The Women Over 40 at the 2026 Winter Olympics Are My Roman Empire

Somewhere between menopause brain fog and reheating my coffee for the third time, I found myself yelling at the TV during Olympic trials like a full-blown sports dad.

Except I wasn’t yelling about a 19-year-old prodigy.

I was yelling about women over 40.

Because while the median age of an athlete at the 2026 Winter Olympics is 25 — twenty-five — there are more than eleven women competing who were alive for cassette tapes, landlines, and the original Top Gun. And they’re not there as honorary mascots of longevity.

They’re there to win.

There’s been plenty of media attention around Lindsey Vonn and her comeback attempt — the grit, the fall, the will-she-won’t-she of it all. We love a redemption arc. We love watching someone refuse to go quietly. And then there’s Claudia Riegler, 52 years old, strapping into a snowboard and casually becoming one of the oldest women to compete in the Winter Games.

Fifty-two.

At 52, some women get asked if they want the senior discount. She drops into a halfpipe.

But here’s what doesn’t get talked about enough: they are not alone.

Across alpine skiing, biathlon, curling, luge, ski mountaineering, and snowboarding, there are women over 40 quietly — and not so quietly — doing the thing. Marianna Jagerčíková competing in ski mountaineering at 40. Veterans in curling whose precision has been sharpened by decades. Biathletes who can still ski and shoot with steadier hands than most of us can send a coherent text before coffee.

Yes, the median age is 25.

But medals don’t check your birth year before they hang around your neck.

And I’ll be honest: I found myself rooting just a little harder watching Elana Meyers Taylor. She already has five Olympic medals — the most by any Black woman in Winter Games history. Five. That’s not a career. That’s a legacy.

And she’s a mom.

Then there’s Kaillie Humphries, with three Olympic gold medals — more than any female bobsledder ever. Also a mom.

Do you understand what it takes to train at an elite Olympic level while raising tiny humans who still need snacks cut diagonally and someone to find the missing shoe?

These women are pushing sleds at top speed and packing lunches.

They are managing recovery protocols and bedtime routines.

They are living proof that motherhood is not a retirement plan.

Watching them feels personal. Because if you’re a woman over 40, you’ve felt it — that subtle cultural nudge that says your prime was somewhere around 23. That ambition should soften. That risk should shrink. That you should start “being realistic.”

And yet here are women in their 40s and 50s launching themselves down mountains at highway speeds.

If that’s not a rejection of outdated timelines, I don’t know what is.

Not all of these women will stand on a podium. That’s just math. But all of them are champions. Because showing up at 40-plus in a field where the average competitor was in kindergarten when you were already competing? That takes a different kind of muscle.

Longevity muscle.

Discipline muscle.

The kind of strength that comes from choosing not to fade just because someone quietly expected you to.

I keep thinking about how different things might feel if more women understood this isn’t rare. The strength. The second act. The comeback. The refusal to expire on schedule.

Age is a number.

Not a verdict.

The median athlete may be 25, but greatness doesn’t peak on a calendar. And if women can compete in the Winter Olympics at 40, 45, 52 — then maybe the rest of us can sign up for the hard thing we’ve been postponing.

Lift heavier.

Start the business.

Go back to school.

Try again.

Try scared.

Try older.

Try anyway.

Because if these women prove anything every time they line up at the start, it’s this:

We don’t expire.

We evolve.

And sometimes, we get better with mileage.