Winter Olympics 2026: 54-year-old personal injury lawyer Rich Ruohonen becomes America’s oldest ever Olympian

MILAN — Eighteen months ago, the skipper of one of America’s top men’s curling teams was fighting back from a debilitating autoimmune condition.

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

They needed a shrewd tactician, a driven competitor, someone who had experience competing at the national and international level yet hadn’t already made plans to join another team for the 2024-25 season. They found all those qualities and more in a 54-year-old personal injury lawyer from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

Rich Ruohonen had stepped away from elite curling in 2022 after his sixth attempt to qualify for the Winter Olympics resulted in yet another agonizing near miss. He planned to play a few tournaments with friends and focus on the senior circuit before Team Casper’s plea for help coaxed him out of semi-retirement.

What was supposed to be a short-term partnership instead turned into something more after Ruohonen thrived as a fill-in skipper last season and developed instant chemistry with a quartet of teammates no older than half his age. Casper invited Ruohonen to stick around this season as the team’s alternate — or fifth player — even though the 24-year-old had regained his strength and no longer needed a regular substitute.

USA’s Rich Ruohonen during the Men’s Curling match against Switzerland at the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium, on day six of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, Italy. Picture date: Thursday February 12, 2026. (Photo by Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images)
 (Andrew Milligan – PA Images via Getty Images)

Earlier this winter, Team Casper helped Ruohonen cast aside more than two decades of Olympic Trials frustration by securing a spot in the 2026 Winter Games. Team Casper won 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 showing at a last-chance global qualification tournament.

“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.”

Thursday, Ruohonen got his Olympic opportunity in Cortina, subbed in late in Team USA’s loss to Switzerland. It came in the eighth end, with Casper saying “we want to get Rich in.” He grab his broom, then the stone, and released the shot he’d been waiting for for more than 30 years.

HISTORY AT THE #WinterOlympics. 

54-year-old curler Rich Ruohonen waited more than 30 YEARS to make his Olympic debut. With the USA’s game out of reach, his team subbed him in, making him the oldest American ever to compete at the Winter Games. pic.twitter.com/Pqe91JClmn

— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) February 12, 2026

With that, he’s now the oldest American ever 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 author of more than a dozen Olympics-related books.

At age 52, Joseph Savage was part of the duo that finished seventh in the pairs figure skating competition 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. men’s curling alternate could have etched his name into the history books two decades ago, but Scott Baird, at a younger 54 than Ruohonen, did not see game action at the 2006 Torino Games.

Ruohonen started curling more than a decade before his other four Team Casper teammates were born. When he was in fifth grade, Ruohonen picked up the sport from his dad after moving to the Twin Cities area to live with him. By his late teens, Ruohonen had blossomed into an elite curler at the junior level.

Though Ruohonen briefly took a break from curling during law school, he couldn’t stay away for long. He juggled his law career and his curling ambitions, waking up at 5:30 a.m. for pre-dawn training sessions on weekday mornings and saving his vacation time to travel to prestigious domestic or international 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.”

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

Coming up empty at the 2022 U.S. Olympic Trials was among the most painful near misses of Ruohonen’s career. The men’s team skipped by Ruohonen finished in third place behind teams led by Shuster and Korey Dropkin. In mixed doubles, Ruohonen and Jamie Sinclair lost in the finals on the very last shot of the match.

To Ruohonen, those setbacks signaled the end of his hopes of making it to his sport’s biggest stage. His men’s team disbanded with his blessing. He didn’t bother to try to form 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.”

At that time, Ruohonen couldn’t have predicted that Casper would battle Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare condition in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves. He had no way of knowing that even while receiving treatment Casper would still have days where he’d struggle to tie his own shoes 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 via Getty Images)

For Ruohonen, the most challenging yet rewarding part of joining Team Casper has been having teammates who want this as much as him. Casper, Ruohonen, Luc Violette, 26, Aidan Oldenburg, 24, and Ben Richardson, 27, prepared for the season by putting themselves through regular pre-dawn workouts, going to work and then meeting to throw rocks afterward.

“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 trying to keep pace is not lost on Ruohonen. He jokingly refers to his teammates as “his kids” and describes himself as a “scoutmaster with a bunch of cub scouts.” They constantly rib him about his outdated taste in music or about growing up in an era before smartphones and Wifi.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, did they even have color TV back then?’” Ruohonen said with a laugh. “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.”

While Ruohonen likely won’t see a ton of time on the ice, his biggest contribution will be as a tactician scouting opponents and offering advice on game plans and in-game strategies.

Will Ruohonen return to semi-retirement after the Olympics? Not necessarily, 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.’”