Make Me Smart about Olympic figure skating
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Winter Olympics kick off next week in Milan, Italy. On today’s show, Kimberly is joined by Jackie Wong, self-described skate nerd and host of “The Rocker Skating Podcast” to break down the basics of Olympic figure skating and who to watch at the Milan Cortina Games. Despite the sport’s popularity, figure skaters frequently struggle financially off the ice. We’ll get into it. Plus, you pick: real hockey or “Heated Rivalry”?
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- "Winter Olympics 2026 guide: All you need to know about the Milan Cortina Games" from AP News
- "Milan Cortina Olympics: Figure skating could have multiple American golds" from Yahoo Sports
- "What Should I Watch at the 2026 Winter Olympics?" from The Cut
- "Around 5 billion people - 84 per cent of the potential global audience - followed the Olympic Games Paris 2024" from the International Olympic Committee
- "To Go for the Gold, These Olympians Went Into the Red" from The Wall Street Journal
We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. |
| 0:07.0 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.0 | Thanks for joining us whether you are watching the YouTube live stream or listening later on the podcast. |
| 0:17.0 | Wonderful to have you along. If you're new here, this is Economics on Tap. It's our weekly |
| 0:22.7 | Happy Hour episode, and I am super excited to get into today's topic. We are talking Winter |
| 0:28.5 | Olympics, which start next week on February 6th in Milan, Italy, and our guest today is here |
| 0:34.4 | to make us smart about one of the game's most popular events, figure skating. |
| 0:39.3 | Jackie Wong is a self-described chief skate nerd at rocker skating and host of the rocker skating podcast. |
| 0:46.3 | Welcome to the show, Jackie. |
| 0:47.3 | Thank you for having me. How are you? |
| 0:50.3 | I'm good. I'm good. But I want to talk to you all about the Olympics and figure skating. But first things first, we got to talk drinks. What did you bring? |
| 0:58.0 | Okay. I have a non-alcoholic beer from athletic brewery. So I'm a fan. |
| 1:05.0 | Wonderful for dry January or just cause? |
| 1:08.0 | Just because it's a work night. |
| 1:10.0 | Ah, yes, because you're technically working. |
| 1:12.6 | Well, thank you for working with us on a Friday night. |
| 1:14.6 | I appreciate it. |
| 1:16.6 | I have an alcoholic drink. |
| 1:18.6 | I actually had to go back into my own archives because for the Summer Olympics, I made a version |
| 1:25.6 | of an Olympic torch cocktail cocktail which was like this |
| 1:29.7 | mixture of gold slager for you know gold medal grand marionet orange |
| 1:36.5 | bitters and triple sec and orange juice and I lit it on fire for the winter |
... |
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