Winter Olympics 2026: Gritty stories from the slopes

The Winter Olympics 2026 begin in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Whether they’re hurling down a mountain, spinning at dizzing speeds, or crashing into each other on the ice, the athletes competing in this season are.

Although there are so many competitors on the schedule, including broom-wielding curlers, cross-country biathlon skiers, and seemingly supersonic bobsled riders, some of the more intimate stories could get lost.

The subjects of the docs below are all extreme winter-sports athletes, some of whom have competed at the Olympics before or are going for gold this year.

Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing

This series offers an intimate look at the high-stakes, high-drama world of ice dancing, one of the most artistically demanding events in the Olympic Games. It highlights a trio of teams with golden aspirations on the world’s biggest sports stage, Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the US, Canada’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, and France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron.

The series from the team behind Simone Biles Rising covers the athletes’ intense training, year-round international travel demands, and the sacrifices that these duos make to chase their dreams.

Miracle: The Boys of ’80

This documentary tells the story of the “Miracle on Ice,” when the 1980 US Hockey Team beat the USSR in the Olympic semifinals at the height of the Cold War to bring home a gold medal.

The iconic underdog tale is told with never-before-seen footage shot on 16-millimetre film, and firsthand reflections from the players as they return to the scene of their historic victory.

The film is directed by Max Gershberg and Jacob Rogal,   producers of sports documentaries Court of Gold and The Last Dance, respectively.

Scotty James: Pipe Dream

This documentary zooms in on Scotty James, the Australian snowboarder who won an Olympic bronze medal in PyeongChang in 2018 and a silver medal in Beijing in 2022, both in the halfpipe. And in 2026, he is making his fifth and potentially final appearance at the Winter Games.

The film features home footage and interviews with family members, former coaches, and fellow athletes like Chloe Kim, Shaun White, and Torah Bright.

Open Heart

Hockey superstar Henrik Lundqvist tended goal for the New York Rangers for 15 years and played for the Swedish team in three Winter Games: Turin in 2006 (where they won the gold), Vancouver in 2010, and Sochi in 2014 (where they won silver).

This documentary, directed by Jonathan Hock, unpacks Lundqvist’s legendary career and examines how it was impacted by a near-fatal heart attack and his subsequent recovery from open-heart surgery just months after he signed with the Washington Capitals.

Harley & Katya

Australian figure skaters Harley Windsor and Ekaterina Alexandrovskaya’s promising shared career came to a heartbreaking end in 2020. This 2022 documentary, directed by Selina Miles (Martha: A Picture Story), looks back at their beginnings, their years of success on the ice, including at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and their story’s tragic conclusion.

Full Circle

This documentary, directed by Josh Berman, follows extreme-sports enthusiasts Barry Corbet, an alpinist injured during a helicopter crash in 1968, and Trevor Kennison, a snowboarder who broke his back in 2014.

Both survived life-altering spinal cord injuries, and their recoveries put them on parallel paths: Corbet became a leader in the disability community, and Kennison aimed to become the first sit-skier to land a double backflip in the Colorado backcountry, where he’d been injured.