Knitting is the perfect activity to calm the body and soothe the mind during a high-pressure event like the Winter Olympics. Once you internalize your stitch pattern, you can just zone out and focus on how the yarn feels between your fingers, and for those EMDR girlies among us, knitting also counts as bilateral stimulation.
Since diver Tom Daley went viral in 2021 for knitting between events at the Tokyo Olympics, he’s become something of a knitbassador for the craft, and perhaps also an inspiration for this year's Olympians. This year, several athletes are posting their WIPs (works-in-progress) to social media, and as Defector's resident fiber freak, I am going to take this opportunity to review their projects.
Breezy Johnson, American Skiier
Johnson makes headbands and hats, according to this video. Her style is loose and somewhat improvisational; she doesn't follow patterns, preferring to self-draft colorwork and stitch patterns based on vibes. This is a fun way to knit! It does result in some wacky projects, though, such as this headband with a wavy bottom that seems to alternate between garter stitch and knit stitch between the color work.

Johnson admitted that she doesn't block her work, which is hardly the worst sin a knitter can commit. Blocking is the final step in knitting a garment, when you soak the work in water and then lay it flat to shape the garment and make the stitches look nice and uniform. It's an extremely annoying step, but I'm sorry to say that it also makes a huge difference in how the final product turns out. Breezy, I really urge you to consider blocking your work!
I would also consider an i-cord of 3-5 stitches for a project like this that has so much going on; it can help provide a solid frame around the colorwork and stitch variation. To be fair, it is possible that Johnson used an i-cord here—from some angles it looks like it could be, from others, not so much. If she did use one, I'd bump it up by one or two stitches for a more solid barrier.
Maxime Germain, American Biathlete
Germain is doing the sweetest thing ever and knitting a hat for someone special while he's at the Games. According to his Instagram post, he's working on a pattern called Fish Beanie from Tuna Knit Co., which is a minimal beanie pattern with colorwork geometric fish repeating throughout.

Germain is knitting this up in contrasting blue and white yarns, and it looks like the white is extremely floofy. Here it is in cake form:

I am willing to believe that this looks better in person than it does online. Texture like this can be hard to capture on camera, and a significant part of the pleasure of a knitted garment is the tactile experience of it against your skin. That being said, I don't think the white texture serves the colorwork super well here, because the vast difference between it and the background color muddles the lines of the design.
Adam Runnalls, Canadian Biathlete
What is it about skiing and shooting guns that lends itself to knitting?
Adam Runnalls has taken to knitting with the zeal of a convert. He's only a few months into his knitting journey but has made the practice so central to his Olympics persona that I thought surely he'd been doing it much longer.
I was impressed at the variety of projects he's taken on, which you can see in this video. He's primarily made hats and sweaters, but he has explored different techniques in each one, like colorwork and felting. I was particularly impressed by this duck sweater his wife made.

Runnalls is spending the Olympics working on one project, the Step by Step sweater by Florence Miller, which is a simple top-down raglan knit in pleasingly bulky aran weight yarn and featuring German short rows and a folded collar. It seems like the perfect sweater to provide just the right amount of instant gratification for a project tied to a time-boxed event. Here's where he was the night of the opening ceremony:

He's nearing the bottom hem and then headed to the dreaded Sleeve Island, a purgatory that can ensnare even the most dedicated knitters. (Sleeve Island is when you get stuck finishing the sleeves, which are arguably the worst and most boring part of a sweater, and you just never finish it.) I have faith that Runnalls will make it through because he's using an aran-weight yarn, which should move pretty quickly. I don't know that any Olympian really needs a pep talk from a blogger re: believing in themselves, but keep your morale up!
Maddie Mastro, American Snowboarder
Mastro posted a haul of her recent projects to Instagram and they were all beanies and scarves. I'm not seeing a ton of variation in beanie design except for a striped one that Weekend Knits claimed was their Beanie 002 pattern. Other than that, Mastro's beanies are mostly 1x1 or 1x2 ribs at varying gauges.

She experimented with a little bit of colorwork, most notably with this striped scarf, which is very cute.

An important part of knitting is learning to pace your challenges so that you're learning new skills at a manageable rate. The idea is that you don't stagnate, and maintain a steady flow of finished objects to remind yourself that you're actually capable of finishing something. I am pleased to know that Mastro has broken out of scarf/blanket purgatory, which is a necessary but painful phase most fiber artists must endure when they're first learning to knit. I wonder if she is a bit intimidated by bigger projects like sweaters, though. To that I say: if you know how to M1L/M1R, you can absolutely make a sweater. I would recommend that Mastro try out a very simple sweater pattern next, perhaps the Step by Step Sweater that Adam Runnalls is working on!






