In Her Final Olympics, Hilary Knight Is Leaving Women’s Hockey Better Than She Found It

Competing in her fifth Winter Games, the U.S. captain is the face of American women’s hockey after her role in galvanizing the sport—both at home and internationally.

At the Milan Cortina Games, Hilary Knight has the chance to tie an Olympic hockey record with her fifth medal. | Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

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Every day that Hilary Knight wakes up in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics, she will know she’s exactly where she is supposed to be.

It's been 16 years since Knight first played for the United States national women’s hockey team at the Olympics in Vancouver, and 20 years since she first joined the squad as a teenager, but being an Olympian never gets old.

“The Olympics are just so special. It’s like every day you wake up you feel like a kid because it’s the most magical thing ever,” she says.

Now at her fifth and final Olympics, the 36-year-old is one of the most accomplished players of her sport, the face of the American game both on and off the ice. And as the Team USA captain progresses through the tournament with her team, which is the favorite to win gold, and if her team is successful, she could tie Canadians Jayna Hefford and Hayley Wickenheiser for an Olympic record five hockey medals (Knight has one gold and three silver medals). 

But just because it’s her final Games, don’t interpret it as Knight being past her prime. In the second period of the U.S.’s opening game against Czechia, Knight scored on a breakaway, powering past defender Klára Seroiszková to go top shelf while falling to her knees. She also had a league-leading 29 points in the PWHL last year, seemingly unlocking a new level of her game despite being in the twilight of her career. “The gameplay, honestly, it’s the best that it’s ever been,” Knight says in the middle of her season with the PWHL’s Seattle Torrents, one of the league’s first expansion teams. 

WHAT A GOAL BY THE CAPTAIN. 🫡

Hilary Knight goes top shelf for the USA's FOURTH goal of the day. pic.twitter.com/sIWEp6pQXa

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) February 5, 2026

Now in its third season, the PWHL has professionalized women’s hockey in a way that the sport has never before experienced: a 30-game regular season, designated facilities for teams to practice, equipped with proper coaching and training staffs in a way that was only seen at the collegiate or international levels before. And for players like Knight, this has meant having a career that doesn’t revolve solely around the four-year Olympic cycle. 

“The athletes themselves, getting to play this caliber 30 times a year, that was something we never had before this,” says Hefford, PWHL executive vice president of player operations. “Hilary Knight had one of the best years of her career last year. Marie Philip-Poulin seems to continue to get better. So we’re not seeing players fall off. We’re seeing the best players continue to get better through league play, which is really exciting. I expect women’s hockey will be the best we’ve ever seen in the Olympics.” 

To get the game to this level, it took a fight, one with Knight as the face on the American side of the game. When 200-plus women’s hockey players decided to boycott the existing leagues in 2019 with the goal of creating a united and sustainable North American league that treated them as professionals instead of part-timers, Knight and her fellow U.S. teammates had been here before. In 2017, with the IIHF World Championships just weeks away on home soil in Michigan, the 23 players of the national team decided they weren’t going to suit up to defend their world title. Inspired by the 99ers—the 1999 U.S. women’s national soccer team that boycotted after its World Cup win, demanding equity—their protest worked. Right before the tournament began, the players reached a deal with USA Hockey that saw an equitable investment into the girls’ and women’s programs. 

Knight (top right) scored in Team USA’s 5–1 win over Czechia to open its 2026 Winter Games campaign. | James Lang-Imagn Images

“We’ve all done it in smaller formats in our own ways, in our own communities, because a lot of us have shown up to a space that wasn’t built for us,” Knight says. “I think when you always feel like an outsider, it just instills a disruptive visionary, kind of like confidence somewhere deep down inside of you. And so you’re like, I want spaces that are for me, I wanna be a part of that, I wanna build that.

“You feel that empowerment and that confidence of being successful, and standing up for something bigger than yourself and sort of winning that battle, and you wanna do it again, because you know it’s the right thing to do. I think 2017 definitely gave us the confidence and the experience to go out there and demand and build better.” 

Kendall Coyne Schofield, who will be participating in her fourth Olympics, has been along for the ride with Knight and has witnessed firsthand the impact her teammate has had on the program. To her, the program is not successful without Knight. That includes obtaining resources as well as the team’s performance on the ice.

“What makes [Knight] so good as a leader is she just really knows how to tap into each player,” Coyne Schofield says. “She really has a great feel on the room, a great feel on her teammates and just who they are as people and what makes them go. She's always there to support those teammates. There’s so much that she does that we don’t know she does, and I think she makes all of us, our job coming to the rink a lot easier. She’s handling a lot of things outside of the rink, so it allows us to enjoy coming to the rink every day.”

Knight finds ways to make her teammates’ jobs easier on the ice too. One does not become the face of her sport without the highlight reels to support it. She graduated from Wisconsin in 2012 as a two-time champion and the all-time school leader (men or women) in goals with 143. On the international level, she has a record 10 gold medals at the world championships and holds the career record for most goals (67), assists (53) and points (120) at the tournament. 

But wait, there’s more. 

“Hillary’s defensive game is far better than people recognize,” fellow U.S. forward Kelley Pannek says. “She puts herself in a lot of really good spots. She attracts a lot of attention so she can also make plays to other people. She’s the kind of player you always constantly have to be on guard, and if you’re not, she will make you pay for it. And she doesn’t need a lot of space to do it.” 

Rivals in the PWHL, Coyne Schofield (far left) and Knight (far right) have played together in four Olympics. | Brian Fluharty-Imagn Images

Whether its winning medals or fighting for equity, Knight wasn’t the first to spark change in her sport, and she likely won’t be the last. If there’s anything she has learned throughout her career, it’s that there’s always more out there. While this will be her final Olympics, Knight hasn’t decided when she’ll hang up the skates for good. But whenever she does, she will certainly be remembered for the records she set on the ice and the progress she’s spearheaded off it. 

“It just becomes sort of a part of your fabric of wanting to have an impact on your sport, wanting to have a positive impact on someone in a small way through sport,” Knight says. “I think that’s where my gratitude and gratefulness come from. To have had an opportunity to be able to do that is a dream come true. And so I hope that whenever it is, when I’m done, that, you know, that’s mission accomplished.”

As Knight climbed the ranks in women’s hockey, the goal quickly became to leave the sport better than she found it. As the U.S. captain wakes up every day in Milan, she can safely say that's the case.

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