Olympians stand alone on the podium, but there are many others who helped them make the climb.
Athletes competing at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics were asked to name someone from their childhood outside their family who first believed in them before the world knew their name. The Olympians and the heroes they named then had a surprise reunion in the NBC Local series “Launching Legends.”
“It definitely takes a village for anyone to make the Olympic team,” said Renee Hildebrand, a speed skating coach.
These are the stories, not of the legends, but of those who helped launch them.
Hilary Knight
Hockey star Hilary Knight is the GOAT– just ask George Hughes, the man who taught Knight to skate and watched her fall in love with the game.
Hilary Knight put on her skates and went out to the ice.
Six years old at the time, it was her first step on a frozen path that would lead to her becoming one of the greatest women’s hockey players of all time.
But, on this day, long before she won four Olympic medals, broke multiple scoring records and became captain of the U.S. women’s hockey team, she used her hockey stick to simply keep her balance.
She wore a ski coat instead of a jersey, mittens instead of hockey gloves, and a smile instead of a game face.
“The thing I remember the most about that day was looking into her eyes,” said Knight’s former coach George Hughes. “She’s wearing this Cooper helmet with a mask. And behind the mask were these brown-almond eyes with this huge smile. It was electric. It still gives me chills to think about it today. The look on her face. So, she was obviously in love with the game from day one.”
It was there, on day one, at a rink in Illinois, that she was formally introduced to the sport of hockey and the Hughes family.
Brittany Bowe
Before she was an Olympic speed skater, Brittany Bowe was a little girl learning to inline skate in Ocala, Florida. Now Bowe’s childhood coach is watching her compete in her fourth Olympic Games in Milan Cortina, but not before giving her the surprise of a lifetime.
Brittany Bowe was eight years old when she was invited to the local skating rink in her hometown of Ocala, Florida for a birthday party.
When the kids laced up their skates and stepped onto the rink, one speedster caught the eye of a spectator.
Renee Hildebrand, a physical therapist who started coaching in 1991, was there for skating practice, and she was scouting.
“I always, of course, check out any kids I might think need to be recruited for speed skating,” she said. “I look out there and there’s this little girl on these rollerblades, and she is just running. I don’t even think the wheels were rolling, she was just running on them all the way around the rink. After I watched for a little while I just kind of chuckled because she just couldn’t go fast enough.”
The wheels couldn’t keep up with Brittany Bowe.
Caroline Harvey
Team USA’s Caroline Harvey never imagined the impact her middle school principal would have on her career.
Caroline Harvey spent plenty of time in the principal’s office.
It belonged to her mentor, and the office walls extended to the soccer field. That’s where, as a middle school student, the future Olympic-medalist learned about work ethic from Lisa Dias.
“She was actually my soccer coach and my principal at the time,” Harvey said. “Sometimes it would be a tough game or maybe in the classroom I was slacking off a bit, she would get on me, she would teach me great work habits. And to never give up.”
Harvey applied those habits, not only on the field, but on the ice. She had started playing hockey when she was three years old and emerged as one of the top players in New Hampshire, often competing against boys.
Dias, before becoming principal and coach, had skated down a similar path.
“I think maybe I just saw some of my own characteristics in her,” Dias said of Harvey, who is set to play in the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics as a defender for the U.S. Woman’s Hockey team.
Mac Forehand
All eyes will be on freestyle skier Mac Forehand as he makes his Olympic return to the 2026 Milan Cortina Games. Forehand’s childhood coach shares the moment he knew the preteen was destined for greatness.
Mac Forehand was finished before lunchtime.
Around 10 years old at the time, the future Olympic freestyle skier was going through a progression of tricks on a development track in Vermont in his first day under his coach Brian Knowles.
Each trick builds a skill that can be mastered before moving on to the next, Knowles said, similar to gymnastics or other progression-based training modules.
“Most kids get three or four steps into it in the first couple of days with just a rudimentary set of skills,” Knowles said. “And Mac basically went through the entire progression track that we could do on that specific feature without moving into something bigger before lunch.”
Completing the progression before even getting a midday snack on day one was nearly unheard of. After each trick, Knowles asked Forehand to repeat it. And, each time, he did so. Perfectly.
“He was able to just learn something new and repeat it and learn something new and repeat it — which was stunning as a coach,” Knowles said. “That’s your one percenter. I’ve worked for 30 years as a coach and I’ve seen maybe three or four kids that could do that. So, we knew right off that Mac was going to be special.
Mikaela Shiffrin
Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin will be the first to say she doesn’t get emotional, but the Olympic superstar couldn’t help get teary-eyed as she remembered the coach who changed the trajectory of her career.
For Mikaela Shiffrin, it felt like the first day at Hogwarts.
The future skiing legend, just 11 years old at the time, joined her family for a trip to Burke Mountain Academy, a private school in Vermont that trains alpine skiers. Her parents were visiting potential schools for Shiffrin’s older brother Taylor, also a promising skier.
Shiffrin knew she’d also be going to the same school and down the same slopes. And she badly wanted her parents to pick Burke, much in the same way Harry Potter wanted to be placed in Gryffindor.
“She told me it was kind of like out of ‘Harry Potter,’ where they’re doing the Sorting Hat,” said Kirk Dwyer, the headmaster at Burke Mountain Academy who became one of Shiffrin’s most instrumental coaches. “And she’s saying, ‘Choose Burke! Choose Burke! ‘Choose Burke!’”
Her parents – not the Sorting Hat, a magical hat that selects which of the four houses within Hogwarts are the best fit for new students – chose Burke. Shiffrin became the school’s Potter, and Dwyer was like Dumbledore on skis.
“He really helped me at a pretty fundamental period in my growth in skiing,” said Shiffrin, who became a two-time Olympic gold-medalist and the winningest alpine skier of all time. “He helped me understand so much about the sport and the mechanics of movement and how that translate to fast skiing and why it’s important to be fundamentally stable before you’re just fast.”
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