6 Military Veterans Who Competed in the Winter Olympics for Team USA

There's a long history of United States service members competing in the modern Olympic Games. Hundreds have competed, and dozens won medals. Some participated in the Games before joining, while others were members of Team USA while simultaneously serving and a few competed after they completed their service.

Every individual who qualifies for a U.S. Olympic team is a world-class athlete, but there are some whose athletic performance and service records distinguish them from the rest of an impressive crew.

Eddie Eagan

Eagan agan has one of the most incredible Olympic stories of all time. He's the only person to earn a gold medal in both the Summer and Winter Games in different disciplines, and he did it with a 14-year break between the two wins.

After serving as an Army artillery lieutenant in World War I, Eagan enrolled at Yale and won a gold medal as a light-heavyweight boxer at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium. He was later a Rhodes Scholar and studied at Oxford, followed by a degree from Harvard Law School.

At the age of 34 in 1932, Eagan wanted to give sports one more try and filled in as a last-minute replacement on the four-man bobsled team for the Lake Placid Olympics. He had never competed in the sport before and never would again, but his team won the race and took gold.

Billy Fiske

Fiske's tale may be just as amazing. He took up the bobsled at age 16 and immediately won gold as part of the five-man team that competed in the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Four years later, the rules had changed and he competed again as a member of the four-man team at Lake Placid and won another gold. Yes, that's the same team that also included Eddie Eagan.

Fiske was living in London when World War II broke out and told British recruiters that he was Canadian so he would be permitted to join the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. As a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain in 1940, he was killed in action and became one of the first Americans to die in the conflict, almost 16 months before the United States entered the war.

Shauna Rohbock

Maybe there's something about the bobsled that attracts military members. Rohbock competed in the two-woman bobsled at two Winter Olympic Games as a Utah Army National Guard member. After graduating from Brigham Young University in 1999, Rohbock competed in the 2006 Torino Games in Italy and won silver with partner Valerie Fleming. She also competed in the 2010 Calgary Games, placing sixth with partner Michelle Rzepka.

Chris Fogt

Fogt joined the Army in 2008 after graduating from Utah Valley University. His Olympic sport? Bobsled.

Fogt competed in the 2010 Vancouver Games as a member of the USA-2 four-man team. Shortly after those games, he deployed to Iraq. He came back to the sport for the 2014 Sochi Olympics in Russia and won a silver medal as a member of the four-man squad nicknamed Team Night Train. He competed again in the 2018 PyeongChang Games in South Korea. As of 2022, Maj. Fogt is still serving in the Army.

Justin Olsen

Olsen has competed in three Winter Olympics Games as a bobsledder. He's a member of the New York Army National Guard and the U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program.

Olsen was a member of the four-man bobsled team that won the gold medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. His four-man team came in 12th at the 2014 Sochi Games and managed to compete in both the two-man and four-man bobsled at the 2018 PyeongChang Games even though he had emergency surgery to remove his appendix just after arriving in South Korea. His two-man team finished 14th, and his four-man team placed 20th.

Roy Mikkelsen

Mikkelsen never won an Olympic medal, but he had a notable military and sporting career. Also, he was a ski jumper and never competed in bobsled.

Mikkelsen was born in Norway and immigrated to the United States in 1924. He was a member of the ski jump team for the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics and the 1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics.

He later served as part of the Army's 99th Infantry Battalion, a unit made up of Norwegians and Norwegian-Americans who could ski and were fluent in the language. They were attached to multiple outfits after the 1944 D-Day invasion and participated in battles in France, Belgium and Germany.

Mikkelsen later played a key role in securing the 1960 Winter Olympics for Squaw Valley, California, and was inducted into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1964.

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