Knitting during breaks, an Olympic athlete's pastime: "It relaxes and helps you focus."

More and more athletes are taking up this hobby between races. The trend launched by Tom Daley at Tokyo 2021 has also spread to Milan-Cortina

An unexpected new sport is becoming popular among the Olympic champions of Milan-Cortina: knitting. More and more athletes are equipping themselves with needles and yarn, taking advantage of what is called "knitting therapy" as a way to distract themselves from competitive pressure and performance anxiety. Thanks to the measured and repetitive movements, the mind trains to calm down and stay focused, essential qualities in Olympic disciplines like biathlon and cross-country skiing.

Some of them have even created clubs where, between races, they meet to drink hot tea and relax by knitting on a comfortable sofa. Canadian biathletes were the first to found what they call on social media "the most exclusive club of the Olympics." "Want to be part of the club? Send us your application, but we warn you: the jury will not be easy to convince," they write under one of their videos. Among the participants who stand out for their passion for knitting is Aadam Runnals, a Canadian biathlete who now calls himself an "Olympic knitter" on social media. Along with his "Olympic sweater," which he hopes to finish by the end of the Games, is the handmade hat Maxime Germain, an American biathlete who wrote under one of his posts, referring to his results in the races: "I'm nowhere near the level I'd like to reach. The good thing is that I have plenty of time for my knitting. Maybe my calling is to be a knitfluencer?" In a sport like theirs, where immediately after extreme physical effort you need to keep a cool head and clear head to hit a target, knitting even on the exercise bike can be an excellent workout, as Runnals himself explained.

This theory is also confirmed by American skier Ben Ogden, a cross-country skier who, with his recent second-place finish, managed to bring American cross-country skiing back to the podium after 50 years. On social media, he's now nicknamed "the silver knitter," and his teammate Breezy Johnson, an American skier, also uses knitting to "block" her mind when her thoughts are racing faster than her skis. She also has a superstitious ritual: for every important competition, she makes headbands by hand, which she then wears between races. "Knitting is a great way to calm myself," she says in a video on social media from the US team, "and since it brought me luck, I haven't stopped." The knitting trend among Olympic athletes had already exploded thanks to Tom Daley, the British diving champion, who was photographed in the stands knitting during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. "I love knitting because it's incredibly beneficial for mental health. For me, it's a way to escape stress: it helped me win Olympic gold here in Tokyo," he explained in an interview with Agence France-Presse.

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