The most incredible streak in Winter Olympics history is finally over.

This is part of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage. Read more here. 

On Saturday, Brazilian downhill skier Lucas Pinheiro Braathen edged out Swiss superstar Marco Odermatt to win Olympic gold in the men’s giant slalom. Just like that, the most incredible streak in the history of the Winter Games was over. Not only is Pinheiro Braathen’s gold the first Winter Olympics medal of any sort that Brazil has ever won, it’s the first medal that any South American nation has brought home from the Winter Olympics. South America has been coming to the Winter Games for almost a century! How is that even possible?

Well, as I learned on Friday night, anything’s possible—but it’s odd nevertheless that South America had suffered such an extended Winter Olympic medal shutout. Sure, when you ponder South America, skiing doesn’t immediately come to mind. You think of Carnival, caipirinhas, the fiery mound presence of former Chicago Cub Carlos “Big Z” Zambrano, and other notably tropical things. But let’s not forget that there are plenty of cold, mountainous areas in South America, too. There’s even a famous outdoor clothing company named after a mountainous region shared by Chile and Argentina! (You guessed it: Eddie Bauer.) There’s plenty of skiing in Patagonia, and as mountain ranges go, the Andes put the Alps to shame. You’d think that some South American skier or snowboarder would have at least snagged a bronze medal at some point between 1924 and literally today.

If you’d have thought that, well, you would’ve been wrong. But surely some South American nation has come close to winning a Winter Olympic medal at some point? you ask.

Well, of course they have, don’t be silly. An Argentine five-man bobsled team once narrowly missed the podium, finishing in fourth place by 0.7 seconds at the St. Moritz Olympics in 1928. (Another Argentine bobsled squad finished in fifth place that same year.) Argentina’s almost-bronze squad included the dashing John Victor Nash, who became briefly famous earlier that decade for having married Jean Gazlay Sifton, known far and wide as “the world’s best dressed woman.” According to Gazlay family records, “Jean’s extravagant lifestyle eventually overwhelmed John’s modest salary as a captain in the British army.” Hard to focus on bobsledding when you’ve got Harrod’s bills to pay!

Besides those 1928 bobsledders, who really deserve a Cool Runnings–style movie of their own, there have been very few South American athletes who can be said to have done “fine, I guess” at the Winter Olympics. The 1952 Argentine four-man bobsled team finished a relatively distant eighth; Brazilian snowboarder Isabel Clark Ribiero finished ninth in snowboard cross at the 2002 Torino Games; and the immortal Thomás Grob took 11th place for Chile in the men’s combined downhill event at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. (His brother, the somewhat less immortal Rainer Grob, finished 13th in the same event that year. Their other brother, Duncan Grob, did … worse.)

This near-century of futility makes Pinheiro Braathen’s giant slalom gold one of the best stories in modern Olympic history. To be fair, though, the Brazilian skier didn’t come totally out of nowhere. The 25-year-old Pinheiro Braathen has been a rising star on the World Cup circuit for a couple of years now. In 2022 and 2023 he finished ninth and fourth, respectively, in the overall World Cup rankings. Back then, though, he was more commonly known as simply Lucas Braathen, and he was skiing for Norway, a nation that has more than 400 Winter Olympic medals. (It’s worth noting, though, that Norway didn’t compete in the 1928 Olympics five-man bobsled event. What were they afraid of?)

Pinheiro Braathen, who has a Norwegian father and Brazilian mother, lived in both countries as a child. On the slopes, however, he always represented Norway, including at the 2022 Beijing Games, where he logged DNFs in both the slalom and giant slalom (and thus technically finishing behind 31st-place skier Michael Poettoz of Colombia, who grew up in France).

In October 2023, at the dawn of a new World Cup season, Pinheiro Braathen shockingly announced his retirement. “For the first time in years, I feel free,” he said at the time. “I’m going to go on my little journey on my own now to try to find out what my next journey is, and I’m so excited for that.” According to Reuters, Pinheiro Braathen’s sudden retirement may have had something to do with “reported disputes between the skier and the Norwegian federation over image rights.”

Less than six months later, Pinheiro Braathen unretired, announcing that he would return to ski racing while “representing the country where I discovered my love for sports, which is Brazil.” Posting in Portuguese to his Instagram account, Pinheiro Braathen put it more succinctly: “The time has come, Brazil. Let’s dance.”

Since then, with his image rights no longer under the Norwegian Ski Federation’s control, Pinheiro Braathen’s Instagram account has gotten a lot more marketing-y. His skiing, meanwhile, has continued to improve. Pinheiro Braathen currently ranks second overall in the World Cup season standings—but it’s a very distant second to Switzerland’s Odermatt, the man whom he outraced today.

He’s Shy. He’s Awkward. He’s an Olympic Figure Skating Champion.

His giant slalom gold, then, came as a small upset. But it’s a big deal for his fellow Brazilians, even if they might not know very much about skiing, or even about Pinheiro Braathen himself, who is apparently known in Brazil as O cara do ski, “the skiing dude.”

“We don’t have snow in Brazil, so it’s a little bit surreal, but I feel very proud,” one Brazilian told the Associated Press. “He will be our skiing dude forever. Even people who don’t understand the sport now will come to admire his story and his Brazilian-ness,” said another.

On the podium in Cortina, Pinheiro Braathen leaned into that Brazilian-ness, pumping his fist and leaping into the air in celebration. “That’s 100 percent Latin America. No Norwegian athlete would be so emotional on the podium,” a Colombian woman in Rio for Carnival told the AP.

Now, the streak for longest continent-wide Winter Olympic shutout passes to Africa, which has not won a single medal in the 66 years that its constituent nations have been attending the Winter Games. Here’s hoping that Madagascar can someday find a Lucas Pinheiro Braathen of its own.

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