With the 2026 Winter Olympics about to start, we at Vogue are taking a large view of the state of play in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. As a result of it might be a real disgrace to scale back the athletes’ deserves solely to their “potential” and whether or not they “win or lose,” I’ve been finding out up on the varied hockey gamers as a result of compete at this yr’s Video games with an purpose to spherical up a completely unscientific batch of the all-around finest and/or coolest.
Within the spirit of gender fairness and bisexuality, this record consists of gamers from each the lads’s and girls’s groups, and for the sake of brevity, I’ve restricted the sphere to American gamers. I take into account this record to be spiritually linked to a Google Doc I had going with a number of pals in round 2017, the place we ranked the Los Angeles Dodgers by hotness (in case you’re curious, Kiké Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw tied for first), however this record additionally takes under consideration who’s bought good type, good off-the-ice hobbies, and/or an all-around good vibe. Let’s dive in and do some Heated Rivalry-inflected favorite-picking, lets?
Hilary Knight
Photograph: Getty Pictures
I imply, I couldn’t not embrace one of many broadly agreed-upon finest gamers in girls’s hockey historical past—who additionally occurs to be overtly queer—particularly since Knight, a ahead and captain for the Seattle Torrent, with a record-setting 10 gold medals on the IIHF World Girls’s Championship to her credit score, has been courting Crew USA velocity skater Brittany Bowe since 2022. Guys, the now-couple would take masked night walks collectively in the course of the Winter Video games in Beijing! Am I…by some means nostalgic for COVID restrictions proper now? (No, however that is nearly cute sufficient to get me there.)
Brock Nelson
Photograph: Getty Pictures
