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With every Olympics, no matter the season, there are always plenty of controversies and scandals to go around. With the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, there were a few that gained notable news coverage and media outrage.
Several well-known news sources hopped onto one story, which was dubbed an inappropriate name involving male genatalia. Male skiers were injecting hyaluronic acid into their genitals to increase the size, and according to sources like The New York Times, the logic is that with the increased size, their suits would stretch out, and wind would get caught in them, making them fly faster.
If you are not sure how to feel about that, you would not be alone. The whole idea of it working seems ridiculous, much less going as far as possibly maiming yourself in such a sensitive body part just does not seem worth any medal. On one hand, it has a small chance of helping you win, and while that would give a huge rush of pride for years to come, but if something goes wrong and you do not win on top of it? Massive risk, limited reward.
Unlike the men’s skiing event, the pairs figure skating event was shrouded in controversy for a whole other reason. For this event, there were no drugs, injections, or anything of the like. While there was a lot of celebration when the French pair figure skaters won the gold, there was tension among fans and judges.
The French was not the favorite to win, instead, it was the American pair. The French pair of figure skaters made several errors in their routine while the American team had few to no errors in theirs. When the announcement of victory was made, the score cards were immediately brought into question. It turns out, that the French judge had rated the French team a whole point higher than the American team. He gave the French team 137.45 points, while giving the American team 129.74 points.
This was the largest point discrepancy among all the scores given. For context, the score he gave the American team was an average of 5 points lower than what the other judges gave them, while the score he gave the French skaters was an average of 3 points higher than the others. When that kind of discrepancy is seen in a sport where literal fractions of a point can determine a win from a loss, there must be something amiss. There cannot be that large of a gap in scoring without buyouts or heavy bias clouding the judgement from the judge.
The difference in tone between these two scandals alone is telling of what kind of shenanigans and biases that can happen during the games. That is without getting into what can happen before the games while the Olympic Village is being built. In such a high level of competition and talent, where even the smallest advantage means the difference between bringing home a victory for your entire country, or coming home empty handed, people get desperate, and everything is under scrutiny.
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