Five gold medals in ski and snowboarding, two in luge, one for bobsledding, two for figure skating, and two for ice hockey. All for Team USA in the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics. This set a record for them for the most gold medals won in a single Winter Olympics. This is an extremely impressive feat for Team USA and an important milestone in our history.
When you look up “Team U Winter Olympics,” Google will point out the 12 gold medals and even highlight the same events listed above. But you’ll never see anything about the Olympic reel-scrolling competition that was hosted on February 4, 2026, well before the Olympic Opening Ceremony that was hosted on February 6. It was a small, quick, and niche event that was easy to miss if you were not heavily locked into watching every event of every day of the Olympics.
The Team USA Olympic Orientation Camp for the reel scrolling event ran from August 26, 2025, to August 27, where 20 potential athletes were invited. An ISO (in search of) for the athletes was posted to the official Team USA Olympic Instagram account, which gave the opportunity for anyone to send in a tryout. From there, the 20 athletes were chosen and invited to orientation camp, where they were then reduced to just five athletes. Those five were sent to Italy only six months later to then represent their country by using their extraordinary skills of reel scrolling.
We saw one athlete from Team USA finish with bronze—just another small detail going unaddressed by the mass media—but then we also got to watch another athlete from Team USA finish with gold, scrolling through the 1,000 reels in a little above a minute. That makes it about 16 reels per second (a record your average bed-rotting teen could easily beat).
The two medalling athletes did a marginal amount of post-game media, but most of it was wiped from the internet due to discourse on reel scrolling “not being a real sport.” Yes, the Olympics ended over a month ago, and the reel scrolling event was almost two months ago. However, the reel scrolling discourse has opened back up again after a recent quote from the gold medal winner saying, “I’m trying to get the phone. Like, that’s bull**** that the Reel Scrolling Hall of Fame has it, in my opinion. Why would they have that phone?”
Despite the heavy discourse circulating on Instagram, TikTok, and even X, the additional gold medal marks a huge milestone for the USA in sports history, and it is something that should be recognized and celebrated.
Disclaimer: This article is part of The Stupe and is satire
