From WNY to the International Stage,
Local Connections to the 2026 Winter Olympic Games

The Winter Olympics can feel impossibly distant, held in snow-dusted venues half a world away, with athletes participating at altitudes and intensities most will never experience. The 2026 Winter Olympics are being held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy this year, from Feb. 6 through Feb. 22. The highly anticipated event will feature various winter sports that fans know and love, as well as a new feature: ski mountaineering. Viewers can watch these elite feats of winter excellence on NBC and Peacock here in the States.While Chautauqua County and Western New York residents will be watching from their electronic device and televisions, the regional connections to the beloved Winter Olympics run closer than many people realize.

One of those people is Jay Kearney, former Olympic athlete and Olympic performance physiologist.

Kearney grew up in Busti, New York, graduated from Southwestern High School, and later attended SUNY Brockport, where he competed in football, and track. He’s now a member of both the Chautauqua County and SUNY Brockport Halls of Fame.

He first arrived on the world stage as an athlete competing in flat water canoe sprint in 1980, a demanding discipline raced on straight regatta courses, with competitors kneeling low in narrow boats built for one purpose only: speed.

“You’re paddling on one side, in a high kneeling position,” Kearney explained. “Those boats are designed to go fast and that’s the only thing they are good for.”

After his competitive career, Kearney took a deeply influential role, working for decades with the United States Olympic Committee as a performance physiologist.

“It’s been an absolutely extraordinary experience,” Kearney said. “You’re working with world-class athletes and you’re working with coaches who are extremely well-educated. Hey were very well-versed on what the physiological demands of their sports were. They were an absolute joy to work with.”

Of the hundreds of staff members at the US Olympic Committee during his tenure, only a handful had also been Olympians themselves. Kearney was part of that rare group, the less than one percent that return to help behind the podiums.

Different sports, and even different positions within the same sport, require different physical capacities: cardiovascular endurance, oxygen uptake, and muscular strength. Kearney said the performance physiologist’s job is to identify the specific physiological demands of the sport or event, assess where an athlete currently stands and help coaches design training.

Kearney said one big misconception about Olympic Athletes is that they make a split-second decision and are suddenly on their way to the Olympics.

“Most people don’t recognize the career of someone who performs,” he said. “They see figure skaters or any athlete across any of the sports and don’t realize there are very few of them who have been training less than 10 years.”

Kearney said many might see the young gymnasts, for example, and think it could not be possible that they have been training for 10 years. However, he noted that many began training for the Olympics by the time they are seven or eight years old.

“This isn’t something that they just happened to be good at in their gym class so they decided to go to the Olympics,” he said. “These people have, in almost all cases, modified their life history to enable them to be able to focus on their training.”

Although Kearney officially retired from the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee in 2010, with the Vancouver Games marking his final Olympics as a staff member, his involvement hasn’t slowed.

Today, he chairs the International Competition Committee for U. S. Biathlon.

“We have the responsibility of working with the high-performance team that involves the high-performance director of coaches on team nominations to the various World Cups, IVU Cups and then in every quad, including this year, the Olympic team,” Kearney said.

That process can be brutally precise.

This year, Kearney said, the final two spots on the women’s biathlon team were decided after three races by nine-hundredths of one percent.

When asked who viewers should keep an eye on this Olympic cycle, Kearney didn’t hesitate: Ilia Malinin in Men’s Figure Skating; Mikaela Shiffrin, continuing to redefine excellence in alpine skiing; Lindsey Vonn, returning to podium finishes after years away from the sport and a partial titanium knee implant; Elana Meyers Taylor, a four-time Olympian competing in women’s bobsled; and Jessie Diggins, leading the World Cup standings in cross-country skiing.

Kearney noted for those locally who would like to feel just a bit more involved in the process that the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee is funded entirely by donations, not federal funding. The U. S. and Italy are the only two countries that fund their committees this way.

“The USOC is unique in that way,” he said. “Americans send the team and support the team, not America.”

For those interested in donating, Kearney said they can visit www.USOPC.org/donate.

The Winter Olympics may unfold on snow-covered mountains and international stages, but they’re built on years of unseen work, often by people from areas just like ours. Sometimes, the road from Chautauqua County leads all the way to the Games.