The 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics officially closed last night with openly LGBTQ+ athletes winning more medals than ever before.
This year’s games were already historic for queer representation, boasting a record-breaking 45 publicly out athletes taking part. Now, the final medal counts are in, and openly LGBTQ+ athletes have won 11 in total.
Outsports, which has been tracking Team LGBTQ+ wins, notes that if queer athletes had competed as a single team against the world’s countries, they would have finished 13th in total medals.
Collectively, openly LGBTQ+ athletes won five gold medals at the Winter Olympics. The Team USA Women’s Ice Hockey Team, featuring Cayla Barnes, Hilary Knight and Alex Carpenter, took the gold after defeating Canada in the final.
French skater Guillaume Cizeron won the gold in ice dance alongside his new partner Laurence Fournier Beaudry. In women’s downhill skiing, US athlete Breezy Johnson won the gold medal. Amber Glenn won a gold medal alongside Team USA in the figure-skating team event. Mathilde Gremaud, of Team Switzerland, won the gold in the women’s freeski slopestyle event.
Team GB curler Bruce Mouat won a silver medal in the men’s tournament, while the other queer athletes to win silver medals – Emily Clark, Erin Ambrose, Emerance Maschmeyer, Briane Jenner, Laura Stacey and Marie-Philip Poulin – were members of Canada’s women’s ice-hockey team.
Bronze medal winners at this year’s Winter Olympics included Swedish freestyle skier Sandra Näslund, Swedish ice-hockey player Laura Zimmerman, Belgian speed skater Tineke den Dulk, and Canadian ice-dancer Paul Poirier. The latter, alongside his partner Piper Gilles, skated to RuPaul’s ‘Supermodel’, for the rhythm dance segment of their event.
Beyond medal glory, this Olympics had other moments of queer joy. One standout moment saw US ice-hockey player Hilary Knight and US speed-skater Brittany Bowe get engaged. In a touching video posted on Instagram, Knight shares the moment she proposed to her partner.
The caption reads: “Olympics brought us together. This one made us forever.”
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