From Gold to “I Do”: Utah’s Breezy Johnson gets engaged at the Olympics

Breezy Johnson training at Copper Mountain in 2020. Photo: Max Hall, courtesy of U.S. Ski & Snowboard

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — It was already shaping up to be the week of Breezy Johnson’s life. Then her boyfriend dropped to one knee.

View this post on Instagram

The 30-year-old alpine ski racer — a graduate of Salt Lake City’s Rowmark Ski Academy, who moved to Utah at age 13 to train on the slopes of Park City Mountain Resort and Utah Olympic Park, according to NBC Olympics — capped a storybook stretch at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on Thursday when fiancé Connor Watkins proposed at the finish line of the women’s super-G race in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

The proposal came just four days after Johnson claimed Team USA’s first gold medal of the Games, winning the women’s downhill on Feb. 8 with a time of 1:36.10 — edging Germany’s Emma Aicher by just four hundredths of a second, according to NBC News. NBC Olympics reports the win made Johnson only the second American woman ever to claim Olympic downhill gold, joining Lindsey Vonn, who won the title in Vancouver in 2010.

Thursday’s super-G was a harder day. Johnson crashed into the safety netting and was among more than a dozen racers who did not finish on a difficult course. She skied to the bottom on her own — and Watkins was waiting.

“I was feeling kind of stupid, which is the moment you want the people you love around you,” Johnson said of the moment, according to NPR.

Their love story is modern: the couple met on the dating app Bumble in 2023, when Watkins said he had no idea Johnson was an elite ski racer, NPR reports. According to NBC Olympics, Watkins — a construction worker based in Salt Lake City — had been planning the proposal for about a year, including having the ring custom-made. After Johnson’s crash, a team staffer quietly checked on her mood before proceeding. “There was a Plan B just in case there needed to be,” Watkins told NBC News.

There was no need for it. Johnson tearfully accepted, surrounded by U.S. teammates and officials who erupted in cheers.

Johnson told reporters she had long imagined the moment. “I always kind of had the dream of getting engaged at the Olympics,” she said, according to NBC News. Watkins agreed that the reality surpassed anything he had pictured. “It went above and beyond our wildest imagination,” he told NBC News.

The couple planned to celebrate with family and friends in Cortina before heading to Livigno for the remainder of the Games, according to NBC News.

Johnson leaves Italy with gold, a ring, and a full-circle moment: it was a training crash on this very course in Cortina that tore her ACL and forced her to miss the 2022 Beijing Olympics, per NBC Olympics. She came back anyway — and then some.