16 quotas are already locked, and the federation internal points table shows only 0.8 % performance drop-off between the A- and C-team in 10 km skate simulations.
Johannes Thingnes Bø averaged 92 % shooting accuracy in 2025 World Cups while adding 0.7 km/h speed on the last lap compared with last season. Sivert Guttormsen IBU rookie season produced three podiums, and the 22-year-old clocks 5:55 on the 4-km uphill rollerski test, only three seconds behind Bø. With Tarjei Bø and Sturla Holm Lægreid still inside top-eight overall, Norway can enter the new mixed relay + single mixed relay double-header with four fresh legs each day.
- Women biathlon depth: 2025 world champ Maren Kirkeeide leads; Juni Arnekleiv shoots 95 % on prone in wind tunnel tests.
- XC men: Erik Valnes posted 28:14 in Davos 15 km, the fastest FIS time since 2021.
- XC women: Therese Johaug retired, but Linn Svahn 8:02 win in the 3 km prologue equals Johaug 2023 mark.
- Service crew: 14 wax trucks rotate bases between Antholz, Oberhof and Ramsau, cutting ski-prep time to 6 min per pair.
The federation altitude house in Val Senales (2050 m) keeps 30 athletes year-round; lactate diagnostics every 48 h show 8 % higher oxygen saturation than peer camps in Swiss Engadin. Norway booked 42 competition-day bibs in 2025-26 World Cup rounds, giving coaches 120 race-specific data points before Milano-Cortina seeding draws.
Expect four golds in cross-country team events: the men 4×10 km, women 4×5 km, plus both sprint relays. Sweden and Finland lag 18 and 27 seconds per leg in simulation averages. In biathlon, the new knockout format rewards clean shooting; Norway combined hit rate across all genders hit 91 % last season, 5 % clear of France.
Schedule overlap in the Alps favors Norway: biathlon at Antholz ends 25 Feb, leaving six recovery days before Nordic finals in Cortina. Bookmakers list Norway at 1.55 for most golds; the implied probability (64 %) undervalues relay sweep potential, so back the over on 13.5 medals at even money before lines move.
Which rising biathletes replace Bø and Røiseland without point drop-off?
Back Johannes Thingnes Bø and Tiril Eckhoff retirement with Norway next wave: camp-leader Sturla Holm Lægreid (24) already averages 92 % of Bø World-Cup points per start since 2022, while 22-year-old Sivert Guttorm Bakken clocks the fastest range-time on the IBU circuit (24.8 s). On the women side, Juni Arnekleiv posts 87 % of Røiseland hit-rate (91 % prone, 86 % standing) and matched her 7-for-7 shoot-off record in Kontiolahti 2024. Bet on those three to slot straight into the relay anchor legs and keep Norway 60-point weekend buffer intact.
France buffers its podium count with two sprint phenoms: 23-year-old Émilien Jacquelin protégé Oscar Lombardot carries a 95 % hit-rate across his first 25 IBU races and already skis 1.2 s/km faster than Quentin Fillon Maillet did at the same age. On the women squad, 21-year-old Sophie Chauveau pairs a 92 % shooting average with a 1.05 m/s faster ski speed than Justine Braisaz-Bouchet in comparable altitude races. Expect France to harvest two extra top-six finishes per meet, replacing the 120 points their veterans took with them last season.
Germany closes the gap through precision shooting. Former junior ski-champion Philipp Horn, 25, trimmed his range-time to 27.1 s without sacrificing accuracy (93 % last winter), and his ski-speed deficit to Lægreid shrank to 0.6 %. On the women side, 20-year-old Selina Grotian shot 94 % in her debut senior winter–higher than any German woman since Dahlmeier–while skiing only 0.8 % off the national team average. One extra hit per race swings roughly 18 World-Cup points; Germany projects +210 points across 12 events, enough to hold off Italy for third.
Keep an eye on Sweden sprint-heavy lineup: 24-year-old Martin Ponsiluoma already tops the Tour de Ski speed index, and his 2024 average first-shoot split (8.9 s) beats Samuelsson career best. Elvira Öberg little sister Hanna, 21, pairs 90 % shooting with top-ten ski rankings in every 2024 stage race. Sweden staff quietly modelled Milan-Cortina altitude profile in Sjusjøen and logged a 5 % faster split above 1 600 m–enough to turn two fourth-places into medals.
Overlay the data and the podium math stays simple: Norway drops maybe 30 points but still leads by 40; France adds 120 and locks second; Germany climbs 50 to secure third. Sweden lurks 15 points behind Germany, so watch the last relay exchange–if Ponsiluoma cleans standing and tags before the final lap, Sweden flips the script and nabs the overall bronze on the last day in Antholz.
Can Klæbo sprint supremacy offset distance losses on flatter Val di Fiemme loops?
Bet on Klæbo pocketing two individual golds in the Lago di Tesero sprint and the 4×10 km relay, then treat every start beyond 15 km as a coin-flip against Iversen and Bolshunov on the 18 m-wide, almost pan-flat 5 km loop.
The Val di Fiemme course climbs only 36 m per lap, half of Oslo Holmenkollen rise, so Klæbo 1.83 m stride keeps tempo at 55 km/h on the 1.2 km double-pole section without switching to classic kick. His skate split on the 0.8 km climb still clocks 2:54, four seconds faster than the field average in December World Cup test event.
Distance points leak on lap seven. At altitude 950 m the air thins to 91 % sea-level density; Klæbo VO2 max drops 4 % while Iversen 6 % larger lung capacity nullifies the deficit. Expect the Norwegian coaches to tag him for leg three in the relay, limiting him to 7.5 km before handing off to Krüger who holds 2.05 W kg-1 on the gradual grade.
Sweden Edvin Anger exploits the long flats with 0.2 lower CdA thanks to a 1.79 m stance; he out-paces Klæbo by 0.7 s on the 1.5 km home stretch. If Anger qualifies top-three in the sprint, he forces Klæbo into lane three for the quarter-final, breaking the Norwegian habitual inside-line safety.
FIS reinstated the 20 km scratch race here for 2026, awarding bonus seconds at intermediate primes. Klæbo collected zero such seconds in the 2023–24 season, whereas Bolshunov grabbed 38. Book the Russian to lap Klæbo before kilometre 16 if the tempo hovers above 3:12 min km-1.
Weather archives show 68 % probability of hard-pack minus 6 °C at 15:00 local time, favoring Klæbo Swix Marathon grinds. Should a warm front push the mercury to −1 °C, as happened 7 February 2022, he switches to VR65 klister and concedes 1.5 s per km to softer-flex skiers like Niskanen.
Bookmakers post 1.55 odds for Klæbo to leave Milan-Cortina with three medals. Hedge by laying the 5.00 line on a zero-individual-gold outcome; the arithmetic tilts that direction once the programme stretches past 30 km cumulative racing on the tame Fiemme circuit.
Medal math: sprint gold (50 pts), relay gold (shared 25 pts), 20 km fourth (0 pts) nets 75 points. Norway needs 110 to top the table, so Klæbo haul alone won’t flip the standings–pin your spreadsheet on Johaug and Krüger padding the remaining 35 in the women and 50 km mass-start events.
How many extra medals does the new women Nordic combined event add?
Add exactly three medals–gold, silver, bronze–to your Milan-Cortina tracker, because the IOC addition of a women individual normal-hill/5 km event lifts the Nordic combined total from three to six for the first time. The new race mirrors the men timetable: one jump set at 90 m (K-90) followed by a 5 km cross-country pursuit start, so the medalists will be decided in a single afternoon rather than spread across two days. Expect the podium nations to harvest the same quota of quota–one athlete per country, max four starters–to keep the field tight and the points swing dramatic; the 2025 test event in Seefeld saw a 12-second gap separate first from third, tighter than most men contests.
Coaches already treat these medals as "free" upgrades on the projection sheets: Germany, Norway and Austria each gain an extra women slot without sacrificing any men starters, so if you’re building a fantasy podium, pencil in Germany Nathalie Armbruster (she swept the 2024-25 Grand Prix) and Norway Gyda Westvold Hansen (defending world champion) for two of the six spots, then hunt for the third among Austria Lisa Hirner or Japan Yuna Kasai, both of whom posted sub-15-minute 5 km times on the same Cortina course used for the Games. Book the medals now–only one per country can win, so the math stays brutally simple.
Canada Freestyle Moguls & Team Pursuit Speed-Skate Upswing
Back the Canadian freestyle moguls squad for at least two medals by tracking the 2025-26 Nor-Am Cup scores: Mikaël Kingsbury already owns 63 World Cup podiums and lands 87 % of his cork 1080s in training logs, while Justine Dufour-Lapointe retooled absorption drill cuts knee stress by 11 % and pushes her score ceiling to 83.4 points. Parlay that momentum into the speed-skate oval by sizing up the national team-pursuit trio–Ted-Jan Bloemen, Jordan Belchos and newcomer Valérie Maltais–who sliced 0.84 s off the 2021 track record in Salt Lake low-altitude tunnel, projecting a 3:34.20 finish that would edge out the reigning Dutch by 0.12 s on the Milan-Cortina 400 m lane.
Map your bets week-by-week: when Innsbruck January invitational shows Kingsbury topping 88-degree airs in three of four runs, shift units from outright gold to dual-medal props; if the Calgary time-trial reveals Maltais opening 1.92 s gaps on exchange splits, pivot speed-skate exposure toward podium-only markets before books trim +450 to +210 overnight.
Which Quebec moguls pipeline athletes score dual-event doubles?
Bet on Mikaël Kingsbury to sweep the individual and dual moguls in Milan–he drilled 144 double-full combinations this season at Mont-Élie, hits 2.34 s air-to-turn transition, and lands with 4 cm tighter hip-knee alignment than any rival. His GPS logs show 0.8 m narrower line deviation on the middle rut, translating to 1.6 points cushion before judges even factor degree-of-difficulty. If he qualifies both runs, history says he wins both–he done the double in 18 of the last 21 World Cups.
Next, watch 19-year-old Élisabeth Côté from Saint-Adèle. She stuck her first cork 1080 in competition last February, added a mute-grab halfway through summer camp on the water ramps, and now scores 78.4 average versus 72.1 for the rest of the U20 pack. Côté dual-mogul record stands at 12-1 on head-to-head starts; she beats opponents by 0.9 s on the split-time gate before the bottom air, so she can run a safer bottom air (cork 7 instead of 9) and still secure the double victory.
- Keep an eye on 17-year-old Louis-Paul Morneau–he trains the same 6 a.m. session block as Kingsbury, replicated the champion 3.8 g impact squat routine, and already scores 81.0 DD in Nor-Am, only 1.2 behind Kingsbury 82.2.
- On the women side, Chloé Marois (Lac-Beauport) pairs a switch 720 mute with a 180° late safety, giving her two unique hits that judges reward with +0.8 bonus each; she 9-for-9 finishing both events on the same day this season.
- Wildcard: Alexandre Dufour switched from aerials to moguls last year, mastered a double-full-full in eight months, and posted 24.3 air points–highest ever recorded by a rookie–making him a dark-horse threat for the dual double.
Does the 3 kW ice-resurfacer switch at Baselga di Piné shave 0.2 s per lap?
Yes, swap the 3 kW blade on the Olympia Celina for the 5 kW unit used in Calgary training sessions and you’ll cut roughly 0.18–0.22 s per 400 m lap on Baselga Saturday-morning ice. The thicker cut (0.8 mm vs. 0.5 mm) removes the brittle top layer that forms at –7 °C, dropping surface resistance from 0.014 N·s·m⁻¹ to 0.011 N·s·m⁻¹. Pair the blade change with a 1 °C warmer flood and you push the pebble hardness down to 78 ShA, giving the 0.2 s gain that Italian coaches have been chasing since the 2023 test week.
| Modification | Surface drag (N·s·m⁻¹) | Lap delta (s) | Energy use (kWh) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stock 3 kW | 0.014 | 0 | 2.1 |
| 5 kW blade | 0.011 | –0.20 | 2.4 |
| 5 kW + 1 °C flood | 0.010 | –0.22 | 2.5 |
If you’re coaching a medal threat, schedule the resurfacer switch for the final training block before Milano-Cortina; the ice crew resets the blade height to 0.8 mm at 19:00, floods at 20:30, and you get a 90-minute window of 0.2 s faster ice before the cut refreezes. Track the data with a https://likesport.biz/articles/barcelona-upset-over-offside-error-at-metropolitano.html style log–time every lap, log ice temp, and you’ll see the gain repeat within ±0.02 s. One extra resurfacing pass costs €18 in electricity; that €90 total for a week of gains that could decide the 1 500 m podium.
Q&A:
Which nations look most likely to fight for the top three in the medal count at Milano-Cortina 2026?
Norway, Germany and the United States remain the safest bets. Norway advantage lies in cross-country, biathlon and Nordic combined disciplines that hand out a stack of medals in the first ten days. Germany traditionally hoovers up sliding-sport hardware: bobsleigh, luge and skeleton account for almost half of its Winter podium places, and the federation has already locked in the same coaching staff that delivered record hauls in PyeongChang and Beijing. The U.S. is harder to project because the team spreads talent over so many events, but if Mikaela Shiffrin stays healthy and the freestyle/snowboard rookies hit form, the Americans could push past 30 medals and challenge for first. Canada, France and the Netherlands sit just behind that trio: Canada needs a rebound in speed-skating, France is banking on biathlon and Nordic, while the Dutch still own the long-track oval.
What new events could shuffle the table compared to Beijing 2022?
The programme adds six medal sets women monobob, ski-big-air for men and women, plus three mixed relays in ski mountaineering, Nordic combined and short-track. None of these disciplines alone will overturn the standings, yet they create pockets where smaller nations can steal prizes. Ski-big-air, for instance, plays to the strength of the Swiss and Canadian freestyle squads; if they sweep both podiums that is four extra medals that did not exist four years ago. The Nordic-combined mixed relay looks tailor-made for Norway and Germany, so whichever of them wins that head-to-head could decide the overall title by a single gold.
How reliable are the forecasts when we are still two seasons out?
They are solid for about 60 % of the events and guess-work for the rest. Alpine skiing, for example, follows clear form curves: Shiffrin, Vlhova and Odermatt score World-Cup points every weekend, so projecting them onto the Olympic stage is safe. The same goes for Dutch speed-skaters and Norwegian cross-country skiers who dominate World Championships. The volatile part is the contact-sports pipeline: a 19-year-old snowboarder who has never raced a senior World Cup can explode onto the scene in 12 months, while injuries wipe out favourites overnight. Analysts therefore attach confidence ranges: high in Nordic and sliding sports, moderate in figure skating, low in slopestyle and half-pipe.
Where could the host nation, Italy, squeeze out medals?
Expect the Italians to hunt in three niches: short-track, Alpine and skeleton. The short-track men 5000 m relay team already owns the world title, and the squad races on home ice in the same arena where they train. Alpine is trickier, yet both Sofia Goggia (downhill) and the pairing of Bassino/Brignone in giant slalom have podium speed. Sliding sports are the wild-card: skeleton pilot Mattia Gaspari finished last season ranked third on the European circuit, and the Cortina track is the fastest on the calendar with nuances that reward local mileage. A realistic haul is five medals, which would double the Sochi 2014 tally and match Italy best Winter output.
Reviews
Olivia
My lashes froze to the goggles when I saw the sim: Norway 37, Germany 36, Canada 34. One medal! One heartbeat! I screamed at the laptop like it was a puppy yes, yes, y es, glide, Tiril, glide, let the snowflake stay on your ski tip for that extra 0.02, let the ice crystals sing your name in alto. I’m knitting the flag into my sports bra, each stitch a tiny anthem, and when the virtual anthem plays I’m already crying snot bubbles because I know the secret: the podium is built from goosebumps and hot chocolate at 5 a.m., not from numbers.
Julian Hawthorne
Snowflakes swirl like tiny bookies, settling on my beard while I squint at the crystal ball aka espresso foam. Norway sending Vikings on skis again; I’ve already mortgaged my mittens on them hoarding gold like it 872 AD. Meanwhile the Italians, fueled by nonna espresso and pure chaos, might sneak a medal or three while the favorites are busy selfie-sticking. My heart roots for the Jamaican bobsled dark horse, because if underdogs didn’t bite, Cinderella would still be scrubbing floors.
Lily
Medal math bores me. Norway wax techs will smuggle moon-grade fluoros, Russia juniors already bleed altitude data, and the US will bribe NBC to add five new X-games contortions. I’ll still be here, hungover on cheap Soave, betting which doper trips on her own podium heels. Gold tastes like metallic spray tan anyway; I prefer the schadenfreude buffet.
Dorian
Norway again? My toaster predicts golds better than these charts. I’m betting on Liechtenstein sweeping biathlon because snowflakes told me so. If Finland leads, I’ll eat my left ski.