Of the nine current or former students competing in the games in Milan and Cortina, three came home with medals and one, Ben Ogden ’22, earned two silver medals in cross-country skiing events, becoming the first Catamount to score multiple podium spots at an Olympic Games. Besides Ogden, UVM medalists were Paula Moltzan, who studied biology at the university, who claimed a bronze medal in the inaugural alpine women's team combined event, and Ryan Cochran-Siegle, an engineering management student, who won the silver medal in the men’s alpine super-G. With four medals, Vermont athletes earned as many or more than some countries, including Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and Denmark.
All three UVM medalists were appearing in their second Olympic games, having previously been on their Team USA rosters in Beijing in 2022. And Cochran-Siegle medaled at Beijing, bringing home silver that year in the same super-G event.
Ogden’s silver medal finish in the February 10 cross-country men’s sprint broke a 50-year “drought,” making him the first U.S. man to medal in any cross-country event since Vermont native Bill Koch won silver at the 1976 Winter Olympics, in Innsbruck, Austria.
“I didn't even realize the 50-year thing," Ogden told NBC Sports. "I knew it had been a long time, but I didn't know it was exactly 50 years, and it's so thrilling to me that that our success will go down together.”
Eight days later, on Feb. 18, Ogden and his teammate, Gus Schumacher, earned the silver spot in the men's cross-country team sprint.
Cochran-Siegle was also able to harken back to the past when winning his medal on February 11. It was exactly 54 years to the day since his mother, Catamount Barbara Cochran ’78, won her gold medal in the slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan.
“Yeah, February 11, a good day for our family,” Cochran-Siegle joked in an interview on NBC’s Today show.
On February 10, Moltzan joined her teammate, Jacqueline Wiles, to earn the bronze medal in the new alpine women's team combined event, which consists of one downhill run and one slalom run per pair. Moltzan and Wiles narrowly edged out their U.S. teammates Mikaela Shiffrin and Breezy Johnson, who finished fourth in the event. Eight days later, Moltzan finished in eighth place in the women’s slalom, which included laying down the fastest time in the event’s second run.
This was the 19th consecutive appearance of UVM-affiliated athletes at the Winter Olympics since the university’s first Winter Olympian, Larry Damon, skied cross-country for Team USA in the 1956 games, which also took place in Cortina. Damon, a 1955 graduate who died in 2024, went on to compete in the Winter Olympics in 1960, 1964, and 1968 in cross-country skiing and biathlon.
Besides Moltzan, Ogden, and Cochran-Siegle, six other Catamounts took part in the games. Canadian Alpine skiers Kevin Drury, who studied mathematics at UVM, and Laurence St-Germain, who majored in computer science, marked their third consecutive Winter Olympics. Sini Karjalainen, who earned a degree as a dietetics and nutrition major, and Natálie Mlýnková, who studied exercise science at UVM, both made their second consecutive appearances at the Winter Games, playing hockey for their respective native countries–Karjalainen for Finland and Mlýnková for the Czech Republic.
Milano-Cortina was the Olympic debut for Margie Freed, a 2020 Grossman School of Business graduate, who was a member of the USA women’s biathlon team. In women’s hockey, current student and exercise science major Julia Mesplède also made her first Olympic appearance, competing for France.
