- Even with all the anxiety about going into this Olympics
with omicron, testing, and everything,
there are a lot of first-time Olympians
that are very excited about this.
I think it's interesting to see the people
that are going for the first time,
because that excitement is just so contagious.
For instance, I was at the figure skating championships
in Nashville.
Alysa Liu --
she would be considered a top US women's skater.
And the morning of her free skate,
she tests positive and she's out.
She can't skate anymore in the national championships.
When she was named to the team the next day, she was ecstatic.
She had built up so much internationally
and in other competitions, being selected
was pretty much an automatic.
She has been the best American female
skater for the last few years.
Next to her was Mariah Bell. She's 25.
She's the oldest American woman
to win the national championships
and go to the Olympics in almost 100 years.
I think a lot of people thought her career was over.
Last summer, she got together with Adam Rippon,
who's really, really good with jumps and told her,
"Look, here's what you need to do."
And they worked together, and she's rebuilt her career,
and so she went and she won the national championships.
So, in skiing, Paula Moltzan is 27 years old,
and that makes her the oldest US female
Alpine skier to make her first Olympic team in 70 years.
She left the sport three years ago to go to college.
She went to the University of Vermont to be a doctor.
And now she's kind of come back.
She's a little bit of a dark horse
to kind of watch in these Olympics.
Another really interesting skier is Luke Winters.
He's 24 years old.
This year he finished 10th in the World Cup race.
And maybe that doesn't sound great,
but it was his best finish in six years,
so I think kind of gave him a little bit of a hope
that maybe he's someone, too,
that kind of is a little bit on the rise right now.
There's also a moguls skier, Olivia Giaccio.
She's had some up-and-down performances,
but she has had a nice little run lately.
And recently, she became the first person
to land a triple cork 1080,
which is three rotations, one of which is off-axis.
I think the fact that she can hit this jump puts her
on a little bit different look from everyone.
Because if she can put together a complete run
and hit a couple big, big jumps that no one else can,
that could get you on to a podium.
One person really to watch who's a first-timer is Eileen Gu.
She's gonna be phenomenal to watch.
Not only in the halfpipe --
she also does freeski slopestyle,
she also does freeski big air.
She is clearly the number one in the world
in the halfpipe and slopestyle,
third in the world probably right now in big air.
She is American by birth. Her father is American.
Her mother is from China.
She's lived in America essentially her whole life.
But she chose a couple years ago to compete for China.
She's talked about how she wants to inspire young girls in China
to be interested in sports like this and also be feminine.
She is huge in China.
This is a momentous decision for people in China,
that she has chosen to compete for them instead of the US.
I think she'll wind up being the story of the Olympics.
Different that Eileen Gu and yet very similar
in some ways is Kaillie Humphries,
one of the very top in the world at what she does.
There's two events this year in female bobsledding.
There's the two-man bobsled,
and there's now this new event called the monobob.
She won the World Cup in both.
She is the most successful female bobsled racer ever.
And this is her fourth Olympics,
but it is her first as an American.
She's won two gold medals
and a bronze in three Olympics for Canada, but she left Canada.
She had an ugly dispute in Canada,
actually even filed a harassment
claim against the coach of the Canadian team
for verbal and mental harassment.
There's a very good chance she could win two gold medals here.
That would be a huge story for the US
to have an athlete come in and do.
In the same vein as bobsled is skeleton,
and Kelly Curtis is a first-time Olympian at 33.
She wrestled as a kid.
Her dad played in the NFL.
And she's in the Air Force.
Right now, her role in the Air Force
is to prepare for this Olympics.
But when the Olympics are over,
she'll be a cybersecurity specialist.
In speedskating, one athlete to watch is Kristen Santos.
And she's interesting because in 2017,
right before qualifying for the 2018 Olympics,
she got a gruesome injury where she got her hand
caught in somebody else's skate,
and almost wasn't even gonna compete.
She did. She finished fourth,
which probably would have gotten her on the Olympic team
if there had been a relay team,
but the US hadn't been able to qualify a relay team that year.
Now she is second in the world in the 1,000,
fourth in the 1,500.
She will compete in both in Beijing,
and there's at least a decent shot
that maybe she could get a medal.
One other first-time speedskater is Austin Kleba.
What's interesting about him
is that he was a hockey player growing up,
and then he had a shoulder injury.
He really kind of thought that maybe hockey was over.
He had skated well in some tests for kind of speedskating,
and thought, "You know what, I want to try
for the Olympics at that."
And now here he is.