New York Times Milano Cortina 2026 Coverage
This post is still being improved! Check back later for a more detailed breakdown! 🙂
Affiliated NYT Articles:
- See the Biggest Tricks From the Olympic Halfpipe, in Miniature: Gift link for full little athletes article
- See the Biggest Tricks From the Olympic Halfpipe, in Miniature (Watch Tab): Little athletes in reel form
- Some Readers Thought Those Little Olympians Were A.I. Here’s How We Made Them.: Short explainer
- See How Gaon Choi Dethroned Chloe Kim in Women’s Halfpipe: Small chart feature
- Big Air, Big Tricks. How Kira Kimura Won Snowboarding Gold.: Another small chart feature
My Contributions & (Soon!) Reflections
I’m super grateful to have been a part of the New York Times’ 2026 Winter Olympics coverage on halfpipe snowboarding.
This was the NYT’s first time visualizing snowboarding in 3-D (previous visualizations include figure skating, swimming, and running), and the tricks posed a unique and exciting challenge in their variety and complexity.
I was responsible for building the trick animations and the halfpipe.
The tricks were created using keyframe animation in Blender. In the end, I built 100+ animations that could be pieced together to create a full run down the halfpipe. These animations were not all manually created, but optimized using my original Blender tools for adjusting rotation (spins in the Z, flips in the X, tilts in the Y) and grabs (about 10 variations of grabs were built – Indy, Weddle, Stalefish, etc).
The halfpipe was geometrically modeled in Blender, after tons of experimentation on shape, length, style, etc. To aid in experimentation, I designed tools in Blender/Python that generate halfpipes based on UI customizations.