Officially, Rich Ruohonen is listed as the alternate on the U.S. men’s Olympic curling team in Milan-Cortina. Unofficially, he might be the most indispensable 54-year-old personal injury attorney in the Olympic Village. He’d also be oldest American to ever compete at the Winter Olympics.
“I’m not the dad and I’m not the coach,” his homemade T-shirt communicates to other athletes, The Wall Street Journal reported. He’s there to compete. The way Team USA’s youngest Olympians tell it, that “guy” is the one cooking omelets before pressure games, grilling steaks after big wins, and quietly picking up a chunk of the tab to keep their improbable run on track.
A two-time U.S. champion and long-time fixture in American curling, Ruohonen has finally reached the Games after more than four decades in a sport he first learned on Saturday mornings in the fifth grade, at the St. Paul Curling Club in his home state of Minnesota.
The road here was winding. Ruohonen stepped away from elite men’s curling in 2022 after his sixth failed bid to make the Olympics, retiring twice in four years and shifting his focus to senior events and his thriving law practice in Minnesota. Still, his Team USA page clarifies that since he began curling in 1981, he only taken only one curling season off—while studying law at Hamline Law School in Minnesota and recovering from a serious knee injury.
