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MILAN — Step into the world of speed skating, where ice skating meets racing.

American speed skating phenomJordan Stolzenters the2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympicsas the favorite to win up to four Olympic gold medals. Stolz could become the first Olympic speed skater to win multiple medals at a single Winter Games since Canada's Cindy Klassen in 2006 and the first American since Eric Heiden in 1980.

All 14 speed skating events will be held at the Milano Speed Skating Stadium in Milano Ice Park. Here's what you need to know about speed skating at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics:

Jordan Stolz goes to Milano Cortina as a gold-medal favorite

MORE:Jordan Stolz secures spot in all three sprint races for 2026 Olympics

When did speed skating become a Winter Olympic sport?

Speed skating originated in the 1600s to quickly pass over frozen lakes and rivers. It's been an Olympic sport since the first Winter Games in Chamonix in 1924, which included four distances for men (500m, 1500m, 5000m and 10,000m). The women's events were added at the 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics. Team pursuit races were added to the program at the 2006 Torino Games and mass start made its debut in PyeongChang in 2018.

How does Olympic speed skating work?

Speed skaters aim to record the fastest time around a dual-lane, 400-meters long ice track, the same size as an Olympic running track. In individual races, skaters race against the clock in pairs, alternating lanes each lap to cover equal distances. Speed skaters use clap skates to ensure their blade stays in contact with the ice to get a stronger and longer push.

Olympic speed skating includes 14 different events:

• 500-meter (men and women)

• 1,000-meter (men and women)

• 1,500-meter (men and women)

• 3,000-meter (women)

• 5,000-meter (men and women)

• 10,000-meter (men)

• Team pursuit (men and women): Two teams of three go head-to-head, starting on opposite sides of the ice track. The clock stops once the last skater from each team crosses the finish line.

• Mass start (men and women): Up to 24 skaters begin at the starting line together and race against each other.

Top Team USA athletes

• Jordan Stolz: The 21-year-old Wisconsin native became the first male skater to win three individual gold medals (500 meters, 1000 meters and 1500 meters) at the world championship in 2023, a feat he repeated in 2024. With world championships, world records and World Cup wins to his name, the only thing missing from his resume is an Olympic gold medal.

• Erin Jackson: The 33-year-old Florida native made history at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games with her gold-medal win in the 500m event. She became the first Black woman to win a medal in speed skating and an individual Winter Olympic gold medal.

• Casey Dawson, Emery Lehman, Ethan Cepuran: The trio captured gold in team pursuit at the 2025 World Single Distances Speed Skating Championships and set a new world record in November. They are looking to upgrade their team pursuit bronze won at the 2022 Beijing Games.

Olympic gold medalist, history making speed skater Erin Jackson

International landscape

Jackson will have some competition in the women's 500m. Netherlands sprinting starFemke Kokhas won three consecutive world championships in the event and set a new 500m world record of 36.09 seconds in November. The country Netherlands as a whole is highly skilled in speed skating and took home 18 medals (eight gold) at the 2025 World Single Distances Speed Skating Championships, the most of any country.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Speed skating at 2026 Milano Cortina: US stars to watch, rules

SAN FRANCISCO — When theClass of 2026 for the Pro Football Hall of Famewas finally, and officially, unveiled on Thursday night, it was only natural to connect some dots.

Larry Fitzgerald was once aMinnesota Vikingsballboy, when he got a close-up view of how Randy Moss and Cris Carter operated.

Luke Kuechly tallied at least 100 tackles in every NFL season he played, yet there was a reason the dominant linebacker lasted just eight years: Concussions.

Adam Vinatieri is the NFL's all-time leading scorer, with a signature kick in a blizzard in a 2001 divisional playoff game that launched the Patriots dynasty – and had NFL Coach of the Year Mike Vrabel reminiscing earlier in the day, while ramping up for Super Bowl 60.

"One of the greatest feats I've ever seen on a football field," Vrabel reflected of the snowfest in Foxborough. "You could barely run, let alone approach and kick a football."

Then there's Drew Brees and Roger Craig. Let's connect some dots.

Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald head the 2026 Pro Football Hall of Fame

Brees hailed his formerSaintscoach, Sean Payton, for believing in him more than he believed in himself while at a career crossroads punctuated by major shoulder surgery.

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Craig was viewed by 49ers architect Bill Walsh as the versatile, missing piece for the West Coast scheme triggered by Joe Montana. Now, more than 30 years since he retired, Craig, 65, was selected as a finalist from the seniors category.

The connection? As Brees explained, when he went to New Orleans in 2006, Payton began indoctrinating his new quarterback in a new system by having him absorb an abundance of film from Walsh's cutting-edge offense.

"We actually started off watching all the 49er Bill Walsh film," Brees said. "I think a lot of the attention went to Montana, went to (Jerry) Rice, it went to other people. What you started to realize very quickly was that Roger Craig was the secret sauce in so many ways."

Brees, second all-time for passing yards and passing TDs, is mindful of Craig's historical calling card: In 1985, he became the first player in NFL history to rush for 1,000 yards while tallying 1,000 receiving yards in the same season, a feat that has been matched by only two others – Marshall Faulk (1999) and Christian McCaffrey (2019).

"He was truly one of the first every down, multi-purpose backs," Brees added. "And obviously, as you begin to dig into statistics, you realize just how exceptional he was at that. So, a lot in those early days (with the Saints), we're watching film on Roger Craig, which you wouldn't think that you'd be watching 25-year-old film. But you go back to the guys that were doing the absolute best and it was the fundamental components by which a lot of the offenses are run today."

Which is indeed a Hall of Fame connection.

Contact Jarrett Bell atjbell@usatoday.comor follow on X:@JarrettBell

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:How Bill Walsh offense shaped Drew Brees and Roger Craig legacies

BORMIO, Italy — The Stelvio slope here is renowned, or perhaps condemned, as the most demanding downhill course on Alpine skiing's World Cup circuit.

It is not just visually spectacular, it carries a reputation for being dark and dangerous with steep drops and sometimes icy corners. It is known by some as the "Ribbon of Death."

But because of the technical skill it requires, the Stelvio is also a place where the best of the best have been crowned. In the two World Championships that have been held here, Switzerland's Pirmin Zurbriggen and American Bode Miller — two of the most successful ski racers ever — emerged as winners.

Now there's another name to add to the list: Switzerland's Franjo von Allmen took Olympic gold on Saturday — the first at the 2026 Milan Cortina Games — completing the course in 1:51.61. Italy's Giovanni Franzoni (1:51.81) took the silver medal, while countryman Dominik Paris (1:52.11) won bronze.

Kyle Negomir was the top American, finishing 10th.

Bryce Bennett placed 13th in his third and final Olympic Games.

American Ryan Cochran-Siegel, who came to the Winter Games in some of the best form of his career, finished 18th after posting the fastest training time in Wednesday's run.

The other American entrant, Sam Morse, finished 19th.

Miller remains the last American man to medal in this event, winning Bronze in 2010.

CAIRO (AP) — The head of Yemen's ruling leadership council has named a new cabinet, weeks after deadly clashes in the country's south and the dissolution of a separatist group.

Theescalationhas exposed cracks in a Saudi-led coalition fighting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

Rashad al-Alimi, head of thePresidential Leadership Council, announced the cabinet in a presidential decree published by the country's state-run SABA news agency late Friday.

The 35-member cabinet is chaired byPrime Minister Shae'a al-Zandani, who also serves as foreign minister. It included only two women: Afrah al-Zouba, minister of planning and international cooperation, and Ahd Jaasous, state minister for women's affairs.

Maj. Gen. Taher al-Aqili was appointed defense minister and Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Haidan will lead the Interior Ministry. Both will oversee Saudi-backed efforts to dismantle militias of the separatist Southern Presidential Council, which is supported by the United Arab Emirates.

Yemen has been mired for more than a decade in a civil war that involves a complex interplay of sectarian and tribal grievances and the involvement of regional powers.

The Iran-aligned Houthis control the most populous regions in the north, including the capital Sanaa. Meanwhile, a loose regional coalition of powers — including Saudi Arabia and the UAE — has backed the internationally recognized government in the south.

The Southern Transitional Council is part of the anti-Houthi camp, but it seeks an independent state in southern Yemen.

In December, STC forces advanced into the provinces ofHadramout and Mahra, where they seized oil-rich areas and facilities and the presidential palace in the main southern city of Aden. They pushed out forces affiliated with the Saudi-supported National Shield Forces, another group aligned with the anti-Houthi coalition.

The Saudi-backed forces have sinceregained control of Hadramout, the presidential palace in Aden andcampsin al-Mahra. The STC then announced itsdissolution.

The escalation in southern Yemen in the past two months has rattled the Saudi-led coalition and brought long-muted tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the open.Saudi Arabi accused the UAE of supporting the separatists, and smuggling the STC leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, who is wanted for treason, out of Yemen and flying him to Abu Dhabi.

The Saudi-led coalition, which until recently had included the UAE, has fought to restore Yemen's government. The war has remained at a stalemate, and the rebels reached a deal with Saudi Arabia that stopped their attacks on the kingdom in return for an end to Saudi-led strikes on their territories.

Jean Shey was 12 when she first questioned her father's judgment.

He wanted to serve lunch to the Germans. Not neighbors — prisoners of war in her town of Algona.

Five of them. Men captured overseas while her friends' brothers were fighting and dying in Europe.

"Dad, you're inviting those monsters into our home?" she asked in disbelief.

More:At Iowa's Camp Clarinda, fear defined life for Japanese prisoners of war

Her father never hesitated.

"They're just like us," he told her.

Shey, now 93, still remembers those words, and her mother's reply.

"Mom said, 'Well, I'm definitely not going to use my good dishes.'"

In the middle of World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history, in a county struggling to meet federal food quotas with fewer men and limited machinery, the Shey family farm near Algona, Iowa, became one of many places where the lines blurred between enemy and neighbor.

More than 25,000 enemy prisoners of war were transported to Iowa from 1943 to 1946, more than any state except Texas and California.

Most of the prisoners Iowa received were German soldiers captured with the Afrika Korps in North Africa and transported across the Atlantic on gray-painted ocean liners before continuing inland by rail.

Shey remembered lining up to see the prisoners as they stepped off the Pullman railcars and into the heartland of America, their uniforms marked with distinctive large letters stitched onto their backs and chests: PW.

The Geneva Convention barred prisoners from being used for direct war labor. But Iowa's fields still needed planting and harvesting.

Corn had to be cut. Oats shocked. Sugar beets and potatoes pulled from the ground.

Across the state, farms were stripped of labor by conscription and wartime industry. Machinery was scarce. Kossuth County's 4,245 farm families struggled to increase production.

In August 1942, the Algona Upper Des Moines warned, "It begins to look like the Army boys may have to fight on empty stomachs."

The War Department got creative. It asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to identify secure inland sites where prisoners of war could be housed and put to work without competing with free local labor.

Algona met the criteria, and Camp Algona opened in April 1944.A second major Iowa camp also was erected in Clarinda.

German POWs drove tractors, harvested seed corn and processed hemp for rope. They were paid 80 cents per day in camp credit, enough for cigarettes and a Hershey chocolate bar.

The labor program functioned as intended. But inside that system, historians and those who lived it say, something else ripened in a way unlike anywhere else: community.

Skepticism comes first

Don Tietz was an 8 year-old boy when the camp went up in Algona.

Before the prisoners rolled into the rural north-central Iowa town, Tietz, now 89, said the war was something you could only hear or watch.

It came through the radio. It showed up in grainy newsreels: Adolf Hitler shouting, veins bulging, fists clenched, rage flowing.

"The world was scary, no doubt about that," he said. "We'd go to a movie theater and see Hitler. It was scary when he talked. He was just raging mad with anger."

Those images were reinforced by government-curated media and years of escalating violence abroad.

Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 ignited a European war the United States initially watched from afar, and American policy remained largely isolationist even as reports of mass killings spread.

Tietz said he still remembers the day that distance collapsed: Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and pulled the United States fully into World War II.

By 1942, Iowa families had sons and brothers serving overseas, and the war effort meant producing more at home with fewer workers.

When word spread that a prisoner of war camp would be built near Algona, fear that had lived on screens and in headlines took a new, local form.

According to Mark Davis, vice president of the Camp Algona POW Museum board, residents were openly anxious before the first prisoners arrived.

"There was a lot of fear in Algona about this camp being here," Davis said. "Before the prisoners even arrived, they had public meetings and stuff trying to assuage people's fear about the prisoners."

Historian Chad Timm, a Simpson College professor whose Iowa State University thesis was one of the first to merge the history of Iowa camps together, said resident fears reflected a broader pattern of how war is understood when the enemy is defined mostly through propaganda and secondhand accounts.

"We have ideas about who the enemy is, and we define the enemy, and we fear the enemy, and we create ideas about the enemy in our minds," Timm said. "When Iowans found out that the Germans were coming, they were nervous and apprehensive and really concerned. There were letters to the editor, even from abroad, that were critical of the camp."

On the Tietz family farm, though, there was no backup plan. Housing prisoners of war in Algona offered one of the few ways the thousands of nearby farms could meet federal food quotas.

He said his father was one of the first farmers to go to the camp and ask for labor.

"There was just no help available, and our farm equipment was very basic. We had no electricity, no running water, we picked the corn and husked it by hand," Tietz said. "We needed all the help we could get."

And the fear ran both directions, Tietz said.

"The prisoners on the shuttles would get scared, thinking that the enemy was going to open fire on the shuttle," Tietz said. "The guards would say, 'No, you're in the United States. The war is not here.'"

A town — and a camp — that adapted

Once the prisoners began arriving, daily life around Camp Algona settled into a routine that few residents would have predicted during those early public meetings.

Each morning, German prisoners were moved out in work details bound for farms, canneries and processing facilities across north-central Iowa. Some were transported by military trucks.

Others were picked up directly by farmers, who signed them out and returned them at the end of the day. Guards were present, but often minimally so.

"The guard never went out into the field where they were working," Shey said. "He sat under the tree in the yard, where there was a lot of grass, and enjoyed the quietness. I think he took some naps."

Historians say that, unlike POWs assigned to factories in other states and larger cities, the men working out of Camp Algona spent their days on family farms, often alongside children and women who had taken on expanded roles during the war.

"Because the nature of the work they were doing here in the Midwest was so agricultural, and many of these farms at the time were family farms, there was a lot of contact between German POWs and Iowans," said Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, a musicologist whose research has examined daily life at Camp Algona.

Language eased that contact. Northern Iowa was home to many families of German descent, and while public use of German had largely been suppressed after World War I, older generations still spoke it.

Many of the prisoners were farm boys themselves, too, drafted into the German army.

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"They were strong men," Davis said of the early arrivals from the Afrika Korps. "They had been captured early in the war and brought here because England couldn't feed them anymore."

Trust developed quickly in some places. Prisoners ate meals at farm tables. Children were left alone with them. In a few cases, prisoners wandered away and returned on their own.

"One story that the folks at Algona love to tell is that, one time as a prank, a couple of POWs escaped and then just, like, came back, just to kind of prove that they could," McGinnis said.

The low security environment was partly the result of geography.

"The Midwest is vast," McGinnis said. "They would not get far and would not be able to do much."

Inside the camp, life expanded beyond work. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners had to be provided opportunities for recreation and cultural activity. Camp Algona became a place of constant movement between the military installation and the surrounding community.

"These POW camps, especially the big ones, had things like instrument collections, record collections," McGinnis said. "You have the Red Cross and the YMCA coming in asking what books and instruments and records were needed, and trying to make life livable and even sometimes enjoyable as possible."

Music became one of the most visible points of exchange, she said. German prisoners organized choirs, orchestras and ensembles. They performed German music openly, something that had not only grown increasingly rare in post-World War I Iowa, but also in Germany itself, where the Nazi regime tightly controlled cultural expression.

Local residents were allowed into the camp for church services and performances. Prisoners attended services led with community participation.

The camp also brought a wartime economic boon to rural Algona.

According to records from Camp Algona's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Arthur Lobdell, the value of labor to those hiring prisoners totaled more than $3.5 million, worth over $62 million today. Lobdell estimated the wholesale value of food and other products handled by POW labor at $101 million, worth over $1.8 billion today.

Shared humanity prevailed

Inside that system, perceptions shifted, Timm said.

In his research, he highlights how Iowa was not only a place where civilians and prisoners interacted, but where those interactions often extended beyond the worksite and into the most intimate spaces.

He described Iowa's experience as one end of a national spectrum. In other states, he said, prisoners often faced far harsher conditions.

"There were POWs in some states who were shot and killed trying to escape and then there were POWs like in Iowa, who sat at the same dinner table and ate meals with Iowa farmers," he said.

Shey remembers her family's dinner table as the place where that difference was clear. At noon, she said, the prisoners came inside for fried chicken, potatoes and dessert.

It was there, she said, that she realized the men "were not monsters. They were very nice, and they were polite."

Even decades later, she still returns to one detail.

"This one older man, when he got through eating, he would sit up really straight and he would take both hands and make a fist out of them and pound on his stomach all the way across the front of him," she said. "And I wondered what in the world was going on. 'Well,' he said, 'you know that food was so good, I'm trying to decide if I could eat more.'"

Timm said the repeated contact forced residents to hold two realities at once: What they were told about the German military and what they were seeing in front of them.

"Iowans looking into the eyes of German soldiers and seeing their brothers and their uncles and their relatives who were fighting overseas and realizing that they're human beings," he said, "they realized that the enemy were humans."

The most visible artifact of that cultural life is the nativity scene built at Camp Algona. Assembled over several months and paid for by the prisoners themselves, it remains on display at the Camp Algona POW Museum.

Brian Connick, the museum's director, said it was built for roughly $8,000 in 1945 dollars, worth over $143,000 in today's value, drawn from prisoners' daily earnings of 80 cents.

"That first night, Christmas Eve of 1945, I think that would have been quite a scene to be there and sharing that with, in essence, your enemy during that war," Connick said. "Certainly, it was something that brought people together, and it's still bringing people together 80 years later."

He described the response in Algona not as a single act of goodwill, but as a series of choices made in everyday settings.

"The people of Iowa, and specifically Algona, chose to treat these people as human beings. They didn't have to go that way," he said. "The easy thing would be not to treat them right or not to treat them well. But I think people here did the right thing."

Tietz said he saw that choice play out in real time.

"There was a bond, a bond of friendship and trust," he said. "We viewed the prisoners as our relatives from Germany."

Connections that lasted for generations

When the war ended, the German men who had hoed Iowa fields and eaten at local dinner tables were sent back across the Atlantic to famine conditions and ruins.

Shey said her father made a promise before the prisoners left: "He said 'now, if you need anything when you get back to Germany, you let me know, and I will try to get whatever you need.'"

When letters arrived, Shey said, her father responded with a level of compassion she had never seen from him before.

"He didn't have Mom help him at all," Shey said. "He said, 'I'll just take care of it. I'll send what I think they will need.' He had a special bond with these prisoners."

That impulse — to help first, regardless of who the person is — is what Tietz said stayed with him long after the camp closed.

"I don't know what causes people to go bad," Tietz said. "Hitler was a bad person. He was a bad, bad man. And if we don't learn from history, we become victims of its mistakes."

Those lessons feel especially urgent now, he said.

"We are a divided country right now," he said. "We are a state (and) we're a country of immigrants, and we forget that every day."

Years after the war, former prisoners told Shey's family their time in Algona had stayed with them.

For the Shey family, that connection centered on one man: Wilhelm. He spoke the most English, helped lead the small group of prisoners working the farm and stayed in closest contact after returning to Germany.

His family was starving. There was a newborn at home. Shey's father understood what they needed, and what they missed the most.

"Grandpa sent baby clothes over for his newborn son, Thomas, and we think he probably sent Mom's baby clothes," said Jane Shey, Jean's daughter.

When the packages arrived, Jean Shey was told, Wilhelm's wife opened one right there at the post office.

"At the top was a Hershey candy bar," Shey said. "And she grabbed it and just almost inhaled it."

Years later, Shey said, they found themselves in Germany, hoping the door they were about to knock on belonged to Wilhelm.

When it opened, he was standing there, in dress pants and a sports coat.

"He leapt at me and gave me a hug, and said something I'll never forget," she said.

"My little Jean," he said, as they both cried at the door.

Nick El Hajj is a reporter at the Register. He can be reached atnelhajj@gannett.com.Follow him on X at @nick_el_hajj.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register:Iowa farmers and German prisoners of war built friendships during WWII