First and Second-Generation Americans Won Half of America's Gold Medals at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
How 14 first and second-generation Americans contributed to Team USA's 2026 Winter Olympic medal count.
This year’s Winter Olympics had me fondly reminiscing of my own winter sports glory days — I once went down a moderately steep hill on a sled as a teen in Wisconsin, and just this morning I became an amateur solo luger after slipping down the sidewalk during an intrepid trek to get groceries in a snowstorm.
Thankfully, America has better winter athletes than the likes of me. Of our 82 medalists this year, Alysa Liu received widespread coverage and praise not only for winning America’s first Olympic figure skating gold medal in 24 years but also for doing so despite being targeted by Chinese Communist Party spies due to her father’s background as a Chinese dissident who found refuge in America.
The Liu family’s story made me curious about how many other Olympic athletes this year were first or second-generation Americans, so I spent the weekend researching the backgrounds of 82 American medalists from this year’s games and built an interactive site where you can explore the findings. I encourage you to look at the data for yourself, but in short, here’s what I found.
In total, 11 of our 33 medals involved an athlete with some sort of immigrant connection, whether that came in the form of being born abroad themselves or in the form of having at least one immigrant parent. Interestingly, immigrant connections were most common at the gold-medal level, where 50% of our medals were tied to athletes with immigrant connections, and least common at the bronze level, where only about 22% did.
Another interesting discrepancy was that our gold-medal-winning men’s hockey team was nearly a quarter second-generation, while I couldn’t find any athletes with an immigrant tie on the women’s hockey team.
Five of the six athletes with an immigrant connection on the men’s hockey team had heritage that traced back to Canada. Canadian Americans formed the largest group of medalists, thanks to their presence on the men’s hockey team, with no other group coming close.
Our second-generation representation even beat out heritage countries in two cases: Mexican and Argentine Americans won medals at the Olympics, but Mexican and Argentine athletes did not.
Explore the full dataset here.