Sports correspondent & historian with Sideline Sid

After two weeks of saturation coverage of the Australian Open, on Sky, TV this couch potato’s attention will quickly turn to the Winter Olympics being staged in Milano Cortina, Italy February 6 – 22, 2026.

I have long wondered why it took New Zealand so long to add Winter Olympic medals to the long list of Summer Olympic medallions.

Lying at the bottom of the world, with an abundance of mountains and copious amounts of snow, our country had the necessary attributes for international alpine competition success.

New Zealand was represented at their first Winter Olympic competition, by Herbert Familton, Bill Hunt and Annette Johnson, at Oslo in Sweden in 1952.

Annalise Coberger broke the drought at the 1992 Winter Games with the Kiwi skier winning a silver medal in the women's slalom. Annalise became the first athlete from the Southern Hemisphere to win a medal at the Winter Olympics. 

The Winter Olympics were turned on its head at Nagano in Japan during 1998 when snowboarding made its debut. Olympic spectators had never seen the likes of the half-pipe where competitors perform tricks while going from one side of a semi-circle ditch to the other.

The addition of snowboarding and free-style skiing became the catalyst for New Zealand to win five medals at the 2018 and 2022 Winter Olympics. 

We have to go back some three decades to the start of the X Games, founded by ESPN, for the eventual introduction of snowboarding and free-style skiing to Olympic competition.

The X Games were a series of new generation all-action sports and broke the traditional role of athletes. The participants were mostly young with many dressed in 'street gear' instead of traditional athletic uniforms.

Early X Games attracted a new generation of fans who were looking for fast paced extreme competition. 

X Games introduced skateboarding, BMX, Motorcross, trick skiing and snowboarding to our sporting competition vocabulary.

It took two 16-year-olds to bring the Winter Olympics firmly to Kiwi attention at the 2018 Games held in South Korea.

Who can forget Zoi Sadowski-Synnott soaring high in the women's snowboarding big air event and Nico Porteous thrilling the fans in the men's half-pipe. A bronze medal apiece was the reward for the two thrilling Kiwi performances.

Beijing, four years later saw Zoi Sadowski-Synnott break New Zealand's 70-year Winter Olympic Gold Medal drought, with victory in the women's slope style. Not to be outdone, Nico Porteous won the men's skiing halfpipe.

For good measure Zoi Sadowski-Synnott added a silver medallion in the big air event.

In the space of just four years, Zoi and Nico had taken the New Zealand tally of Winter Olympics medals from one to six.

So, to the 2026 Winter Olympics.

New Zealand is sending a record 17 snow sport athletes to the Italian Winter Games.

All but one of our team will compete in the snowboard and free-style skiing competitions.

Heaps of Kiwi attention will focus on Zoi Sadowski-Synnott as she chases back-to-back victory in the slope style competition.

The lone alpine skier, Alice Robertson, has laid down the credentials necessary for an Olympic medal in recent seasons. 

In 2025, Alice finished in second place in the World Championships, becoming the first from Aotearoa to earn a FIS World Championship medal.

There will be plenty of late nights and early mornings in the next couple of weeks as Kiwis keep watch on the happenings from the Italian slopes.