Rémi Drolet remembers watching the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics on television and thinking: that could be me. Sixteen years later, he's about to find out what his second shot at that dream looks like.
Drolet, a Harvard alumnus, is one of five people with ties to the university competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy this month. The group includes a current Extension School student who first made it to the Games at 17, and athletes representing Canada, the United States, and Italy across skiing and ice hockey.
Learning from the first time
Drolet made his Olympic debut in Beijing in 2022, a moment that felt like the culmination of years of work. But he's learned something crucial in the four years since: experience changes how you handle the pressure.
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Start Your News Detox"Being a bit older, I think I am able to handle the pressure better now," he said. "Around the Games, there are periods that are busy and periods where you are twiddling your thumbs, and it can be hard to go back and forth between the two. It really helps to head into these games with that previous experience."
At Harvard, Drolet was a three-time All-American and the 2023 NCAA Men's 20K Classic National Champion. He earned Academic All-America honors twice and a 2024 NCAA Today's Top 10 Award. More than the medals, though, he credits his time at Harvard with teaching him something that translates directly to elite athletics: how to sharpen focus when you're juggling multiple demands.
"One of the things that Harvard taught me that I use in training is how to make the most out of every situation," Drolet said. "I felt like I always had quite a bit on my plate at Harvard, and balancing so many different things at once is helping me now sharpen my focus in training."
A second Olympics at a different stage
Tess Johnson was 17 when she competed in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics as a mogul skier for Team USA. That debut came during her senior year of high school — an extraordinary accomplishment at an age when most athletes are still figuring out what elite competition even looks like.
Seven years later, she's heading to Italy with a different kind of readiness. Johnson is now an undergraduate at Harvard Extension School, pursuing a psychology degree while training at the highest level. The combination wasn't accidental. After PyeongChang, she specifically sought out a program that would let her pursue both paths seriously.
"Harvard Extension School seemed like such a great fit from the moment I learned about it," Johnson said. "It allows me to pursue both my athletic and academic dreams from anywhere in the world."
Her choice of psychology wasn't random either. Sports psychology has shaped her own career and thinking. "I've always been drawn to it, for both personal gain and intellectual curiosity," she said. She's so committed to the academic side that she'll be taking a class while at the Olympics.
Johnson feels the difference between her first Games and now. "I feel so much more prepared and confident heading to my second Olympic experience," she said. "I am skiing better than I ever had and I am ready to leave it all out there and enjoy every second."
Also competing this month are alumnae Emerance Maschmeyer '16 for Canada's women's ice hockey team and Kristin Della Rovere '23 for Italy's women's ice hockey team. Daniel Cnossen, M.P.A. '16, M.T.S. '18, will represent Team USA at the Paralympic Games in March.
For Drolet and Johnson, this second Olympics represents something different from the first: not just the achievement of reaching the Games, but the maturity to know what to do once you're there.
