Rich Ruohonen’s current teammates weren’t alive when he first tried out for the U.S. Olympic curling team in 1987 — nor when he tried again in 1991. In fact, he fell short of making the team eight times.
Now at age 54, he not only qualified for the Milan Cortina Olympics, but he also became the oldest American to compete in the Winter Games last week.
“It kind of made all that devastation worthwhile,” said Ruohonen, wearing a navy USA hat on a Zoom call with The Washington Post.
Ruohonen had actually retired from competitive curling in 2021 to focus on his job as an attorney for a Minnesota law firm.
Then he received an unexpected call in the fall of 2024: A Minnesota team’s top player was sidelined with a neurological condition. Ruohonen agreed to temporarily replace him, playing on the team alongside curlers half his age.
He stayed on the team, becoming an alternate who coached his teammates and did whatever he could to assist them — cooking omelets, driving them around, carrying their equipment and staying up past their bedtimes to watch film.
His dedication paid off: He finally clinched his decades-held goal when his team won the U.S. trials and an international tournament to qualify for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
While the milestone wasn’t exactly what Ruohonen had long dreamed of — he substituted in at the end of a game his team didn’t have a chance of winning — he said it was one of the best moments of his life.
HISTORY AT THE #WinterOlympics.
54-year-old curler Rich Ruohonen waited more than 30 YEARS to make his Olympic debut. With the USA’s game out of reach, his team subbed him in, making him the oldest American ever to compete at the Winter Games. pic.twitter.com/Pqe91JClmn
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) February 12, 2026
“It was really emotional,” Ruohonen said. “I just get emotional talking about it, because it just shows perseverance — and a little luck. You got to get a little lucky too, you know? And I felt like part of my career wasn’t too lucky.”
The oldest American to compete in the Winter Olympics before Ruohonen was figure skater Joseph Savage, who was 52 during the 1932 Games in Lake Placid, New York.
Ruohonen was first introduced to curling around 12 years old, when his father, Art, took him to a curling club in St. Paul, Minnesota, at a time when people smoked cigarettes while sliding granite stones across ice sheets into target areas to score points. Ruohonen began playing there every Saturday morning.
Starting when curling was a demonstration Olympic sport — a special event that didn’t award official medals — in 1988, Ruohonen began his run trying out for the Olympic team. By the mid-1990s, he took a break to attend law school and start a family.
Curling became an official Olympic sport in 1998, and in the 2000s, Ruohonen resumed training for national tournaments. His teams won national championships in 2008 and 2018.
He said he approached curling similarly to his work as an attorney — and vice versa. His law firm’s website says that the “strategic thinking, discipline, perseverance, and mental toughness required in competitive curling mirror his approach to litigation: always thinking three steps ahead, always prepared for the next move and always giving it his all.”
But a loss at the 2021 Olympic trials prompted him to decide he would just curl for fun going forward.
Then in the fall of 2024, Ruohonen learned that curler Danny Casper, now 24, had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that occurs when someone’s immune system mistakenly attacks their nerves. Casper needed a fill-in while he recovered, and he found a few players who rotated in and out. The team still had its eyes on qualifying for the Olympics.
“It kind of got to the point where we were like, ‘We need an American citizen.’ So we looked really far down the list and found Rich,” Casper said at a news conference this month.
Ruohonen practiced with the team many mornings, went to work and trained again in the evenings. He traveled to tournaments on weekends, packing a collared shirt and a tie for work calls on Zoom. He gladly became the target of his teammates’ jokes about his age and danced to Taylor Swift songs for their social media videos.
“It’s like being with my kids,” Ruohonen said. “… I fit in pretty well for being twice their age.”
Even as Casper recovered and returned to his starring role, Ruohonen’s coaching as an alternate was crucial. He gave pregame pep talks, including one for the final match of the Olympic trials in November against a team that had dominated for more than a decade. Ruohonen’s team won and qualified for the Olympics a few weeks later at an international tournament.
Before the Winter Games began, Ruohonen set an automatic reply for his work email: “I am out of the office from January 30, 2026 through February 23, 2026 playing in the Olympics.”
To avoid confusion about a 54-year-old in the Olympic Village, Ruohonen designed a navy T-shirt that says “I’m Not The Dad Or The Coach.”
On Feb. 12, the U.S. team was down 8-2 to Switzerland and considering conceding the match. Ruohonen said he had competed against the fathers of some of Switzerland’s players, whom he approached with a question: “Can we play one more end just so I can get in?”
They agreed to another end, meaning round of play, and Ruohonen said he slid two stones as his wife, Sherry, and children, Hannah, 24, and Nick, 21, watched and cheered from the crowd.
“Yeah, baby!” Casper yelled across the ice after one of Ruohonen’s shots. “Good shot, Rich!”
“We’re not doing him a favor by putting him in,” Casper said of Ruohonen to NBC. “He deserves it.”
The United States failed to qualify for the semifinals after finishing 4-5 in the round-robin session. But this won’t be the end of Ruohonen’s career. In the spring, he’ll compete in the World Senior Curling Championships in Geneva, a competition for curlers at least 50 years old.
Ruohonen said he probably doesn’t have the time and energy for another Olympics run — but he said the same thing five years ago.
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