As Olympic athletes in Italy closed out the 2026 Winter Olympics season, sports business students closed out Olympic Studies Week at the University of Oregon. 

From Feb. 16-20, various events have been held by the Warsaw Sports Business Club and the Olympic Studies Hub. The Olympic Studies Hub is a Master of Business Administration program conducting research on the Olympic movement and the Olympic Games. Co-directors of the hub, Yoav Dubinsky and Bettina Cornwell, were unavailable for comment due to their travels to Italy for the International Olympic Symposium. 

The week’s events were mainly organized by students who were members of the undergraduate Warsaw Sports Business club. 

On Feb. 17, tours were held in the library to view archives of Olympic history. On Feb. 18, Will Stolpe, a former bobsledding Olympian and UO alumnus, visited the club’s weekly meeting. 

For three days, watch parties for the Olympic Games were hosted in Tykeson Hall, showcasing events like hockey, figure skating and curling. 

UO student Jack Albery has been involved in planning the week’s events as one of the members of the Warsaw Sports Business Club’s executive board. He was in charge of the media promotion for Olympic Studies Week, making graphics, pushing out emails and posting on Instagram to spread the word of the week’s events. 

Albery said the executive board has been working to “find ways to engage people and have them come (to Tykeson Hall) to watch the Olympics and see what Warsaw’s all about.” He said he was skeptical about the turnouts because it is a club event that many students don’t know about, but that the reactions have been positive schoolwide. 

“Having it in a more public space has really brought in a lot of people from all across campus … It sort of brought people together around the Olympics,” Albery said. 

Peter Stolpe, the academic advisor for the Warsaw Sports Business Club and an undergraduate professor for sports business, said the week’s events have been a six-month process to plan. According to Stolpe, the Olympic Studies Week is about “encouraging a sports moment” and giving sports business students an exposure to winter sports.

Because of Hayward Field and Eugene’s reputation as “Track Town, U.S.A.,” UO students get a lot of exposure to the summer Olympic sports. However, as Stolpe pointed out, the winter games are foreign to a lot of students. 

Stolpe said he’s been “pleasantly surprised” at the amount of student engagement at the watch parties, which had 80-120 students cycling in throughout the first day. 

“It’s been wildly successful,” Stolpe said. 

Lauren “LA” Anderson is the director of the Warsaw Sports Business Program, which is the umbrella program that holds both the Sports Business Club and the Olympic Studies Hub. 

She said that at the Olympic Studies Hub, they’re working on long-range planning for the next Summer Olympics in 2028, which will take place in Los Angeles. The Hub also has a connection with Hayward Field and TrackTown events. 

At the watch party on Friday, Anderson, who said she’s “super passionate” about the Olympics, was draped in an American flag, which she’s been wearing at every Olympic event since the 2002 Winter Games. On the flag was a “miracles happen” pin from the U.S. men’s hockey team. 

As the director of Warsaw, Anderson oversees the Olympic Studies Hub and the Sports Business Club, and was a major organizer of the week’s events. She said the Olympic Studies Week was something she wanted to do since the beginning of the school year and that the students in the organization really “took the reins” to make it happen. 

 Anderson said the goal of the week was to share with the campus what the Warsaw Sports Business Program does, and to “bring the winter games to everybody so people can start to learn about the sports, and just come out and have a good time.”

She recalled that during her time working at Nike, they would hold watch parties for big global sporting events, which is why she wanted to bring that to UO.

“It’s just a way to bring the community together,” Anderson said. “It’s nice if people aren’t aware of the Sports Business Club for them to see what we do and talk about sports as an industry, but I think really it’s an opportunity for us to engage as a community and do some fun stuff.”

As for the student turnout at the watch parties, Anderson said it was strong, with a “packed house” at the U.S. women’s gold medal hockey game. 

“The vibe in here was great,” Anderson said. “We got a great group of people here who are super excited to come and watch hockey, and early in the mornings we have people coming in to watch figure skating and bobsledding and skimo. It was a great chance to see some new sports, learn some new things, meet new people and have a lot of fun.”