Winter Games 2026: How tiny Dartmouth College has sent athletes to every Winter Olympics ever
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MILAN — Certain locations evoke the Winter Olympics in all its snowy glory, places with romantic names like Milano-Cortina, Chamonix, Lake Placid and Lillehammer.
Hanover, New Hampshire, might not be the first — or the 50th — locale to come to mind in connection with the Winter Olympics, but it should. Hanover is the home of Dartmouth College, which has the unique distinction of sending Olympians to every single Winter Games, from Chamonix in 1924 right on through to Milan Cortina in 2026.
Skiers have come from Dartmouth, of course; the school boasts one of the finest skiing programs in the country. (Jeff Shiffrin, Mikaela’s father, was an alumnus.) But so have biathletes and bobsledders, hockey players and speed skaters. Several Dartmouth athletes at this year’s Games have already won medals, including skier Tanguy Nef (gold medalist for Switzerland in the alpine skiing team combined event) and hockey forward Laura Stacey (silver medalist for Canada). Several more have marched and competed under a wide range of both flags and disciplines.
How has this tiny Ivy League school, with an enrollment of around 7,000, produced so many elite athletes? There are three answers: one cultural, one logistical, and one geographic.
“Any Ivy League school is going to attract the best and the brightest,” Maura Crowell, Dartmouth’s hockey coach, said recently. “And I’m looking out the window in this snowy, beautiful setting up here in New Hampshire. Your skiers and hockey players just gravitate to this area. It’s an unbelievable place to go to school.”
The school also boasts easy access to the Appalachian Trail and a range of running, hiking and mountain biking trails, all of which encourage students to get outdoors. “It's so easy to get outdoors here. I mean, you can more or less ski from campus if you're a Nordic skier,” says Cami Thompson, Dartmouth’s director of skiing. “Our trails are very close to campus. There's snow on the green here today. And that gets people excited to get out and ski.”
Two-time Team USA Olympian cross-country skier Julia Kern agrees. “What drove me there is that I really wanted a strong education, but I also wanted to ski race at a high level,” she said recently, “and I felt like going to Dartmouth gave me the best of both worlds.”
“It's the smallest Ivy, so I think a quarter of our student body is a Division I athlete,” Crowell says. “When you walk around campus, you inevitably see Dartmouth lacrosse, Dartmouth track and field, Dartmouth hockey … and because of our size and our location, it is a pretty close-knit athletic community.”
One logistical key to Dartmouth’s Olympic success: its academic calendar, which allows for potential winter Olympians to structure their schedules to fit their athletic needs. The calendar is made up of four 10-week terms, three classes per term, one term off per year. That offers much more flexibility not just on the annual calendar, but on the weekly and daily ones too.
“As a hockey coach, I’m thrilled, because we can do individual meetings, we can do video, they can get in the shooting room, they can work with our mental performance people,” Crowell says. “There’s just more time in their days to focus on athletics, which is kind of rare at an Ivy League school.”
“There’s no athletic scholarships,” Kern noted. “You’re going there because you want a good education, but you also care about skiing. A lot of people who are driven and disciplined in skiing are also very driven in school.”
“It's really up to the students to establish relationships with their professors and think strategically about what classes they're taking, and when they're taking them, and how to manage the training and the competition around their classes,” Thompson says. “There's no special favors for these athletes. They have to make it work on their own.”
One of those students: Freshman Michaela Hesova, a goalie on the Dartmouth hockey team and a 2026 Olympian for Czechia. She found out she would be an Olympian while walking home from a workout, and while in Italy, she worked with her professors remotely, taking tests online.
“It’s going to be challenging,” Hesova said before the Games, “but I think it’s going to be more than worth it.”
“The thing that most (Dartmouth Olympians) possess is a willingness to put themselves out there and to try, but also to find balance and figure out where sport fits in their life,” Thompson says. “For most of them, the academics are also important when they're here. They're able to find the balance to be successful in a number of areas.”
“Outside of hockey and classes, there’s still not a bunch of time, but there’s still time to get everything done,” Hesova says. “Especially Sundays, you’ll find our entire team in the library for six hours. I’m not even kidding. As long as you’re willing to put your head down and grind it out, anybody can do it.”
Well, maybe not anybody.
“I like to think that we sort of attract the sort of super-motivated individuals who like to succeed, so that not only is in the classroom, but also on the trails and the ski hill,” Thompson says. “The culture of our program is encouraging our athletes to shoot big. So we're always happy when they succeed.”
