Before the Podiums, There Were the Parents
The names on the scoreboards at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina belong to the athletes. But behind almost every one of them is a quieter story: a parent who spotted something early, who reorganised their life around it, and who showed up, for years, without any guarantee of where it would lead.
For the youngest competitors at these Games, that parental chapter isn't just background detail. In many cases, it's the whole foundation.
Here are some of the athletes whose journeys to Milan Cortina started long before they ever stepped onto the ice or snow, and the families who made sure they got there.
Holly Harris (Australia) didn't know her mother had been a skater.
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When five-year-old Holly Harris (Australia) spotted an ice rink on a family holiday in Aspen, Colorado, and wanted to try it, Karen simply took her. When Karen stepped onto the ice and glided. Holly watched, baffled. "Mum was gliding around the ice so effortlessly," Holly recalled. "She offered to help me but I was determined to do it myself." That Karen had skated at a national level, that she had performed alongside two of the most famous ice dancers in history (Torvill and Dean), didn't take centre stage. The discovery belonged to Holly. The determination to get good at it belonged to Holly, but Karen was there - steadfast in her support, which was supercharged by her training knowledge and insights into the trials and tribulations of skating at an elite level. |
From the moment Holly stepped on to the ice, she was fixated.
She dreamed of the Olympics from the age of five and pursued figure skating with the kind of single-mindedness that tends to either burn young athletes out or carry them all the way. In Holly's case, it carried her. When she was just thirteen, Karen made the decision to relocate with her from Sydney to Colorado Springs so Holly could access better training and broader opportunities. Holly's father and siblings stayed behind in Sydney. The family separated, across hemispheres, so that Holly could keep going.
When Holly suffered a severe concussion during an extended period in the United States and needed months to recover, far from home, her grandmother stepped in alongside Karen to make sure she wasn't navigating it alone. Eventually, Holly transitioned into ice dance, and it was there she truly found her footing.
At Milano Cortina 2026, Harris and partner Jason Chan became only the third Australian team ever to qualify for Olympic ice dance, navigating that concussion history, a missed qualification at the 2025 World Championships, and a sport dominated by North American and European powerhouses.
| When it was over, Holly's father, watching on with tears in his eyes, pointed to Karen and said: "This one here in particular has been amazing, helping all the way." Karen's response was immediate: "We all have. The whole family. It takes a team." She had spent two decades not making it about herself. She wasn't about to start now. |  |
Mia Brookes (Great Britain, b. 2006) and a camper van a kilometre away
The Cheshire-born snowboarder became the sport's youngest ever senior world champion in 2023, and is a two-time X Games gold medallist. She first stepped on a snowboard at 18 months old at Kidsgrove Ski Centre in north Staffordshire. At Milan Cortina, she came agonisingly close to a medal in the big air event, finishing fourth after over-rotating on her final trick. BBC Sport commentators noted it would likely have won her gold.
Throughout the Games, her parents Nigel and Vicky were staying in a camper van half a mile from the athletes' village, close enough for Mia to escape the intensity of competition with shopping trips, dinners, movies, and Lego. It's the kind of detail that says everything. "It's just coming back to reality and coming down to earth," Vicky told BBC Radio Stoke. She also made a point of saying her daughter was still "a normal 19-year-old kid" who goes through "normal 19-year-old girl things," adding: "We have to lean into that as well as respecting her as an elite athlete, which is what she is now."
That balance, between the ordinary and the exceptional, is exactly what makes these athletes so compelling.
A Four-Year-Old, a Family Decision, and an Olympic Gold Medal
Charlotte Bankes (Great Britain) won Olympic gold at Milano Cortina 2026 in the mixed team snowboard cross alongside Huw Nightingale, becoming part of Team GB's greatest ever day at the Winter Games. It was her fourth Olympic Games. She was four years old when the journey effectively began.
In 1999, her parents Mark and Catherine packed up the family home in Hemel Hempstead and moved to L'Argentière-la-Bessée in the French Alps. They weren't chasing a sporting dream for their daughter. Charlotte hadn't even started snowboarding yet. They simply moved because they loved the mountains, and they wanted their children to grow up in them. Her father continued commuting to his finance job in London at weekends. The family stayed.
What followed was less a structured athletic development programme and more a childhood in snow. Charlotte and her two older brothers spent Wednesdays and Saturdays at the local ski club, were enrolled in French state schools rather than international ones, and were fully immersed in the local community. "My parents made an effort to make sure we were integrated," she has said. "They wanted us to live here and totally immerse ourselves in life." She started snowboarding at five, joined the club at seven, and discovered snowboard cross shortly after.
By fifteen, she was racing internationally.
Decades later, standing on the top step of the Olympic podium, she reflected: "I am very happy and grateful that my parents made the decision to come." It's a remarkably simple sentence for a remarkably consequential choice.
What's striking across the stories of these young female athletes isn't a single parenting style; it's a shared pattern of presence.
Research consistently links parental support style with not just athletic performance, but longevity in sport and long-term mental health outcomes. The distinction researchers draw is between autonomy-supportive parenting, where the parent follows the child's lead, celebrates effort over results, and allows the athlete to own their relationship with their sport, and pressure-driven parenting, where the parent's emotional investment becomes indistinguishable from the child's. The latter is associated with burnout, anxiety, and athletes who quit the moment external pressure outweighs internal motivation. The former tends to produce athletes who are still competing, still improving, and still genuinely enjoying what they do years down the track.
What's telling about the families in this piece is how naturally they seem to have understood that line. Vicky Brookes talking about her daughter as "a normal 19-year-old kid" who needs to come down to earth between events, not be pushed harder. Karen Harris introducing her daughter to skating through a quiet act of patience rather than ambition, and then quietly relocating her life to Colorado Springs to make it possible. The Bankes family took the brave step to uproot their lives to live in the mountains simply because they loved being there and as it turned out, their daughter did too.
These aren't parents who saw an Olympic dream and chased it. They're parents who saw something their child loved and made space for it. The Olympics, it turned out, followed from that.
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Olympic.org — Milan Cortina 2026 Official Athlete Information. olympics.com/en/olympic-games/milan-cortina-2026
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Gould, D., & Lauer, L. (2010). The Role of Parents in Tennis Success. United States Tennis Association.
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Knight, C.J. (2019). Effective Parenting in Youth Sport. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology.
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Vince Rugari, The Sydney Morning Herald — "From Torvill and Dean to the Olympics: Meet Australia's ice dance team" (February 7, 2026). smh.com.au
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BBC News — "Mum 'super proud' of Olympian daughter Mia Brookes", Alex McIntyre, Richard Price & Susan Hanks (2026). bbc.com/news/articles/cjenv24nz4vo
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Sean Ingle, The Guardian — "Bankes and Nightingale win mixed team snowboard cross for GB's first Olympic gold on snow" (February 16, 2026). theguardian.com
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Suzanna Chambers, The Connexion — "French-British snowboarder Charlotte Bankes aims for Olympic success" (February 4, 2022). connexionfrance.com
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Charlotte Bankes, GB Snowsport — "My Snowboard Cross Story". gbsnowsport.com
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Nick Hope, BBC Sport — "Snowboarder Charlotte Bankes defects from France to Britain" (November 21, 2018). bbc.com/sport
