It’s up to you, New York, New York!
The Big Apple is sending just one born-and-bred native to try to take home gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics — fulfilling a dream the Manhattanite had since she was a tot.
This year’s Games are the first for Kamryn Lute, a 21-year-old from Tudor City who is representing the USA in Italy as a member of its action-packed speedskating team.
“I’m very excited,” Lute told The Post ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony.
“I feel like it gets more real the closer we get. It’s been a very surreal experience so far,” she said.
“From the moment I started, I knew I wanted to go to the Games.”
Lute will be competing as part of the Women’s 3000m Relay and 1500m for the Winter Olympic Games Milano Cortina 2026 alongside teammates Kristen Santos-Griswold, Corinne Stoddard, Julie Letai and Eunice Lee.
The New Yorker secured the spot after taking home her first two World Tour Relay medals.
Lute said she has a crystal-clear memory of watching the Winter Olympic Games Vancouver 2010 as a youngster with her parents when the coverage flipped to speedskating.
“I don’t know much at 5 years old, but it looked really cool … especially short track with the racing and how action-packed it is,” she recalled. “There’s just so much going on, and I think it just looked like unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
“So my mom immediately was like, ‘OK, let’s give it a try.’ We found a club very soon after, and I just started skating full-time ever since. I knew I wanted to go all the way.”
Lute said she finds it “very cool” to be the only Big Apple native repping the US at the Games this year.
Ice rinks are harder to come by in the Big Apple compared to soccer fields or swimming pools, so her resourceful parents found a training facility in Washington, DC, where her father spent a lot of time working.
The travel meant hours of dedication, but Lute said she was hell-bent on one day competing in the Olympics.
Her goal was first within reach before the Beijing games in 2022 when she was just 17 — though in the months leading up to the qualifying competitions, she began suffering serious fatigue, Lute said.
She was eventually diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid gland. The next year, she was diagnosed with Lupus and mixed connective tissue disease.
The news was difficult for the teenager to hear — but Lute was unwilling to let it stop her from reaching the goal she had been working toward for years.
“I have this mindset ingrained in me that I wanted to keep skating,” she said. “I just pushed through it, and we were able to do whatever it took to allow me to keep skating.’
“You can have everything physically, but if you don’t have the mental aspect, it’s going to be that much more difficult,” Lute said. “That’s something I’ve had to learn over time, especially when I started experiencing the conditions.
“It just made me realize more than ever that I wanted to skate for myself rather than having someone push me all the time, which is, when you’re younger, pretty common,” she said.
“You’re like, ‘This training is really hard,’ and you don’t always want to do it. But as you get older, I realized I do really love the sport and I want to make it work for as long as I can. The mental aspect is definitely half the battle.”
Lute credited her parents as her pillars of support in helping her realize her dream.
She added that before she gets to the starting line on race day, she plans on saying a prayer — a pre-race practice her parents passed on to her in her initial days.
Lute said that when all is said and done, she will be looking forward to some rest and relaxation at home, especially after spending years of training in Utah.
“New York City is still my favorite place in the world,” the Olympian said.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
