Formally, Wealthy Ruohonen is listed because the alternate on the U.S. males’s Olympic curling staff in Milan-Cortina. Unofficially, he is likely to be essentially the most indispensable 54-year-old private harm legal professional within the Olympic Village. He’d even be the oldest American to ever compete on the Winter Olympics.
“I’m not the dad, and I’m not the coach,” his do-it-yourself T-shirt communicates to different athletes, the Wall Avenue Journal reported. He’s there to compete. The way in which Workforce USA’s youngest Olympians inform it, that “guy” is the one cooking omelets earlier than strain video games, grilling steaks after massive wins, and quietly selecting up a bit of the tab to maintain their inconceivable run on observe.
A two-time U.S. champion and longtime fixture in American curling, Ruohonen has lastly reached the Video games after greater than 4 many years in a sport he first realized on Saturday mornings within the fifth grade, on the St. Paul Curling Membership in his dwelling state of Minnesota.
The highway right here was winding. Ruohonen stepped away from elite males’s curling in 2022 after his sixth failed bid to make the Olympics, retiring twice in 4 years and shifting his focus to senior occasions and his thriving legislation observe in Minnesota. Nonetheless, his Workforce USA web page clarifies that since he started curling in 1981, he has taken just one curling season off—whereas finding out legislation at Hamline Legislation College in Minnesota and recovering from a critical knee harm.
On paper, Ruohonen’s function is restricted: As an alternate, he might by no means really throw a stone on Olympic ice. In actuality, the Journal studies, he does have a dad-like presence on the staff. He drives the rented minivan, handles early morning grocery runs so his teammates can sleep, flips eggs to order on sport days, and makes use of a profitable lawyer’s earnings to assist cowl journey and lodging that Olympic stipends don’t absolutely attain. (There may be the matter of a $200,000 reward, given to each Olympian by billionaire Ross Stevens, vesting both at age 45 or 20 years after their look, implying Ruohonen will acquire his in his mid-seventies.)
A accomplice at TSR Harm Legislation, Ruohonen has constructed a status as a relentless plaintiff’s legal professional, securing multimillion‑greenback verdicts and settlements and incomes a number of “Attorney of the Year” honors in his state.
Colleagues describe a litigator who hardly ever loses at trial and approaches every case with the identical meticulous preparation he brings to studying the ice. Ruohonen started curling greater than a decade earlier than a few of his teammates had been born, and has medals from again‑to‑again senior world championships—but he nonetheless exhibits up for six a.m. exercises and accepts his essential job is likely to be to face on the sidelines with a stopwatch and a joke.
