The Broncos may not have quite made it to the Super Bowl, but you know what, there’s another Super Bowl this weekend for a certain Colorado team.

Boasting 33 athletes plus one alternate, Colorado has the most athletes of any state on the U.S. team at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games.

In other words, the Olympic team is pretty much our hometown team, so the Olympics are kind of our alternate Super Bowl this year.

And there’s no bigger fan base than Colorado Springs, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary as Olympic City USA.

Colorado Springs is home to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee headquarters, the Olympic training center, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum and more than two dozen Olympic governing bodies. You can’t walk 50 yards on a hiking trail in this city without running into a current or former Olympic athlete. Sheesh, my real estate agent is an Olympic triathlon coach.

And living in Olympic City during the Olympics is a little like being in New Orleans for Mardi Gras …. the biggest fanboys and fangirls of the Games live right here, and we plan to celebrate our hometown team loudly and boisterously the whole way through.

So for all you current and future fans looking for athletic inspiration somewhere other than the Super Bowl, here are the very best Colorado storylines to keep an eye on in the weeks to come:

Revenge of the GOAT?

Mikaela Shiffrin, hometown Edwards, is without question alpine skiing’s GOAT (Greatest of All Time). She’s won more World Cup ski races than any other person on Earth, male or female, and she’s a two-time Olympic gold medalist, eight-time world championship gold medalist and five-time World Cup overall title winner.

Shiffrin’s father died not long before the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, and she has said her grief nearly caused her to give up skiing and severely impacted her preparation for the Games that year. She won no medals in Beijing, but she has since reclaimed her crown as the best skier ever. So the big question for these Olympics: Can the 30-year-old GOAT get her revenge?

Italy is “not so much about unfinished business, but it’s more about making peace,” she told Olympics.com.

Here are the events Shiffrin’s competing in (so far) in her fourth Olympics:

• Tuesday — Women’s combined slalom
• Feb. 15 —  Women’s giant slalom
• Feb. 18 — Women’s slalom

Gold pursuit on a wrecked knee

The 41-year-old grande dame of American skiing, Lindsey Vonn, is competing in the Olympic downhill Sunday just nine days after a race crash shredded her left knee, rupturing her anterior cruciate ligament.

“I’ve never been afraid of much in my life,” said Vonn, who hails from Vail. “That’s why I’m a downhiller. I like risk. I like going fast. I like pushing myself to the limit.”

Vonn is also competing in the combined on Tuesday and the super-G on Thursday.

“It’s a pretty damn good comeback,” Vonn said, “if I can pull it off.”

World according to Irvings

Freeskiing brother and sister Birk, 26, and Svea Irving, 23, are both part of the U.S. Ski Team’s Olympic halfpipe roster. The sibs, who have been on skis since they could walk, used to like to ski off the roof of their Winter Park home to try out their tricks on jumps and rails built below with a snow blower.

The Winter Games will be Birk’s second Olympics and Svea’s first.

They are competing Feb. 19, 20 and 21.

Side note: Their famous grandfather, novelist John Irving, is expected to be in the crowd in Italy.

Colorado snowboard mafia

Nine — count’ em — nine of America’s Olympic snowboarders call Colorado home.

At 16, the fearless Lily Dhawornvej is the youngest Coloradan on the team and one of the sport’s rising stars. She lives in Copper Mountain and trained with Team Summit and Ski & Snowboard Club Vail. She earned her first World Cup victory at the 2026 Laax Open, taking second overall in women’s slopestyle.

Lily is a proud member of the Soy Sauce Nation, a group of Asian American snowboarders who promote diversity and inclusion in the sport.

The other eight Colorado snowboarders are:

Halfpipe: Maddy Schaffrick, Steamboat Springs; Chase Blackwell, Longmont; Jake Pates, Eagle.

Parallel giant slalom: Cody Winters, Steamboat Springs.

Slopestyle: Jake Canter, Silverthorne; Red Gerard, Silverthorne; Ollie Martin, Wolcott; and Dhawornvej.

Snowboard cross: Stacy Gaskill, Golden, 25, and Winters.

Lily is competing on Sunday and Monday, and Feb. 16 and 17.

Avs, Avs everywhere

It’s been 12 years since NHL players last represented their national teams at the Winter Olympics. But they are back this year, and the Colorado Avalanche are among the teams with the most hockey players in Italy, playing for five different countries.

The Avs are tied with the New Jersey Devils and Minnesota Wild with the third-most players, eight, trailing only the Florida Panthers, nine, and Tampa Bay Lightning, 11.

 Here are the Olympic Avs and the teams they are playing for:

• Nathan MacKinnon, Canada.
• Cale Makar, Canada.
• Devon Toews, Canada.
• Martin Necas, Czechia.
• Joel Kiviranta, Finland.
• Artturi Lehkonen, Finland.
• Gabriel Landeskog, Sweden.
• Brock Nelson, United States.

On another hockey note, former Colorado College defenseman Jaccob Slavin, who plays for the Carolina Hurricanes, was also picked to represent Team USA. Slavin, from Erie, is the ninth former Tiger to compete in the Olympics.

Skimo comes of age

When Cam Smith moved to Gunnison from his native Illinois to attend Western Colorado University, he had hardly ever skied in his life. After a meteoric rise, the Crested Butte resident is now competing in the debut of ski mountaineering at the Winter Games.

Nicknamed skimo, ski mountaineering combines uphill skiing (skinning), technical climbing (bootpacking) and downhill skiing.

Smith has won the North American Ski Mountaineering championship five times, and holds the course record for three of the largest ski mountaineering races in the United States.

He’ll compete Feb. 19 and 21 in the sprint race as well as the mixed relay with Anna Gibson, the top American woman in the sport.

All during his rise, he has managed to hold down a job as an instructor for the Adaptive Sports Center in Crested Butte, where he helps athletes with disabilities ski and mountain bike.

A duel in the bumps

Twenty-one-year-old Coloradan Charlie Mickel will compete in the Olympic debut of dual moguls, which features two skiers racing down a bumps course in a head-to-head battle to cross the finish line first. The new race is all about absorption and speed rather than catching air and doing tricks. My knees ache just thinking about it.

Mickel learned to ski at Purgatory and spends his summers kayaking around Durango, where his parents founded the renowned Mild To Wild adventure whitewater company. 

He is competing Tuesday, Thursday and Feb. 15.

Olympic royalty

Joanne Reid was an NCAA cross-country skiing champion at the University of Colorado before taking up biathlon in 2015.

She is the daughter of 1980 Olympic speedskating bronze medalist Beth (Heiden) Reid and the niece of Eric Heiden, the only Winter Olympian to win five gold medals in a single Games, which he accomplished at the Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid in 1980, according to the Team USA website.

She competes on Wednesday.

Reid told Team USA that the number one thing she misses most when she is competing out of state or out of country is Colorado craft beer.

Gods return to Olympics

Finally, the Olympic City will be represented in Italy in one more, rather hidden way. If you look really hard, you’ll see the Garden of the Gods every time an American reaches the awards podium during the Winter Games.

The Therma-FIT Air Milano Jacket from ACG and Nike that will serve as part of Team USA’s official medal ceremony look features an interior lining graphic that depicts the Gods.

The design includes the park’s rock formations and a bald eagle.

“The collection is crafted in the image of Team USA’s hometown,” a press release from Nike noted, “channeling the infamous Manitou Incline hike, a training ground for some of the world’s greatest athletes, and the Garden of the Gods, which serves as a powerful symbol of strength, resilience and the spirit of adventure.”

Being the homer that I am, I plan to sip a little 291 Colorado whiskey, made right here in Olympic City, every time I spot the Gods on the podium in the coming days.

By the way, The Gazette newspapers and our news partners, 9News, are the only Colorado media outlets with correspondents in Milan. Be sure to follow our columnist Mark Kiszla’s columns and videos filed directly from Italy in the days to come.

Go, America!

Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.