Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games: Slopestyle and Big Air Preview

Freeski competition at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games is set to begin on Saturday at the Livigno Snow Park, where women’s Slopestyle qualifications will get the ball rolling at 10:30 CET, followed by the men at 14:00. Women’s finals are then slated for Wednesday and men’s on Thursday, with both of those finals starting at 12:30. 

SLOPESTYLE

The big story heading into Milano Cortina Slopestyle competition is China’s Eileen Gu, who came oh-so-close to a gold medal sweep of the Freeski events at Beijing 2022, only to fall .33 points short in slopestyle and settling for silver behind Mathilde Gremaud. 

While Gu will again be gunning for golds in all three of the Slopestyle, Halfpipe and Big Air events here in Italy, beginning her bid with the Slopestyle title that eluded her in China has to be at the top of her priority list. And, as she comes into Milano Cortina fresh off a victory at the 2026 Laax Open World Cup just a few weeks ago, signs suggest she could be tough to beat.

If there’s anyone capable of doing so, however, it is once Gremaud, the reigning Olympic champion, two-time reigning World Champion and current leader of the Slopestyle World Cup standings. 

Gremaud’s World Cup results may be underwhelming so far this year, as aside from a win at the season-opener in Stubai that was based on qualification results she has no podiums. However, there’s no other skier on the women’s side who seems able to elevate her game in the big moments quite like Gremaud, and here at Milano Cortina we’ll see if she can do it once again on the biggest stage of them all. 

Also more than likely to be in contention is Great Britain’s Kirsty Muir, who has been on fire since claiming the first Slopestyle World Cup victory of her career at the season-ender in Tignes (FRA) last season. This season, Muir has claimed a Big Air World Cup win at Secret Garden (CHN) and a Slopestyle victory at the U.S. Grand Prix in Aspen, as well as X Games slopestyle gold just before heading here to Italy for the Games. 

A three-strong Canadian team should also be on your ones-to-watch list, with Engadin 2025 World Championships bronze medallist Megan Oldham, Big Air World Cup standings leader Naomi Urness, and the resurgent Elena Gaskell all looking dialled in so far in 2025/26. 

The U.S. team of 2025/26 Slopestyle World Cup second-ranked Marin Hamill, Grace Henderson and rookie Avery Krumme could all be in the 12-woman final conversation, while Austria will be looking to Engadin 2025 Slopestyle silver medallist to once again step up the season’s biggest event in the coming days. Finally Finland, represented by style master Anni Karava, will be looking to upset some of the podium favourites on Monday.

Finally, the wild card of Slopestyle proceedings at Milano Cortina 2026 will be Italy’s own Flora Tabanelli, who is set to drop in on her first competitions of the season here in Livigno after injuring her knee in preseason training. 

Last season it was all Tabanelli, all the time, as the now 18-year-old claimed seven podiums in 11 starts on her way to the the Big Air and the FIS Freeski Overall Crystal Globes, and then followed that up by taking the Big Air gold medal at the Engadin 2025 World Championships. Tabanelli has proven she is one of the freeski world’s elite athletes, but her lack of recent reps and quick turnaround from her injury leave us with some questions that will be answered very soon at these Games.

While the Slopetyle firepower on display for the men at Milano Cortina 2026 promises to be impressive from top-to-bottom of the start list, a short list of familiar names are likely to be the ones contending for Milano Cortina 2026 gold over the coming days.

Neck-and-neck at the top of the pack are Mac Forehand (USA) and Birk Ruud (NOR), both of whom are one-for-one with impressive victories in their lone slopestyle starts this season. 

Forehand’s win came on home snow at the Aspen U.S. Grand Prix, while Ruud’s came just one week later at the Laax Open World Cup in Switzerland - however, at both those events, the other skier wasn’t there to challenge the winner. 

The last time Forehand and Ruud did go toe-to-toe, in fact, was at the Engadin 2025 World Championships, where Ruud walked away with a second straight slopestyle gold medal on the strength of an untouchable performance, with Forehand taking the silver medal and his U.S. teammate Alex Hall claiming bronze.

Reigning Olympic champion Hall represents one of the major hurdles facing either Ruud or Forehand’s chances at gold here in Italy. The first member of the stacked U.S. Freeski team to be confirmed for Milano Cortina 2026 at the end of last season, Hall has been largely taking it easy in 2025/26 and biding his time for the Games. Arguably the most technical freeskier to ever do it, Hall seems to drop never-been-done tricks in competitions at will, and will no doubt have something never seen before to show the world in the coming days. 

The other major hurdle facing the heavyweights listed above? New Zealand’s Luca Harrington, who enters Milano Cortina 2026 competition on an absolute heater of a run leading up to the games that culminated in his second-straight X Games slopestyle victory two weeks ago. 

Harrington is currently riding a record-setting streak of seven straight Big Air podiums that dates back to last season, and while his Slopestyle World Cup results so far this season only show an eighth place at Aspen, his performance at the 2026 X Games, where he bested the likes of Hall, Ruud, Forehand, Colby Stevenson, and Andri Ragettli (SUI) show he’s more than capable of making some big noise on the big stage. 

Speaking of Ragettli, there might be no one in the men’s field hungrier for an Olympic podium than the Swiss skier. The 2021 Slopestyle World Champion, five-time Crystal Globe winner, three-time X Games winner, and the World Cup record holder with 33 career podiums, Ragettli still has one empty space on his trophy shelf that he’s been desperate to fill with an Olympic medal. Now 27 years old, Ragettli could very well be dropping in on his last Olympic Winter Games here at Milano Cortina 2026, and you can count on him being all-in as seeks to achieve that goal.

BIG AIR

Four days after Slopestyle competition wraps up at the Livigno Snow Park, the same set of athletes will be back at it in on the towering big venue, with women’s qualifications taking place on Saturday, 14 February, men’s qualifications on 15 Feb, women’s finals on the 16th, and then men’s finals on the 17th. All qualification and final phases will begin at 19:30. 

While the entry lists for Big Air will be the same as the ones for Slopestyle and the big names-to-watch largely carried over, there are some notable differences. 

First up for the women is the fact that reigning Olympic champion Eileen Gu has not competed in a single Big Air competition since her history making performance at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, where she claimed the gold medal by stomping the first-ever 1620 in women’s competition. 

Gu has, however, spent plenty of time hitting big jumps over the past few seasons, and if there’s anybody who can step back in to her first Big Air competition in four years and find her way back to the top of the podium, it is the exceptional 22-year-old. 

While a 1620 is still the upper echelon of rotations in women’s Big Air competition, the game has changed in the last four years, with the likes of Megan Oldham stomping the first triple cork in women’s competition at the X Games in 2023, and with Mathilde Gremaud adding a nosebutter double cork 1260 to her trick arsenal, which she used to win the X Games two weeks ago.

Whether a triple cork will be possible on this Olympic jump for the women remains to be seen, but it’s almost assured that Gremaud will bring the nosebutter 12 to the table. If she does, it could be almost impossible for anyone to challenge her bid for gold. 

Current Big Air World Cup leader Naomi Urness, reigning Big Air World Champion, PyeongChang 2018 Slopestyle gold medallist Sarah Hoefflin, and the USA’s Rell Harwood are a few of the other names who could challenge for the Big Air podium in Livigno.

On the men’s side, when we’re talking about big air, then we’ve got to mention the USA’s Troy Podmilsak, who sits tied atop the World Cup standings with Luca Harrington on 200 points from two victories in two starts. 

Podmilsak became the first skier in history to land a forward 2160 on his way to gold at the Bakuriani 2023 World Championships, a trick he used again on his way to X Games gold the next season. And while a number of other men have bumped their rotations up to 2160 since then, few execute the trick the power and consistency of Podmilsak. 

And then there’s Flora’s brother Miro Tabanelli, who claimed X Games gold in 2025 by becoming the first skier in competition history to stomp a 2340. While Tabanelli has struggled somewhat this season, with his best result coming in the form of a sixth place at the Steamboat (USA) Big Air World Cup, his focus has been on these Olympics in his home resort since the Games were first awarded to Milano Cortina seven years ago. The pressure on the 21-year-old will be immense, but he has proven he has the chops to rise to the occasion.

Full Milano Cortina 2026 Freestyle Skiing schedule