Here’s an easy question: Which sport enjoys the biggest boost in interest during and immediately following the Winter Olympics? 

Answer: Curling. 

An analysis by polling site FiveThirtyEight found that curling’s Google search-index spiked nearly 81 points on a scale of 0-100 during the Olympic months (80.68) compared to non-Olympic months (4.57) from 2004-2018. 

Surprised? I’m not. I watch hours of curling every four years. It makes me want to try it, so I search online where to play—or curl—and realize it’s not that easy to find a curling rink nearby, so my interest in participating fades. 

The point is, curling is a perfect example of a sport that hugely benefits from the exposure the Winter Olympics provide but lacks the resources and venues to fully capitalize. Comparatively, skiing and snowboarding—with the industry’s massive reach, primetime events, household-name athletes, and existing popularity—should experience a big bump, too. Right?

“The biggest thing that I have seen in my years of involvement has been simply a failure to take advantage of the opportunity that is presented with a winter sports event being pumped onto the screens and into the living rooms of tens of millions of Americans across the country,” says Tom Kelly, who spent more than 30 years leading communications for U.S. Olympic skiing and snowboarding, and is currently doing the same for the Salt Lake City 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Games organizing committee (so he knows a thing or two about this topic). 

You may have read that television ratings for the last three Winter Olympics have dipped compared to previous broadcasts. That might be true, but » there are also a lot more ways to consume television content nowadays, and even the smaller relative ratings are still huge compared to any other winter sports broadcast. With an estimated 56 million American adults planning to watch (according to an August 2025 poll by MRI-Simmons), the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics (Feb. 6-22) will have a lot of eyes on it. Plus, NBC is the broadcast partner for both the Olympics and the Super Bowl, which is Feb. 8, and the network will surely promote its coverage of the Games to the Big Game’s massive audience, providing a unique boost.

Combined, this makes the Olympics and Paralympic Games an “unrivaled platform of winter sport awareness,” says Kelly. “It’s an ideal opportunity for the resort and equipment industry to capitalize by using that time period to launch promotions that will resonate with the broad population that is following the Winter Games on broadcast and social media.”

So, what’s your ski area’s plan to capture all those people who will be inspired by watching our U.S. and Canadian ski and snowboard athletes competing in February? You do have a plan, right? Or are you building an ice arena to capitalize on the “curling bump”? If you are, sign me up.