LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — When Claudia Riegler started speaking about her snowboarding rivals at the Winter Olympics, she had a verbal slip that confirmed an obvious truth.
“I never think about age,” she said. “If I’m racing, I even don’t know how old the girls are.”
Click to Gallery
Czechia's Ester Ledecka, left, and Austria's Claudia Riegler compete during the women's snowboarding parallel giant slalom finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Austria's Claudia Riegler, left, and Czechia's Ester Ledecka compete during the women's snowboarding parallel giant slalom finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
Austria's Benjamin Karl celebrates winning the gold medal in the men's snowboarding parallel giant slalom finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
A wolf is displayed on the helmet of Austria's Claudia Riegler as she waits to compete during the women's snowboarding parallel giant slalom qualifications at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
Then, she did a quick, embarrassed double-take.
“The girls!" she said. "Now, it sounds really like I am older!”
Riegler isn't one of the girls. In fact, she could be their mother, or even grandmother. But how many of them will be able to say they are a proud Olympian at 52 years old?
This Austrian über veteran competed in her fifth Winter Games on Sunday when she raced in the parallel giant slalom in the sunbaked Italian Alps.
That in itself is some achievement, especially given the talent that snow-crazed Austria churns out.
Yet she wasn’t just here to pick up another participation certificate. Riegler showed she still could carve through the gates with the best in the world. She dug in and made the cut for the elimination rounds, right on the cusp, finishing No. 16 from the qualifying field of 36 riders.
That paired her with two-time defending gold medalist Ester Ledecka, 22 years her youth.
Nobody expected Riegler to pull off an upset against Ledecka. That fell to fellow Austrian Sabine Mayer, who stunned Ledecka in the quarterfinals on her way to winning the silver. But if you are going to go out, it might as well be to the sport’s GOAT.
Riegler finished 1.13 seconds behind Ledecka, a considerable gap but not one that caused any shame.
Only when Riegler, her day done, took off her ski helmet emblazoned with a fierce white wolf could you see the gulf in years that separated her from her rivals, which included one 16-year-old.
“I’m really proud that I’m here today and that I had a really good run against Ester,” she said. “I’m happy that I made it to the finals today and I even made a really good final run.”
Riegler made her Olympic debut at Salt Lake City in 2002, one year before the new gold medalist, Czech rider Zuzana Maderova, was born.
Not many months after the Olympic debut, when she was 29, her Austrian team coach said she was over the hill and dropped Riegler from the team.
Yet what could've been the end turned out to be the fuel that has kept her going for two more decades.
“I have to say my biggest motivation now is my age because I was kicked out of the team when I was 30 and they told me I’m too old,” Riegler said. “So at that moment I said to myself, no, it was not over. I will continue by myself. And if he’s saying this, it doesn’t have to be the truth. I have to find my own truth. That’s the thing which is motivating me a lot.”
So she kept training and eventually, after three years and a coaching change, she was back riding in Austria’s red-and-white.
She went on to win the parallel giant slalom world championship in 2015, while adding up over 400 World Cup starts.
Now she is going home satisfied that she didn't show her age in Livigno.
An alternate for the American curling team, Rich Ruohonen, is 54 at these Games. (He has yet to compete.)
But an action sport such as Parallel giant slalom (PGS), where snowboarders zigzag through gates over a short course to see which reaches the bottom first, seems to befit older athletes.
The men’s gold medalist Sunday was 40-year-old Ben Karl, another Austrian, who successfully defended his title won in 2022.
To celebrate he tore off his shirt and flexed his muscles, showing no signs of a “dad bod” even though he's middle aged.
“You saw me with my naked body and I think you can be super good in shape until 40 and maybe until 50, I don’t know," he said. "There is no reason to slow down with my age.”
More evidence for PGS being an elixir of athletic youth: Men’s silver medalist Kim Sangkyum is 37, while another top male rider in Sunday’s lineup was the 45-year-old Roland Fischnaller.
It must be something in the snow.
Or, as Ledecka’s coach, ex-snowboarder racer Justin Reiter, pointed out, racers don’t suffer the same injuries and overall wear and tear that the halfpipe daredevils do when attempting their aerial stunts.
“When you get a little bit older and the knees get a bit creaky, you tend not to ride rails that are in the park or do jumps,” Reiter said. “You tend to ride on your edges and carve and turn. And so you have this return to the roots of snowboarding.”
For Riegler, it's about cycling and weight training, and a good dose of belief. That said, she is eyeing after next year's world championships in her home country as the moment to lay down the board for good.
“I think would be a really nice ending for me,” she said.
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
Czechia's Ester Ledecka, left, and Austria's Claudia Riegler compete during the women's snowboarding parallel giant slalom finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Austria's Claudia Riegler, left, and Czechia's Ester Ledecka compete during the women's snowboarding parallel giant slalom finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
Austria's Benjamin Karl celebrates winning the gold medal in the men's snowboarding parallel giant slalom finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
A wolf is displayed on the helmet of Austria's Claudia Riegler as she waits to compete during the women's snowboarding parallel giant slalom qualifications at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87.
The network reported Turner died Wednesday, citing a news release from Turner Enterprises.
Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy Body Dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 2 million acres of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.
Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. At a time news is instantly available at anyone’s fingertips, it’s hard to recall that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to learn what’s going on in the world was once revolutionary.
In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own newscasts at 11 p.m.
He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent American attack. CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock, but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion became the stock in trade of networks like Fox News and MSNBC. Even though CNN built a worldwide news organizations particularly strong online, it struggles to this day with a diminished desire for straighter TV newscasts.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a coed into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work as an account executive for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems around the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.
TBS’ motley collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans across the nation through their superstation exposure and in the 1980s began declaring themselves “America’s Team.”
Turner, who early on donned a uniform and managed one game, helped open baseball’s free-agent price wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.
In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to make them appealing to a younger audience.
TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”
He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
Asked to share the secret to his success, he said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”
For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women with a roguish charm, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She quit acting while married to Turner, but tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.
“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda said of her relationship with Turner.
Turner had an unexpected friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, bonding over hunting and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A once bitter rival who compared Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern over the environment.
Turner built a sports empire, at one point owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He was best remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the doormats into postseason regulars by the 1990s. Their stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves replaced it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.
Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. He spoke often of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023, but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
During a stock market bust, Turner’s net worth went from nearly $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.
“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in 30 months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “That means that, on average, my net worth dropped by about $67 million “per week,” or nearly $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”
He had enough time, and money, to devote to such lofty goals as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”
Through the years, Turner’s antics occasionally overshadowed his business activities.
Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the America’s Cup title in 1977, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the floor at the victory celebration.
Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus-freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.
He once suggested in a speech that unemployed Black people be used to haul mobile missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.
Other times, his humor saved him from potentially awkward situations, like when he talked to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”
Turner, father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion, or $100 million a year for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving money to the U.N., calling it the best hope for peace.
He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Turner fretted publicly about the world’s problems.
“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”
As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches. Another time he lent personal paintings for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.
Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.
FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner holds up the World Series trophy on the field at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium after the Braves won the 1995 World Series, Oct. 28, 1995, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
FILE - Actress and political activist Jane Fonda and media mogul Ted Turner arrive at a party in support of Proposition 128 in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1990. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)
FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)
FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
