Winter Olympics 2026: At 54, Rich Ruohonen aims to become oldest-ever…

Winter Olympics 2026: At 54, Rich Ruohonen aims to become oldest-ever…

Eighteen months in the past, the skipper of certainly one of America’s top males’s curling groups was preventing again from a debilitating autoimmune condition.

Danny Casper and his teammates started auditioning potential substitutes who may step in for him on days when he felt too weak to slide a 44-pound granite stone down a slim sheet of ice.

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They wanted a shrewd tactician, a pushed competitor, somebody who had experience competing at the national and worldwide level yet hadn’t already made plans to be part of another team for the 2024-25 season. They discovered all those qualities and more in a 54-year-old private injury lawyer from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

Rich Ruohonen had stepped away from elite curling in 2022 after his sixth try to qualify for the Winter Olympics resulted in yet another agonizing close to miss. He deliberate to play a few tournaments with mates and give attention to the senior circuit before Team Casper’s plea for assist coaxed him out of semi-retirement.

What was supposed to be a short-term partnership instead was one thing more after Ruohonen thrived as a fill-in skipper last season and developed immediate chemistry with a quartet of teammates no older than half his age. Casper invited Ruohonen to stick round this season as the team’s alternate — or fifth participant — even though the 24-year-old had regained his strength and now not wanted a daily substitute.

Rich Ruohonen has tried and failed to safe a spot on the Olympic team six occasions. Now, at 54, he is lastly getting his shot. (Photo by David Berding/Getty Images)

(David Berding by way of Getty Images)

Earlier this winter, Team Casper helped Ruohonen solid apart more than twenty years of Olympic Trials frustration by securing a spot in the 2026 Winter Games. Team Casper gained a tense best-of-three final at the U.S. Olympic Trials against a team skipped by five-time Olympian John Shuster, then backed that up three weeks later with a dominant displaying at a last-chance global qualification tournament.

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“I’m so happy to finally go to the Olympics,” Ruohonen told Yahoo Sports. “I’ve been so close so many times. I’ve been the favorite, the underdog. To be able to do it now when I thought it was over for me, it’s a phenomenal experience.”

If Ruohonen will get right into a game in Cortina, he would become the oldest American to compete at a Winter Olympics. Only two other Americans have competed at 50-plus years of age, according to Bill Mallon, co-founder of the International Society of Olympic Historians and creator of more than a dozen Olympics-related books.

At age 52, Joseph Savage was a part of the duo that completed seventh in the pairs determine skating competitors at the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics. Sixteen years later, Mac MacCarthy, then 51, competed in skeleton at the 1948 Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Another U.S. males’s curling alternate may have etched his identify into the historical past books twenty years in the past, however Scott Baird, at a youthful 54 than Ruohonen, didn’t see game action at the 2006 Torino Games. Ruohonen is optimistic that Casper and his other teammates will discover a possibility to insert him right into a game someday during their two weeks in Cortina.

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“I’m sure they’re going to try to make it happen,” Ruohonen said. “I have a pretty good feeling. That’s all I want. I want them to be healthy and I want them to win it, but I’m not going to lie. I want to get in for a rock or two.”

Ruohonen began curling more than a decade before his other 4 Team Casper teammates had been born. When he was in fifth grade, Ruohonen picked up the sport from his dad after transferring to the Twin Cities space to live with him. By his late teenagers, Ruohonen had blossomed into an elite roller at the junior level.

Though Ruohonen briefly took a break from curling during legislation faculty, he couldn’t keep away for lengthy. He juggled his legislation profession and his curling ambitions, waking up at 5:30 a.m. for pre-dawn training classes on weekday mornings and saving his trip time to journey to prestigious home or worldwide tournaments.

“When I started in the 90s, you were expected to be there before your boss got there and leave after he left,” Ruohonen said. “I would work my butt off in the summer and hardly take any time off. I’d save it for the winter and the fall when I’d be curling.”

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Whereas many elite curlers retire of their late 30s, the late-blooming Ruohonen started to hit his peak round that age. He was a part of a team that gained the 2008 U.S. championship and skipped another team to the 2018 national title. A half dozen other occasions, Ruohonen’s groups settled for second place.

Coming up empty at the 2022 U.S. Olympic Trials was among the most painful close to misses of Ruohonen’s profession. The males’s team skipped by Ruohonen completed in third place behind groups led by Shuster and Korey Dropkin. In combined doubles, Ruohonen and Jamie Sinclair misplaced in the finals on the very last shot of the match.

To Ruohonen, those setbacks signaled the end of his hopes of creating it to his sport’s largest stage. His males’s team disbanded together with his blessing. He didn’t hassle to attempt to type a new one.

“I assumed nobody wanted a 50-something-year-old to be on their team,” Ruohonen said. “I was going to be 54 by the next Olympic Trials. I pretty much thought it was over.”

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At that time, Ruohonen couldn’t have predicted that Casper would battle Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a uncommon condition by which the physique’s immune system assaults its nerves. He had no means of understanding that even while receiving treatment Casper would still have days the place he’d wrestle to tie his personal footwear or open a bag of chips.

“Rich has been amazing,” Casper told Yahoo Sports. “We were looking for someone that could call the game. We were like, this guy has been around as long as anybody, he’s super smart and we really like listening to what he has to say. We were kind of pumped about the idea of learning a thing or two from him.”

Rich Ruohonen, Aidan Oldenburg, Luc Violette, Daniel Casper and Benjamin Richardson attend the Team USA Welcome Experience at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics on February 04, 2026 in Milan, Italy. (Joe Scarnici/Getty Images)

(Joe Scarnici by way of Getty Images)

For Ruohonen, the most difficult yet rewarding a part of becoming a member of Team Casper has been having teammates who need this as a lot as him. Casper, Ruohonen, Luc Violette, 26, Aidan Oldenburg, 24, and Ben Richardson, 27, ready for the season by placing themselves by way of common pre-dawn exercises, going to work and then assembly to throw rocks afterward.

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“They wear me out,” Ruohonen said. “There are some days I’ll be sore or limping around a little bit, but it’s worth every second. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

The humor of a 54-year-old making an attempt to hold tempo shouldn’t be misplaced on Ruohonen. He jokingly refers to his teammates as “his kids” and describes himself as a “scoutmaster with a bunch of cub scouts.” They continually rib him about his outdated style in music or about rising up in an period before smartphones and Wifi.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, did they even have color TV back then?’” Ruohonen said with fun. “They always give me a hard time for being old and forgetting things, but I love it. When they’re giving me crap, I know they love me.”

Added Casper: “We joke that he’s the least mature person on the team. Rich is really good at bringing everybody together and making everyone laugh.”

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While Ruohonen is keen to get right into a game in Cortina and safe the the title of the oldest American to compete at the Winter Olympics, he is aware of that, barring injury, he doubtless gained’t see a ton of time on the ice. His largest contribution will most likely be as a tactician scouting opponents and providing recommendation on game plans and in-game methods.

Will Ruohonen return to semi-retirement after the Olympics? Not essentially, he says.

“I told my teammates, if we win, you might get four more years,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Please, no! We’re going to put you in the nursing home and tuck you away.’”

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