Kazakhstan plans to send a team of 35 athletes to compete at the XXV Winter Olympic Games, which will take place in Italy in 2026 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
The 2026 Winter Olympics will be held from February 6 to 22, bringing together approximately 3,000 athletes from 93 countries. A total of 116 sets of medals will be contested.
Kazakhstan’s athletes will compete in 10 disciplines across 58 medal events. These include biathlon, speed skating, figure skating, short track, alpine skiing, Nordic combined, cross-country skiing, ski jumping, freestyle moguls, and freestyle aerials.
Among the strongest medal contenders are figure skaters Mikhail Shaydorov and Sofya Samodelkina; freestyle skiers Anastasia Gorodko and Yulia Galysheva; speed skater Evgeny Koshkin; and a group of short track skaters, including several world championship medalists.
Shaydorov is the current world silver medalist in men’s singles figure skating. Galysheva won bronze in moguls at the 2018 Winter Olympics and was crowned world champion in 2019 in the same discipline. Gorodko has twice earned bronze in parallel moguls at the World Championships, in 2021 and 2025.
Kazakhstan has participated in every Winter Olympics since 1994, when skier Vladimir Smirnov won the country’s first and so far only, Winter Olympic gold medal in Lillehammer, Norway.
To date, Kazakhstan has won eight medals at the Winter Games: one gold, three silver, and four bronze. The Lillehammer Games remain the country’s most successful, with three medals and a 12th-place finish in the overall medal standings. At the most recent Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022, Kazakh athletes did not reach the podium.
However, the national team delivered a strong performance at the 2025 Winter Asian Games, finishing fourth in the overall standings with 20 medals.
