The 2026 Wilson Games | Ep. 6

Last week we learned how Wilson relates to the American Football Championship Super Bowl.

And today we move to the international stage in Italy, where the 2026 Winter Olympic Games are currently in progress.

Welcome to another episode of the Cuz Wilson.

This is where we talk about people, places and things named Wilson.

I'm your Wilsonologist Kenny Wilson.

And since last week's episode was the Wilson Wednesday after the super bowl and this Wilson Wednesday, the 2026 Winter Olympic Games are being held in Italy.

And it's still going on even as I record this episode.

Now.

This is the first year where the Olympics location shared between two cities with equal focus and it is nicknamed the Milan Cortina 2026.

Milan is where most of the indoor competitions are held.

In the west we pronounce it Milan, but in Italy they say Milano.

Cortina, on the other hand, is where most of the outdoor competitions are held.

But curling is also held there because it is the curling capital.

Italy.

Now think of Cortina as, oh, Aspen, Colorado.

It is.

It is very similar in geographic location near the ski resorts, population and size and economic demographics.

In today's people category we split it into two because we follow the amazing Wilson sisters who compete on the mountains at Cortina and and a Wilson who competes indoors in Milan.

Our places category stays in Italy, but with a bit more historic slant and a very interesting love hate relationship.

In both Milan and Cortina, things are related to Wilson's everywhere.

You just can't see it.

The Wilson sporting goods logo isn't found, but companies owned by a Wilson are all over both venues of Milan and Cortina.

And now let's get on with the show.

Let's start out with our part one of the people category.

Let me introduce you to the Wilson sisters who compete at Cortina in skiing and snowboarding.

And guess what country they're from.

Not Switzerland, not Canada, not the usa, not Germany or Italy.

Nope.

And they're not from Jamaica either.

They're from Australia.

Yep, Australia.

Most of you probably didn't even know Australia had snow.

They even have about 10 or so ski resorts.

And they sent 53 competitors to this year's Winter Olympics.

I handed over some research to Notebook LM's Larry and Mary to give us a little background.

So today we are heading to the slopes, fresh off the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics to talk about this really interesting family dynamic on the Australian team.

Yeah, we're talking about the Wilson sisters, Charlotte and Abby.

It's such a great story.

The sister act from Jindabyne Exactly.

And to really get into it we've pieced together interviews from Mammamia, we've got profiles from the Australian Olympic Committee and, and performance data from the NSW Institute of Sport.

And I think our mission here is to figure out how two sisters from the same town who started on the exact same skis took these wildly different paths, one on a board, one on skis and then somehow ended up in the same Olympic village.

It's fascinating.

They're at the same games but their day to day, their disciplines, they're just worlds apart.

It all goes back to Jindabine.

Right.

They both started skiing at two years.

Old too which is, I mean that's just wild.

Most of us are just learning to walk properly at that age.

So where did it split?

It was a family trip to Japan.

Their dad was a snowboarder and he, you know, figured it was time to introduce them to the board.

And Charlotte, the older one, she wasn't into it at all.

Not at all.

Her quote was that she hated sitting.

Down so much, which when you look at her discipline.

Now moguls, that makes perfect sense.

It makes total sense.

Moguls skiing is all about staying upright, this incredible upper body discipline while your legs are just like pistons firing through this field of bumps.

It's all rhythm and technical skill.

And then there's Abby, she was 8, she tried the snowboard and that was it.

She was hooked.

And she didn't just pick any discipline, she went for snowboard cross, which is.

The total opposite of the technical precision of moguls.

Oh completely.

If moguls is like gymnastics on snow, snowboard cross is, well, it's like motocross on a sheet of ice.

It is chaos.

You're elbow to elbow with five other writers just hurtling down a course.

So you have the disciplined engineer and the chaotic racer.

And that engineer part is literal.

Right?

Charlotte studying biomedical engineering.

Yes.

At unsw.

And it's not just a side thing.

I mean you have to think moguls is all about physics.

It's absorption, it's force, it's trajectory.

That engineering brain gives her, I think, a huge advantage in analyzing a run.

And it clearly worked.

Her rise coming into these Olympics was, I mean it was meteoric.

Meteoric is the word.

Just last year, March 2025, she won the Olympic test event in Livino on.

The actual Olympic event, on the actual course.

But you have to look at who she beat.

She beat Zaylin Kopf, who's world number one, and Perrine Lafont, the reigning Olympic champion.

Wow.

So that's like showing up to your first Grand Slam and beating the top two seats.

It's exactly that.

It was a massive signal.

And the day before that win, she was named FIS Rookie of the Year.

So, yeah, out of nowhere.

And her results at these games, sixth in moguls for a debut at 21.

That is incredibly solid.

It really is.

And I love how she decompresses.

She talks about just spending time with her horses, Harry and Pearl.

Right.

She called them dogs.

But really big.

It's that grounding force you need.

Now, Abby, the younger sister, she's 19.

She has this totally different energy.

Charlotte calls her clumsy off the snow.

Which is, you know, kind of terrifying for a snowboard cross racer.

You'd think that would be the one sport where you can't be clumsy.

You'd think, but maybe she just saves all her focus and coordination for the course and it works.

She won bronze at the Youth Olympics in 2024.

And just making this senior team, you know, alongside a legend like Scottie James in his fifth games, that's huge for a teenager.

And her take on the Olympic village was a little different too.

She was pretty focused on the food.

The epic carb loading in Italy.

Yeah.

I mean, you can't blame her.

No.

But it just shows you that human side.

At the end of the day, they're still young athletes and they're part of this huge Australian team.

The second largest ever, 53 athletes.

And having a sister there, that has to change everything.

Charlotte said having someone who actually understands the pressure and the travel is a real game changer.

It has to be.

That built in support system is something most athletes just don't have.

You don't have to explain anything.

She just knows.

So as we wrap up, you see these two incredible athletes, the Wilsons, who took such different roads to get to the same mountaintop.

Yeah.

The analytical engineer and the, you know, the high speed racer.

And it leaves you with this kind of provocative thought, doesn't it?

In that kind of environment where everything comes down to a split second, does having a sibling there give you a competitive edge or does it just add a whole other layer of pressure?

Does it double your support or does it double your anxiety?

And it's something to think about as we watch their careers unfold.

I love that story because I also looked up to my sibling.

My brother won a McDonald's hamburger eating contest by eating 26 hamburgers in one hour.

I was so proud.

Okay, but now it is 2026.

If you were watching the Olympics a couple of days ago, you saw a complete blowout.

Oh, yeah.

Team Canada just dismantled France 10 2.

But nobody's talking about the score, all the headlines, all the oxygen.

It's all about one guy, Tom Wilson.

Well, of course it is, because he somehow managed to condense his entire, you know, chaotic career into 60 minutes of hockey.

The Gordie Howe hat trick.

Exactly.

He gets a goal, he gets an assist, and then almost inevitably, he gets himself tossed from the game for a fight.

And this wasn't some staged, you know, theatrical fight, right?

No, not at all.

Pierre Crennan took a run at Nathan McKinnon, Canada's biggest star, and Wilson, I mean, he didn't even hesitate.

The gloves were just gone.

And that really is the perfect entry point for what we need to talk about today.

This is the Tom Wilson paradox.

It is.

How does a player who is once seen as a total liability, like a dinosaur from a bygone era of hockey, turn into an elite 30 goal scorer who is basically indispensable?

It's such a strange evolution because if you rewind, what, five, six years, the conversation wasn't about his scoring touch, it was about whether he even belonged in the league.

Oh, he was public enemy number.

I mean, you look at the data from around 2021 and something like 47.9% of all social media chatter about him was negative.

That's a huge number.

It's staggering.

And he was earning it.

You know, the massive suspensions, that 20 game ban for the hit on Oscar Sundquist, the whole incident with Artemi Panarin.

The narrative was set that the game's.

Getting faster and he's this relic who needs to be phased out.

Exactly.

But enforcers like him, they usually just fade away.

He didn't.

So what changed?

How did he survive?

He didn't just survive, he adapted.

I think the pivot was that 20, 24, 25 season.

He just stopped taking the bad penalties, the ones that really hurt his team, and he channeled that aggression into his actual play.

And he hits a career high 33 goals that year.

Right.

And everyone said it was a fluke.

You know, a lot of guys have one great year, but it wasn't a fluke.

Not at all.

Look at this season.

We're 50 games in and he already has 23 goals and 26 assists.

He's scoring at almost a point per game pace.

Those aren't fourth line grinder numbers.

That's top line elite production.

He's on the top line and he's not just A passenger there either.

Think about April 6, 2025.

A date that's going to be in the history books forever.

Ovechkin's record breaking goal.

The one that broke Gretzky's record.

Yeah.

And who had the primary assistant on goal number 895?

It was Wilson.

It was Tom Wilson.

And there's a real irony there, right?

The guy they called a goon sets up the most skilled goal in the history of the sport.

It just proves he has the hands and the vision to play with the absolute best.

But Ovechkin's career is winding down.

So what happens to Wilson when OVI finally hangs them up?

He's the heir apparent.

He's the captain in waiting for the Capitals.

They have him locked down on a huge contract through 2031.

A $6.5 million AAV, right?

Average annual value.

So that's 6.5 million against salary cap every single year.

For a guy in his 30s, that's a massive commitment.

So Ovechkin is basically mentoring him to take over the Sea.

It's been explicit, but I still get why you're asking.

In a league that is so obsessed with analytics and speed and skill, why do you hear executives say privately they'd give up almost anything to get a Tom Wilson?

Because there's no metric for fear.

That's it.

That's his unique value.

You could find another guy to score 30 goals, you can find a guy to fight, but you just can't find another player who does both at that level.

It's the whole creating space argument.

It is.

When he's on the ice, the entire emotional temperature of the building just changes.

Opponents think twice.

They hesitate for a split second.

And that hesitation is all the space your superstars need.

You can't put a number on that flinch, but it wins playoff series.

And then, just to make the whole paradox deeper, he's apparently a model citizen off the ice.

A complete contradiction.

Nominated for the King Clancy Trophy for leadership and humanitarian work, runs his own charity, 43's Friends.

He's calm, he's articulate in interviews.

It makes it really hard to keep him in that villain box.

So he's made this full transition from a liability to this unicorn player who can score 30, protect a guy like McKinnon on the world stage, and change a series with one shift.

He's the bridge.

He's the bridge between old school hockey intimidation and new school skill.

He proves you don't have to choose.

Which leaves us and you with one last question to think About?

It's game seven.

Who are you taking?

The league's most skilled player?

The guy who makes all the highlight.

Reels, or the one guy who can control the emotion of the entire arena?

Wilson's career might prove that when everything is on the line, you might just need the monster to win.

Well, I followed Tom's amazing hockey play during this year because of his name, but now I really like him because he was taken up for Nathan McKinnon.

Nathan is a superstar for the Colorado Avalanche here in Denver, and that's where I live.

Well, that's it for our people category.

But.

But before we go to our places category, I'll give you the answer to last week's Cuz Quiz.

Last week, I asked two questions.

What was the vice president Henry Wilson's father's name?

And I gave you a hint that his father was an alcoholic and had to take a cold bath.

The answer is, Henry's father was Winthrop Colbath.

When Henry was old enough to leave home, he decided, I think I'll start a new life under a new name.

And he found the name of a school teacher in Philadelphia who had a great reputation.

The second question was about Henry Wilson's boss, President Ulysses S. Grant.

And what was his middle name?

The hint I gave you was, I'll give you a big hug if you know.

Well, that hint was because the president's initials were.

Were actually hug.

Yep.

His middle name doesn't even start with an S. His first name was actually Hiram.

His middle name is Ulysses.

Well, the S was actually a mistake because the registrar of West Point didn't know his middle name and forgot to ask.

Well, he knew his mother's maiden name, which was Simpson, so he just put S down there.

And Ulysses didn't really mind because on their lockers in the hallway at the school, they put the initials of their name.

And he didn't want hug on his locker because he figured the other students would make fun of him.

So he just left it.

Well, he left it for several years, and it just stuck.

Now, this week's Cuz Quiz relates to the last week's episode about Wilson's pointing goods, which made the football for every NFL game since 1941.

The question is, what country was the founder, Thomas E. Wilson born in and lived for the first nine years of his life before moving to Chicago, where he started Wilson Sporting Goods.

And now it's time for the places category.

Since the Winter Olympic Games are being held in Italy, I looked all over the maps on the Internet for a place named Wilson.

And I didn't find a single one.

However, I did some research and there used to be a lot of places named Wilson in Italy.

And there's a real interesting reason why those names were changed because of a love hate relationship with President Woodrow Wilson.

I gave that research to NotebookLM and they're here to tell you all about it.

Italy.

When you think of Italy, you're usually thinking about, you know, the Colosseum, the Renaissance, maybe finding the perfect espresso.

Right.

But today we're taking a look at the country through a very specific and I have to say, a slightly weird lens.

The name Wilson, it's a strange mix, I admit.

We have the rise and fall of a US President, a tragedy in Capri involving a bank manager and a foundry in Florence that just refuses to change.

So three Wilsons.

Well, two Wilsons and a whole lot of history.

Yeah, but when you stack them up, they tell this incredible story about adoration, betrayal, and the real dangers of beauty.

Okay, so let's start with the big name Woodrue Wilson.

I knew he was involved in the peace treaties after World War I, but I had no idea.

He was basically a rock star in Italy.

Oh, rock star might be an understatement.

Right.

In 1919, Wilson of the first sitting U.S. president to visit Italy.

And the reaction was just, well, they called it Wilson Mania.

Wilson mania?

Yeah.

He was the God of peace, a secular saint.

The adoration was off the charts.

And naturally, when Italians love something, they really go all in completely.

There was this massive renaming frenzy from Milan down to these tiny little villages.

Mayors were scrambling to christen their main streets and squares.

Via Wilson or Piazza Wilson.

He was the symbol of a new world order, I guess.

Exactly.

But looking at a map of Italy today, I don't think I've ever seen a Villa Wilson.

You see Via Roma, Via Garibaldi everywhere but Wilson.

No, never.

That's because the honeymoon didn't just end, it completely exploded.

It all came down to the Paris Peace Conference.

Italy wanted the city of Fiume, which.

Is modern day Rijeka, right?

That's the one.

And Wilson just impressed.

He said no.

He stuck to his principles of self determination.

And the Italians felt utterly betrayed.

So the God of peace becomes the villain instantly.

This is where that narrative of the Vittoria Mutilato, the mutilated victory, really took hold.

And the erasure was brutal.

They didn't just take the signs down.

What'd they do?

In a lot of towns, Villa Wilson was immediately renamed Villa Fiume.

Ouch.

They Literally replaced his name with the city he refused to give them.

It was a permanent political insult pasted right over his legacy.

Today, finding a Villa Wilson in Italy is nearly impossible.

I think there's one in Rapallo and a tiny side street in Formia.

But otherwise, he was scrubbed from the map.

That is just so volatile.

One minute you're a saint, the neck, your name is being torn down.

But while all this is happening, you have this other story in the stack.

The Marinelli foundry in Florence doing the exact opposite.

Right.

If Wilson represents how fast political adoration can just evaporate, the Ferdinando Marinelli artistic foundry represents absolute permanence.

They've been around since 1905, but the key is how they work.

They're the guardians of the lost wax technique.

I've heard that term, but isn't that just standard for making statues?

Not at this level.

It's incredibly high risk.

You make a wax model, cover it in a mold, and then you melt the wax out.

That mold is a one shot deal.

So if the pour fails, the work is destroyed.

There's no undo button.

When you pour the bronze, you have to break the mold to reveal the art.

So every single piece is a massive.

Gambler, a calculated one.

And they hold the original molds for huge works like the holy door at St. Peter's Basilica.

Even the Family Portugalino, the little boar.

Statue near the Ponte Vecchio.

Right.

Most people just rub its nose for luck, but Marinelli cast that from the original.

So while political names were being painted over on street signs, these guys were pouring bronze meant to last a thousand years.

Okay, so we have political erasure versus artistic endurance.

But there's a third Wilson, and this one isn't about fading away or lasting forever.

It's about getting stuck.

This is the seduction part.

We're moving south to Capri.

The source material talks about a literary figure, a man named Thomas Wilson.

I'm guessing not a president.

No, not at all.

He was a bank manager.

He visits Capri, sees the Bay of Naples, the Baths of Tiberias, and decides that a life of work is pointless.

He cashes in everything to live as a lotus eater.

A lotus eater?

Someone who just trades reality for absolute leisure.

Sounds like the dream, right?

Quit the job, move to Italy, look at the ocean.

And that's the trap.

The beauty of Italy can be so intense, it's dangerous.

Wilson runs out of money, but he refuses to leave.

He ends up living like a hunted animal, starving just to stay near that view.

That dark.

The text describes him Dying on a mountainside, just gazing at the Feraglioni rocks by moonlight.

He literally died for the view.

He did.

It's a powerful warning that Italy isn't just a backdrop, it's an active force.

It can erase you like Woodrow Wilson, preserve you like the bronze in Florence, or just completely consume you like Thomas Wilson.

It really changes how you look at the country.

It's not just pizza in ruins.

It's this intense theater of passion and consequences.

I mean, if we go all the way back to that mutilated victory, the that moment Wilson said no to fume, it didn't just change some street names.

That resentment created a vacuum.

A vacuum for what?

That specific narrative was the fuel Mussolini used to rise to power.

So you're saying if Wilson had just.

Given them the port city, it's possible there's no Mussolini?

The entire trajectory of the 20th century might have pivoted on that one.

Diplomatic no.

That is a lot to think about the next time I see a renamed street sign.

Well, I've never heard of that bit of history before, and it's so much fun to learn more and more about Wilson's around the world.

Now, before we move on, I want to tell you about part of our homepage@cuzwilson.com that's C U Z wilson.com.

when you go there, you scroll down to the bottom where you'll begin to see a lot of icons.

I created a bunch of different categories where amazing Wilson's can be found.

And some are so big I had to create subcategories such as the sports category.

And the icon for that category is the soccer ball.

I separated many Wilson athletes into different categories.

If one of those categories is a sport that you participate in, just click on it and you'll probably see a really cool story about a Wilson who excels in your favorite hobby.

I've just started populating those different categories and so it'll take me a while because there's so many amazing Wilsons that excel in almost every category.

If you have a suggestion for Wilson who you think should be on that list, let me know by clicking on the microphone and go ahead and leave me a voicemail and tell me the athlete's name and what sport they participate in.

I'll even make a new category if one of those sports is not listed.

Here is this week's Uncle Willie joke straight from Italy.

Why are mountains so funny?

Because they are hill areas or hilarious.

Oh, that's bad.

Let's quick, let's move on to the Things category.

We know that Wilson Sporting Goods makes a lot of equipment for different sports.

In fact, they make them for 13 different sports.

Well, the guy who started the Wilson Sporting Goods division from the Maypacker plant is Thomas E. Wilson and he died in 1958 at the age of 90.

Wilson Sporting Goods has been sold many times since then, even Pepsi, on them for about 15 years to diversify their portfolio.

But they eventually sold Wilson to get back to their core business of food and drink.

Well, the last company who bought Wilson is Amherst Sports.

That's a M E R Sports and a Wilson from Canada was a major player in a group that bought Amherst Sports.

After that happened, it's kind of come full circle.

It's a Wilson again.

The products from major brands that Amherst Sports owns and is all over the mountain.

Now since I'm battling laryngitis from last week, I'll give my voice a little rest and hand it over to NotebookLM to make sense out of all that information.

Today we're doing a deep dive into a corporate strategy that has, well, sort of quietly taken over the entire sporting goods world.

Yeah, it's a fascinating one.

We're looking at some recent financial filings, market analysis and really the investment history of one particular Canadian mogul.

Our goal here is to figure out how a single Finnish company owns everything from the tennis court to, believe it or not, the high fashion Runway.

And that company is Amer Sports.

Right.

Just so we get this out of the way immediately, it's pronounced Amer.

That's like in father and Mer, like in mercy.

It is not Amer like America.

A very common mistake.

It's a Finnish name.

And if you go back to their start in 1950, they weren't even in sports.

They, they were a tobacco and shipping.

Company, which is wild.

But the tobacco days are not our focus.

We're zeroing in on this huge radical shift that happened in 2019.

The big acquisition.

Exactly.

An investor group buys the company and you have these heavy hitters like Tencent anti sports.

But the sources all point to one man as the real driver, Chick Wilson, the Lululemon guy.

He uses his investment firm, Animard Investments and buys about a 20% stake in the company.

And he didn't just bring money to the table, he brought a playbook.

He brought the Lululemon playbook.

He looked at Aber and saw all these amazing hard goods brands, but he felt they were totally failing on what he called soft goods.

And that's the whole key, right?

That distinction.

Before Chip Wilson, Amer was an engineering company.

They made the best skis, the best baseball bats, hard goods.

But the margins on a tennis racket are, well, they're thin and you only buy a new one every few years.

Whereas soft goods, we're talking peril.

For footwear, the margins are massive.

And people buy new shoes and jackets all the time.

So the strategy became use the credibility of the equipment to sell the high margin clothes.

It's a perfect validation loop.

You trust the parka because you trust this ski boot it's named after.

And then they completely flipped the business model.

No more just selling to other stores.

They went hard into direct to consumer.

They wanted to own the customer relationship end to end, just like Lululemon.

And the numbers speak for themselves.

They went public again in early 2024, raised 1.4 billion DOL, and revenue shot.

Up 18% to over 5 billion.

Just incredible.

Yeah.

And the best way to see how they did it is to look at their big three brands.

Let's start with the most surprising one.

I think the one with the biggest cultural crossover.

Salomon.

Or as we should probably say it, Salomon.

Salomon, like King Solomon.

Got it.

This company started in the French Alps in 1947 making like metal edges for.

Skis, your industrial manufacturing.

But now they've pivoted so hard into footwear.

It's this whole sports style phenomenon.

You're talking about their trail runners, right?

Shoes made for running through mud.

Exactly.

And now you see Bella Hadid wearing them in Paris.

They perfectly caught that gorp core wave where functional outdoor gear becomes high fashion.

Okay, so then you have arc'.

Teryx.

This one feels like the most direct application of the Wilson strategy.

Oh, absolutely.

Arc' Teryx is the breakout growth story of the whole portfolio.

It's almost exclusively direct to consumer, super high price point technical apparel.

And they've somehow managed to position a rain jacket as a luxury status symbol, not just a piece of gear.

Yeah, their growth in North America and China is just off the charts.

But the third one, Wilson, that feels like a different kind of challenge.

It's the heritage brand, founded in 1914.

It is.

I mean, they make the official ball for the NFL, the NBA, the wnba, the US Open.

That is pure hard goods dominance.

So how are they trying to force that soft goods pivot?

They call it their tennis 360 strategy.

They're trying to build out sportswear, tennis lifestyle apparel.

Which explains signing someone like Caitlin Clark as an ambassador.

Exactly.

They need to signal that Wilson isn't just the logo on the ball.

It's a brand you can wear.

It's a tougher sell, I think, than with Salomon.

It is, yeah.

But that's the whole story, isn't it, that Rosa Sports went from being this, you know, holding company full of factories to a single focused retail machine.

They're betting everything on the idea that industrial authenticity is the ultimate way to market and sell clothing.

It totally changes how you see their products.

Next time you see a Wilson basketball or those Salomon sneakers, you realize you're not just looking at a piece of.

Gear, you're looking at a financial strategy, one designed to turn engineering clout into fashion profits.

So I guess the final question is, what's the long term risk here?

Well, if you lean too hard into the fashion, the soft goods, do you eventually lose the technical engineering edge that made everyone want the brand in the first place?

That is the billion dollar question.

Thanks for listening.

Stay curious.

Thank you, Larry and Mary, for cleaning up the thin air on that topic.

The company I was telling you about that A. Wilson started in Canada is Chip Wilson's Lululemon.

And they are the official outfitter for Team Canada for this year's women and men across the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

And there's another way that Wilson is indirectly involved in this year's Winter Olympic Games.

For our Cuz Buzz section this week, here are a few articles of Wilson's that made the news.

Dean Wilson dominated his first supercross race in Birmingham, England.

Nancy Wilson wants to make one last Heart album and do a victory lap in 2027 or 28.

And I got a kick out of this next one.

There's a town called Wilsonville in Oregon.

They hired a new police chief and his name is Jed Wilson.

So Wilson is now the police chief of Wilsonville.

I love it.

Isn't that cool?

Well, there are more Wilsons in the news in our free Cuz Buzz newsletter.

So go sign up at our website@cuz wilson.com and the next thing, if you haven't already, click, follow and subscribe and then share this show with every Wilson you know.

See you Cuz.