American cross-country skier Jessie Diggins is among the many athletes quarantining themselves away from spouses through the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
For most individuals, if not everybody, the pandemic days of masking are behind us.
In sure corners of the Winter Olympics in Italy, although, issues nonetheless look loads like they did in COVID instances.
Some athletes are taking excessive measures to remain wholesome.
When members of the U.S. girls’s cross-country ski group walked right into a information convention in a packed room firstly of the Olympics, every of them wore a masks. Jessie Diggins, the group’s prime athlete, mentioned the identical guidelines apply if she’s inside together with her husband, who’s staying not with Diggins on the Olympics, however with household.
“He needs to guard my well being, too. And he is aware of how essential that is,” America’s most embellished cross-country skier mentioned. “And it is like, we have been ready 10 years to have the remainder of our lives collectively on a regular basis, and never worrying about illness. We will wait two extra weeks. It is OK.”
Locked down, however that is OK
On the final Olympic Video games, in China, a optimistic coronavirus take a look at may put athletes in an isolation lodge.
Issues aren’t that critical this time round. However athletes in cross-country snowboarding are among the many most vulnerable to respiratory viruses, and lots of are being additional cautious to remain wholesome throughout crucial competitions of their lives.
Not solely are many skiers and coaches carrying masks indoors, however America’s cross-country group, and a few from Scandinavia, have allotted with the Olympic Village altogether and are renting out their very own lodges, the place they’ll keep away from busy cafeterias and management who comes out and in.
“We’re fairly locked down attempting to not get sick and attempting to not waste power,” mentioned Ben Ogden, one other star on the U.S. group.
“However that is OK, as a result of, like, now we have six, seven of our greatest associates, like, which might be contained in the bubble.”
Not each group, although, can afford a setup just like the Individuals. Cross-country skiers from nations with smaller budgets are nonetheless staying inside an Olympic Village within the mountains close to their competitors venue.
And groups competing in different sports activities within the Olympic hub metropolis of Milan are taking drastically totally different approaches altogether.
Member’s of Finland’s girls’s hockey group needed to postpone their first recreation on the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, after members contracted norovirus infections.
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Darko Bandic/AP
Ain’t nothin’ however a heartache
Members of the Finnish girls’s hockey group, for example, had been belting out Backstreet Boys collectively at a karaoke occasion at a restaurant in Milan, simply earlier than the Olympics began.
A number of days later, the Worldwide Olympic Committee introduced their recreation in opposition to Canada needed to be postponed on account of a number of circumstances of norovirus on Staff Finland’s girls’s hockey squad.
“It in all probability was a pleasant second, simply between teammates,” mentioned Anni Arko, a sports activities reporter for the Finnish newspaper Night newspaper. “Nevertheless it was such an enormous threat. Like, I simply could not imagine my eyes that they really did that.”
Night newspaper wrote a scathing column concerning the norovirus outbreak, contrasting it with the intense measures taken by Finland’s cross-country skiers.
On the final Olympics, Arko says, the group’s star, Iivo Niskanen, “was thanking his spouse loads, as a result of he was not seeing his family and friends. But additionally his spouse was not seeing principally anyone, so the household would not get any infections and Iivo could be wholesome.”
Niskanen has to this point been spared from sickness. He was wholesome for Sunday’s skiathlon race and positioned seventeenth.
