A Super Bowl starting at 12:30 a.m.? Welcome to an Olympic-sized problem for fans in Italy
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — USA Luge men’s doubles slider Zack DiGregorio is a New England Patriots fan. Makes sense: He’s from Massachusetts, his mother has worked for the Patriots for more than two decades and the Patriots are about to play in the Super Bowl for the 10th time since he was born.
He doesn’t miss games. Especially not big games. And games get no bigger than the Super Bowl.
Welcome to a Super-sized Olympic dilemma: What does one do when football’s biggest game collides with the Milan Cortina Games? In Italy, the game between the Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks kicks off Monday at 12:30 a.m., a time when Olympians like DiGregorio should be asleep and not exhausting themselves before taking part in their own Super Bowl of sliding.
“If I happen to wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom,” DiGregorio said, “I may be tuning in.”
He won’t be the only one in Italy with a gaze locked on a TV, laptop or phone screen in the wee hours of Monday morning. There are 15 members of this U.S. Olympic team from Massachusetts, eight more from Washington and who knows how many else with reason to watch.
Gold-medal pursuits may be forgotten, for a few hours anyway, to watch two teams play for a silver trophy. And yes, some Olympians with major rooting interests in this game say they’ll go without and make sure their sleep cycles aren’t interrupted.
“I’m not going to be able to watch because that’s going to be real late here,” said curling Olympian Korey Dropkin, who was born in Massachusetts. “But as my form of support, I’m going to wear my Pats jersey to bed.”
Then again, some athletes at the Olympics won’t have to stay up to watch. It seems a few already are somehow aware of the outcome.
“It’ll be the middle of the night here so I think we will see the score afterwards,” said short track speed skater Corinne Stoddard, a Seattle native. “We don’t want to be up all night. But the Seahawks are going to win. I don’t have any doubt in my mind about that one. We’ve proved it all year. So, good luck, Patriots.”
Women’s hockey player Alex Carpenter — a dual citizen of sorts for this Super Bowl, a Massachusetts native who plays for the PWHL’s Seattle Torrent — has a game on Monday, so she said she’ll just “check the score in the morning.”
And Boston Bruins star Charlie McAvoy — part of the U.S. men’s hockey team in Milan — told NBC he might just go to bed really early Sunday night.
“That could look like a 5 a.m. wake-up to catch the second half,” McAvoy said.
The collision of a Super Bowl and an Olympics is a fun headache for some. For the Olympic movement, it represents a bigger issue.
Sunday (or Monday in Italy, technically) will mark only the second time that the Super Bowl and the Winter Games will be happening on the same day. They collided in 2022 as well, and with NFL seasons now several weeks longer than they were a generation or two ago these conflicts are probably going to keep happening.
“You’ve got big events all working and overlapping,” International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry told the Olympic Information Service coming into the Milan Cortina Games. “So, the next part of the question is, when are we all going to sit down as one big sporting family and have these conversations around how we prioritize, how do we talk, how do we make space for each of us so that we’re also not competing against each other?”
For now, those involved will just enjoy having two big things to root for at basically the same time.
Mark Henderson’s daughter is U.S. Olympic freestyle skier Grace Henderson, who is scheduled to compete at 10:30 a.m. Monday.
That’s a few hours after the Super Bowl ends. Prediction: Mark Henderson is going to be tired.
He found a bar in Livigno, Italy that has agreed — with the help of some cash — to stay open until the end of the Super Bowl to ensure the Henderson clan of about 15 to 20 people have enough food and drink past the scheduled 2 a.m. closing time.
“I said, ‘What would it take to stay open a few more hours?’” Mark Henderson said. “I named a price and they took it. Food and drink included.”
Krista DiGregorio, Zack’s mom, is looking for a similar establishment. She probably would have been at the Super Bowl this year — she works in the suites at Gillette Stadium, and that part-time role basically funded her son’s costly luge career as he was becoming an Olympian.
Her plan: Find a bar that’ll stay open in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
“We’ll beg, if need be,” she said. “I am not above begging or perhaps sliding a few euros in their direction.”
The main focus for the DiGregorio clan right now is, of course, the Olympics. Zack has his Drake Maye jersey with him. The family’s rental home has all the necessary fan touches: more Pats jerseys, signs, banners, even a towel with the team’s “We all we got, we all we need” theme.
But the way Krista DiGregorio sees it, she already got her championship parade Friday night when her son was in the Olympic opening ceremony and got to march with teammates through the streets of Cortina.
A Super Bowl win would be wonderful. Either way, it’s been a pretty good season for her.
“Unreal. Unreal,” Krista DiGregorio said. “I didn’t anticipate being as emotional as I was at that parade. To be there and see how happy he is, how happy his teammates are, the people he’s grown up with and gotten close to, it’s been wonderful.”
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AP Sports Writers Joseph Wilson and James Ellingsworth contributed to this story.
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
