Lifestyle
What I learned watching every sport at the Winter Olympics
The Olympics are exhausting. Above, Taiwan’s Li Yu-Hsiang reacts after competing in the figure skating men’s singles free skating final in Milan on Feb. 13.
Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
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Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
Let us say up front that watching some of every sport at the Winter Olympics is not as challenging as watching some of every sport at the Summer Olympics. The Summer Olympics are a sprawling collection of activities, where you might see horses or swords or boats or surfboards.
The Winter Olympics still feel very rich, but they’re a bit more focused. My own brain roughly sorts them into team sports like curling and hockey, figure skating, running on snow, going down a hill on snow, sliding down an icy track, and flying through the air in much the way I might if I went skiing or snowboarding, except it’s graceful and on purpose, and you generally do not end up in the hospital.
And I found it all completely captivating.
Franjo Von Allmen of Switzerland in action during the men’s downhill on Feb. 7.
Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
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Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
Alpine skiing: One of my limitations as a watcher of downhill skiing is that most of the runs look similar to me unless someone crashes or unexpectedly departs the course. You could show me 10 skiers going down a mountain, and without their times showing up in green or red, I would have no idea which ones were good or which ones were bad. I would simply say, “Great job getting to the bottom very quickly.” And yet, through the fantabulous deployment of technique, you can earn edging someone out by a tenth of a second. A tenth of a second! Or less!
The slalom events are delightful, because they progress from slalom … to giant slalom … to super-G, which is super giant slalom. There is only one way for this to go, as we all know, and that is in the direction of mega super giant slalom, or M-S-G (which makes all other skiing more appealing because it adds umami flavor). I could try not to say “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” out loud while watching the slalom events, but why? In 50 years, when we are all watching jetpack slalom, I will still say “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”
Biathlon: This is the rare sport that seems to me to be fully wicked, for the simple reason that no one should be asked to hit a tiny target after wearing themselves out. Imagine you run 10 miles and then somebody hands you a slingshot and says, “Lie on the ground and hit that 5-Hour Energy drink bottle way over there.” That is unkind. Biathlon also has a rule where missing shots can require you to ski a “penalty loop,” which is the most “coach gets mad and makes you run laps” thing I have ever seen at the Olympics. I admire and sympathize with everyone involved.
Bobsled: Watching a team smoothly (usually) jump as many as four bodies into a very small vehicle — while running — is such a feat that bobsled would be enjoyable if it were only that. But like all of the sliding sports, it also suggests a willingness and an ability to skirt the line between controlled descent and mad careening. I particularly enjoyed the women’s monobob, both because Team USA athlete Elana Meyers Taylor won her first gold at her fifth Olympics and because the word “monobob” (a one-person sled) is delicious and melodic.
Cross-country skiing: I am exhausted just from typing those words. Where I live, we are just getting rid of snow and ice on the ground that hung around for a month. For the first week or two that we existed in its presence, one of my primary goals on any given day was not to traverse it for any reason. At one point, I picked up a heavy sandbag and walked out into my own backyard, laying down a sand track in front of myself, picking my way across the ice rink and making my way to a piece of trash my dog had found somewhere so I could remove it (in case it was something he should not have, like a chicken bone or an ex-mouse; it was in fact a paper towel). By the time I got back to the house, I certainly felt like I had earned a gold medal. What I’m saying is this: I am in awe of cross-country skiers for their stamina, resilience and balance, even though in fairness, they did not have to carry sand at the Olympics.
Curling: Oh, how I love curling. That anyone can slide a 40-ish-pound rock down the ice something like 150 feet and get it to land on a spot the size of your shoe is astonishing. From time to time, a curler makes a shot that seemingly sorts through a clump of red and yellow stones and knocks out all of one color without disturbing the stones of the other color. From 50 yards away! Moreover, you get to hear the players talking. Everybody has mics on, so they chat about what shot they should try, what shot is too risky, what shot the other team will try to make based on what shot they try to make … like baseball, it is meditative, with long periods of deceptive quiet followed by bursts of excitement. Like baseball, it rules.
Figure skating: The best thing about figure skating is that it is beautiful and graceful and athletic, and the programs have become more creative (to my eye) and less staid since I was a kid. Of course, the most difficult thing about it is that a single fall — truly, a single bad moment — can prevent a skater who has worked toward a goal for 15 or even 20 years from realizing that goal, even if it’s a fluke, a one-off, a thing that never happens. NBC’s coverage this year has really focused on sending the camera practically up into the nostrils of a skater who has just had a bad moment so you can have the most visceral possible look at their pain. That does not prevent post-bad-program interviews in which they are asked to explain their pain 30 seconds after it happens, sometimes at the cost of covering people who did well.
It makes sense that U.S. coverage focused, for instance, on the many problems that befell Ilia Malinin in the men’s free skate (resulting in an 8th-place finish for a heavy gold-medal favorite), but there was also triumph for Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov, who won the gold medal after a free skate during which the commentators were explaining that he was not really a medal contender this year, but might be in another four years. I mean, you’ve gotta love that.
Freestyle skiing: There is much to love about freestyle skiing, which crosses over with some of the things to love about snowboarding. There are aerials, there are tricks, and there is the aptly named discipline “Big Air.” But perhaps my favorite event is moguls, where the competitors go down a course that is intentionally made up entirely of bumps, and one of the tricks is to let your knees absorb all the bumps so that your upper body barely moves at all. I think everyone who has ever so much as sprained an ankle watches moguls with astonishment. If I consistently say “whoosh” while watching slalom, I consistently say “ow ow ow” while watching moguls.
The U.S. women’s ice hockey team huddles prior to a match against Czechia on Feb. 5 in Milan.
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Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Ice hockey: I am not particularly invested in Olympic ice hockey, particularly the men’s, because it involves so many professional players who play each other all the time, and that’s not what I’m watching the Olympics for. But I try to catch some of the women’s tournament every time. (It’s perhaps not surprising, given the fact that trying to follow the puck has always kept me estranged from hockey, that I so dearly love curling, which has all the ice and all the precise shots, except with a “puck” that is huge and slow.)
Luge: What an absolutely terrifying notion. Surely the most terrifying sport the Olympics could possibly come up with. Only the security offered by doubles luge, in which two people lie on top of each other, could possibly make this feel like a good idea. Lying on your back? Without being able to see where you’re going? If your kid wanted to go down the driveway like this on a flattened cardboard box, you would probably ground them.
Einar Lurås Oftebro of Norway’s Nordic combined team competes on Feb. 11.
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Alex Pantling/Getty Images
Nordic combined: This is cross-country skiing plus ski jumping. Two very efficient ways to cross snow, although one of them requires a ramp and a tolerance for risk. Here’s a question: Why isn’t this biathlon? This could be biathlon, and what is now biathlon could be the ski-n-shoot. I’m just throwing ideas out there. Innovating. (In all seriousness, read up on the status of Nordic combined and the athletes, women in particular, who stand to lose out based on International Olympic Committee decisions about the present and future.)
Short track speedskating: This is the speedskating I like the best, because I am unsophisticated and impatient. I don’t want to watch each person methodically lay down a time that other people then try to beat. I want to watch a bunch of fearless adrenaline junkies go fast around a track like it’s roller derby, except (mostly) trying not to knock each other over. I want to watch them hurl themselves across the finish line, sometimes backwards.
Skeleton: What’s this I’m hearing? Oh, never mind, this is the most terrifying sport they could have created. If you think flying down the track not being able to see where you’re going is scary, you’ll love flying down the track being able to see exactly where you’re going, because you are leading with your head. There’s been a lot of chatter this year about the way the Winter Olympics, more than the Summer Olympics, feel like they’re made up of various ways to barely not splatter yourself across the host city, and nothing says that to me like skeleton. They really only give you a helmet, and I wouldn’t do it in a helmet. I would require a helmet and a shark cage. And honestly at that point, I would just close my eyes.
Ski jumping: Ski jumping is very cool, and it’s kind of unfortunate that coverage got distracted this year by a story about … well, about the suits that the men wear, and how they’re fitted, and some other things. The amount of time that ski jumpers spend in the air is unfathomable to me, and the fact that they land on their feet instead of on an enormous inflatable cushion seems impossible, but they do it.
Germany’s Finn Hoesch competes in men’s sprint ski mountaineering on Feb. 19.
Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
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Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
Ski mountaineering: I have seen only a bit of this sport, because it’s its first year at the Olympics, and it didn’t really start until Thursday. If you’ve never watched it, here’s what it looked like when I watched it: The athlete runs up the mountain part of the way on skis with “skins” on the bottom for traction. Then the athlete takes off the skis and runs up a set of stairs. Then they put the skis back on, run up the mountain on skis the rest of the way, take the skis off, rip the skins off the skis, put the skis back on, and ski down the mountain. The women’s gold medal was determined not by the speed of running in skis, running out of skis, or skiing, but the speed of changing the gear all those times. (This also can happen in biathlon, where sometimes you ski well and you shoot well, but you spend too much time noodling around with your gun.) It is a truly wild sport, and I loved it instantly. Who hasn’t been foiled on a busy day by the inability to get your shoes on and off quickly?
Snowboard: I love to watch snowboarders, because they are so much less likely to look devastated when something bad happens than, say, figure skaters. This is partly because they often have more than one run, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they are less competitive or work less hard. But the culture of snowboarders seems to be a little different, and from time to time you will see one absolutely wipe out, and then hop up and throw their arms over their head in a combination of “Wooo!” and “I’m fine!” It’s good to have fun.
Speedskating: Speedskating is the sport I admire more than love. As with long-distance running, I am brimming with admiration for the people who do it, but I struggle to be entertained as a spectator. (Other people think this about curling, I realize. Imagine that!)
But this is part of what watching the Olympics is, right? You try out lots of sports. You sample some fast ones, some more slow-paced ones, some with short races and some with long races. And you decide: This one is mine, this is the one I’m going to follow. And it’s great.
Even for those of you who do not choose curling.
Megan Oldham of Team Canada warms up prior to the women’s slopestyle final on Feb. 9.
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Patrick Smith/Getty Images
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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Lifestyle
Vintage-obsessed millennial parents are driving L.A.’s booming kids’ clothing resale market
Kids’ vintage clothing sales are experiencing a remarkable boom at in-person markets and online, where prices for clothes for little ones have shot up on websites including Depop and Poshmark. Millennial parents are looking to outfit their kids in the clothes and TV and film characters they loved (or coveted) when they were kids.
The result? There’s a new generation of kiddos hitting the playground looking incredibly cool. Take Amari Case, a SoCal toddler who spent a Sunday afternoon this spring ambling around a vintage market in a West Hollywood warehouse clad in baggy jeans and a ’90s-era tee emblazoned with the “Dragon Ball Z” character Son Goku.
When she wasn’t scribbling on a Lorax coloring sheet, she’d been cruising around the market with her dad, Aaron Munoz Case, snapping up new pieces destined to make her the flyest kid at the preschool playground.
Neil Wright, from left, Kristine Nite Scalzo and Brandon Rosenblatt, co-founders of Elemeno Kids Vintage Market.
Showing off Amari’s new vintage satin L.A. Raiders jacket and tiny teal Grant Hill Detroit Pistons jersey, Munoz Case, who was also impeccably dressed, noted that while Amari went through a phase at about 18 months where she wanted to dress herself, eventually she gave up and went back to letting her dripped-out dad dictate her wardrobe.
Munoz Case found Amari’s first vintage piece at the Rose Bowl Flea Market and got the bug, going back every month to pick up something to add to his little’s wardrobe.
Trendspotters and researchers say Munoz Case isn’t alone in his quest. The market for kids’ vintage clothing has heated up precipitously over the last few years, perhaps hitting a boiling point in January when an Eeyore romper from the ’90s sold for over $3,000 on EBay. (It was new with tags, but one without tags still went for almost a grand about a month later.)
The thirst for tiny throwbacks is so popular that first-ever, all-kids market Elemeno — named after the “L-M-N-O” bit of “The Alphabet Song” and where Amari was toddling and shopping — drew 17 vendors and over 2,000 attendees over a single weekend in March. (There are plans for another Elemeno Kids Vintage Market pop-up later this year in New York, as well as plans to bring the event back to L.A. sometime next year.)
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1. Cameron Scalzo, wearing a vintage McDonald’s T-shirt from the ‘90s, and mom Kristine Nite Scalzo. 2. Cameron Scalzo rocks an Avirex jacket from the ‘90s.
Eye Speak Vintage’s Kristine Nite Scalzo, who co-organized the event and is opening an all-kids vintage store in Pasadena this month, says she fell under the kids vintage spell in 2020 when she was pregnant with her son. She’d always been a vintage shopper for herself, so she knew she wanted to pass the passion down to the next generation. She started filling up her son’s closet, and soon enough, she found herself selling her other finds out of a bodega in her garage.
She has a by-appointment space in Pasadena now, where she draws everyone from Rihanna’s stylist to out-of-town moms who make a point to stop by on their way to Disneyland. “The community around kids vintage has really skyrocketed on Instagram over the past six years,” Scalzo says. “We want to know who we’re buying from. We want to know that we’re doing good with buying secondhand. And it’s a hobby for people that can turn into a possible business on the side. Because knowing there’s a big group that’s interested in vintage kids clothes, you can always pass an item [your kid outgrows] to someone else or resell it.”
Scalzo says some parents are out digging through bins at the Goodwill Outlet looking for the perfect piece, while others are content to pay up for, say, a ’90s Simpsons T-shirt or a mini-size Harley-Davidson jacket. Scouring the racks at the Elemeno market, most pieces cost $15 to $40, though there were special pieces pulled to the side in some booths with price tags that could make a parent’s eyes pop. (Think $275 for a set of well-worn Spider-Man overalls from the ’00s or $150 for a pair of Cross Colours denim shorts from the ’90s.)
In kids and adult vintage alike, mint condition is highly valued. No matter the era in which they were raised, kids tend to be messy. They get strawberry juice on their shirts or scuff up the knees on their Bugle Boy jeans. Vintage kids clothes that look pristine are more expensive, and while plain kids clothes do sell, items with characters on them or cool prints tend to draw more attention and dollars.
Brandon Rosenblatt, another of the Elemeno organizers, says he’s had his eye on a specific kids “Back to the Future” shirt for some time, but notes that it typically sells for about $1,000. He’s partial to McKids clothes for his daughter, from McDonald’s short-lived kids clothing brand, noting that he’s even snagged her a vintage official McDonald’s-themed aloha shirt from Hawaii, something he says he’s never seen anywhere else.
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1. Siblings Amora and Milo Castilo wear vintage cowboy hats, jackets and chaps. 2. Thalia Castilo and her kids Amora and Milo.
Other collectors, he says, might be a little less obscure, leaning into mainstream characters such as Strawberry Shortcake or from ’80s and ’90s properties including “The Land Before Time” and “Rugrats.”
“A lot of millennials are having kids — like everyone who’s in their 30s and 40s — and they all want to put their kids in the same IP they grew up in,” Rosenblatt says.
“It’s the thrill of the hunt that gets everyone so excited,” Scalzo says. “Once you find that perfect nostalgic piece, you’re like ‘Holy s—,’ and you just want to chase that feeling again and again.”
Mia De La Rosa, a reseller who was at the Elemeno market, says that like Scalzo, she started buying kids vintage clothes when she was pregnant with her daughter, Liv, who’s 6 now, very into everything on PBS Kids and has a closet full of thrifted vintage garb covered in characters such as D.W., the annoying little sister from the ’90s show “Arthur.”
Everything Liv wears is “completely her style,” De La Rosa says. “She dresses herself every day and she gets compliments on what she’s wearing at school all the time.”
Other vintage-wearing kids — and in particular younger ones — might simply be sporting what their parents like or might just like the look of the shirt even if they don’t know what it’s advertising. (An 8-year-old boy at the Elemeno market, for instance, chose to wear a pristine T-shirt highlighting the ’90s Jim Carrey movie “The Mask” because it featured his favorite color: green.)
Derrick Broaster, a vintage enthusiast turned full-time reseller, says that while he chooses to put himself in clothes from the ’60s and ’70s, he outfits his two sons in clothes from the 2000s. (“How Bow Wow used to dress when he was a kid,” he says.)
Although his younger son tends to rebel against Broaster’s vintage picks, opting for whatever Spider-Man shoes happen to be in his eyeline, his older son has leaned in, letting his dad advise him on what vintage pieces could work and what would be the most stylish.
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1. Julian, left, and Javier Gutierrez show off their vintage clothing. Javier says his mom always tells him to keep his vintage outfits clean. 2. Mom Priscilla Guzman, clockwise, Dad Javier Gutierrez and sons Julian and Javier Gutierrez enjoy the vibe of vintage clothing. Guzman says she’s been buying and selling kids’ vintage since her oldest son was born eight years ago.
Rosenblatt says a good portion of what vintage finds he sees in the market now has returned to the U.S. from places in Central America and South America or Asia where those pieces were likely sent decades ago after they were donated or given away.
“There’s a real underbelly of this vintage game with rag houses getting access to bulk product overseas and letting people sort through it,” he says. “There are companies now that rip through 20, 30 or 40,000 pieces of vintage clothing a week. It’s a really interesting ecosystem.”
For many kids vintage sellers, finding their stock is just as fun and interesting as getting it back into consumers’ hands. “Anywhere we can find clothes, we’re there,” says Matthew Carlos, owner of Long Gone Youth. He started selling vintage clothes 11 years ago, when he was 15, switched to kids vintage at 20 and has spent the last six years scouring flea markets, websites and swap meets.
“The kids market is definitely growing,” he says, “but I still feel like we haven’t even gotten close to where we can go. It’s just getting popular now, but the more events [like Elemeno] we can do, the more it’ll go mainstream.” Even now, some major brands like Gap and OshKosh B’gosh have recognized the interest in some of their styles from the ’80s and ’90s, moving to re-release the looks in limited runs.
Jackie and Frank Oropeza with daughter Rumi Mae shop at Elemeno Kids Vintage Market.
Kids resale is also leaning into streetwear culture. Rosenblatt, who worked in the streetwear industry, says that he’s noticed that a good portion of those interested in kids vintage — particularly, male shoppers — tend to be fans of streetwear brands like Supreme, Fear of God Essentials and Bape. At Elemeno, for instance, a good portion of the parents we saw pushing strollers were well-dressed dads seemingly on solo missions, something you don’t always see at kid-centric events.
“I just want my son to feel like I did as a kid,” said Justin Nguyen, while watching his toddler, Jayden, play with bubbles. “I want him to be happy, carefree and joyful, and I want to be able to spend time with him. My mom and dad were always working, even on the weekends. Now that I’m a dad, taking my son out on weekends to do stuff like this just seems like a blessing.”
Author Julia Elliott won for her short story collection Hellions.
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Forrest Clonts/Tin House
Writer Julia Elliott has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her short story collection Hellions. The award honors work by women and nonbinary authors in the U.S. and Canada.
Elliott, who also authored the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch and the short story collection The Wilds, is known for blending elements of Southern gothic horror, surrealism and fairy tale. Hellions, published in 2025, includes stories set against backdrops like a plague-stricken medieval convent, a feminist art colony, and small Southern towns.
“This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls,” wrote the prize jury in a statement. “Here, human folly moves against a backdrop of horror and magic … But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control.”
The prize, named after a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, awards $150,000 to one winner each year. Novels, short story collections, and graphic novels by women and nonbinary authors are eligible.
This year’s finalists included Quiara Alegría Hudes (The White Hot), Lee Lai (Cannon), Megha Majumdar (A Guardian and a Thief), and Sonya Walger (Lion). They will each receive $12,500.
The Carol Shields Prize went to writer Canisia Lubrin in 2025.
You can listen to actor Donna Lynne Champlin read Elliott’s story “Hellion” on the Death, Sex & Money podcast here.
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