2006 Turin Winter Games
2,508 Athletes, 80 Countries, 84 Events

The 2006 Olympic Winter Games took place from Feb. 10-26 in Turin, Italy and welcomed a then record number of 2,508 athletes to what was the largest city to host the Winter Games. Albania, Madagascar and Ethiopia were all represented at the Winter Games for the first time.

Snowboard Cross was included in the Olympic program for the first time in 2006, while speed skating added the Team Pursuit event. Aside from the athletic endeavors, the Turin Games will also be remembered as the Olympics that saw a monumental shift to how they were consumed across the globe. For the first time, live coverage was available on mobile phones. Internet coverage of the games also spiked as fans turned to the World Wide Web for results. The site of the Turin Games Organizing Committee, torino2006.org, registered approx. 700 million page views, and the site of the International Olympic Committee, Olympic.org, over 32 million (according to http://www.olympic.org/turin-2006-winter-olympics).

The Ivy League saw 29 athletes head to Torino, including 20 women’s ice hockey players. Canada won the women’s hockey gold medal, downing Sweden 4-1 in the gold medal game. The Canadian team featured five Ivy League alums, including Becky Kellar (Brown ’97), Jennifer Botterill (Harvard ’03), Sarah Vaillancourt (Harvard ’08) and the tournament’s second and third-leading scorers Cherie Piper (Dartmouth ’07) and Gillian Apps (Dartmouth ’07). In five games, Piper scored a tournament-high seven goals and added eight assists, while Apps matched Piper’s seven goals and had seven assists. For Kellar, Piper and Botterill, it was the second of their third Olympic gold medals. After finishing atop of Group A with a 3-0 record, the United States was knocked-off by Sweden, 3-2, in the semifinals. Led by three goals from Katie King (Brown ‘97), Team USA rebounded to blank Finland, 4-0, to claim the bronze.