CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Breezy Johnson is coming home with more than an Olympic gold medal.
The newly minted downhill champion got engaged Thursday, Feb. 12 after the super-G, her last race of the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games. With Johnson’s teammates surrounding them in the finish area, Connor Watkins got down on one knee in the snow and proposed.
Johnson began crying when she realized what was happening. When Watkins asked her to marry him, she nodded, beaming through her tears.
‘I had told him that I always dreamed of getting proposed to at the Olympics, so I had an inkling,’ Johnson said.
‘It felt fitting to kind of combine two of my loves,’ she said when asked why she wanted to get engaged at the Olympics. ‘And I don’t know, it’s a special place at the Olympics. I feel like there’s a lot of mystique around it.
‘And also you get free photography!’
The couple has been together for almost 2.5 years, and Watkins said he’s been planning the proposal for about a year. He had Johnson’s ring custom made – it’s a blue sapphire stone set between two curving white gold bands, one of which is filled with white sapphires – and made sure her family was all here.
He even had a Plan B in case the finish area didn’t work out.
‘You never know how the day’s going to work out. Sometimes the mountain’s going to be unforgiving,’ Watkins said.
As part of the proposal, Watkins also gave Johnson a note with lyrics from Taylor Swift’s ‘The Alchemy,’ which is believed to be about her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Johnson said it’s fitting because the song came out about the time they moved in together, and it’s about a poet and an athlete.
‘I feel like he’s the poet and I’m the sports person,’ Johnson said, grinning. ‘I feel like it’s so fitting. … I feel like we always hear the song and we smile and think about each other.
‘So it’s just kind of really special to us.’
The U.S. Ski Team and Team USA posted photos and video of the proposal, and Johnson was flooded with congratulations. Federica Brignone, who won the super-G, also congratulated them.
‘I didn’t see it,’ Brignone said. ‘But congrats to her. That’s amazing.’
Johnson and Watkins met on Bumble. They went to brunch on their first date, and Watkins said he had no idea who Johnson was until he asked her what she did.
‘I was a little taken aback. I had very little knowledge of ski racing and everything else,’ said Watkins, who works in the construction industry.
‘Over the past couple years, I’ve really grown to love it,’ he added, joking that he’s ‘outkicking my coverage.’
Johnson was one of 17 skiers who did not finish the super-G today. But she collected the first medal of these Games for Team USA when she won the women’s downhill earlier this week.
And now she has an engagement ring, too.
‘I mean, who doesn’t want to leave with a couple pieces of metal?’ Johnson joked.