There are fewer faster and more nerve-wracking events at the Winter Olympics than luge, in which athletes throw themselves feet-first down the 1,730-meter track at the Eugenio Monti Sliding Centre in Cortina d’Ampezzo, reaching speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour (75 miles per hour). Four of the five luge events have been completed so far, with Germany winning both the men’s and women’s singles and Italy winning both doubles.
The luge portion of the 2026 Games will end at 12:30 p.m. ET (6:30 p.m. local), when the team relay is set to take place. In this event, each nation will send down four sleds in rapid succession, with a solo woman, solo man, and a doubles pair of each sex coming down the track as soon as the previous sled has crossed the finish line. Germany has won gold in each of the previous three iterations of the event, which was introduced prior to the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
Germany is a -150 favorite to take home the gold at DraftKings Sportsbook. Austria is +225, with Italy (+400) projected to round out the podium. Those three Alpine nations are the only ones with odds shorter than +2000 to take home gold.
Luge Mixed Team Relay prediction, pick
The German singles racers should carry the way, as Max Langenhan and Julia Taubitz each won their races by more than half a second a second across four legs. But though their doubles teams didn’t win gold, they weren’t far off, either: Tobias Wendl and Tobias Arlt finished just nine-hundredths of a second behind their Italian counterparts in men’s doubles, and Dajana Eitberger and Magdalena Matschina finished 12 hundredths of a second behind the Italian team. Because American Ashley Farquharson and Latvian Elina Bota both medaled in women’s singles, Germany was the only country to medal in all four luge events. The German teams won by an average of eight-hundredths of a second per run, larger than the margin between the first-placed and eighth-placed teams in men’s doubles.
But while eight-hundredths of a second per run may seem like a lot, margins are extremely fine in luge, and just one slip-up could be the difference between a German gold and an upset. Austria shouldn’t be underestimated despite women’s luger Lisa Schulte merely coming seventh, as its men’s doubles team of Thomas Steu and Wolfgang Kindl actually beat Germany in the men’s doubles competition. Austria actually leads the FIL Team Relay World Cup standings, finishing second behind Germany thrice and winning a race in which the Germans failed to complete the course.
Italy will have a pair of gold-winning doubles teams, as Simon Kainzwaldner and Emanuel Rieder and Andrea Voetter and Marion Oberhofer both managed to beat their German counterparts down the track across four races. Arguably the Italians’ weak link is women’s single Verena Hofer, but she only missed out on a medal by 0.063 seconds. The host nation ranks seventh in the FIL World Cup standings, winning in Park City ahead of Austria, with Germany slipping to fifth in that competition.
Because track familiarity is important and ice conditions can change subtly throughout the competition, start order will matter. Austria will launch third-to-last, Italy second-to-last, and Germany last. That means Taubitz, Langenhan, Eitberger, Matschina, Wendl, and Arlt will have the opportunity to watch 32 runs down the track to learn the intricacies of that day’s conditions — and also to psych themselves out.
There’s always the potential for mistakes on a course with such thin margins, but at merely -150 odds, it’s hard not to go with the nation that has historically dominated luge and has never lost a team relay in Olympic competition. Germany is set to once again prove its sliding supremacy.
