Sports Illustrated released its iconic Olympics issue, and all four cover athletes are women

Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, speed skater Erin Jackson, cross country skier Jessie Diggins, and hockey star Abby Roque are the faces of the Olympics issue.

• The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing is nearly upon us.
• Sports Illustrated has released its iconic Olympics issue ahead of the games.
• All four cover athletes are women and top competitors for Team USA.

The Beijing Olympics are nearly upon us.

Sports Illustrated has released its iconic Olympics issue spotlighting the competitors representing Team USA ahead of this year's winter games.

And in a historic move, all four athletes selected for the cover are women.

Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, speed skater Erin Jackson, cross country skier Jessie Diggins, and hockey player Abby Roque are the faces of the February edition of Sports Illustrated. And in addition to earning photos on the front of the magazine, all four medal contenders were featured in elaborate cover stories that contextualize their journeys to Beijing.

Shiffrin has long been a ski racing phenom. The Vail, Colorado, native became the youngest alpine skiing slalom champion in Olympics history when she won gold in Sochi eight years ago, just a few weeks shy of turning 19.

Now 26, Shiffrin is shouldering a burden few besides Simone Biles or Shaun White could ever fathom; all eyes are on her once every four years, and anything short of perfection is deemed a letdown. For example, at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, Shiffrin pulled out of two events and underperformed in another after weather-induced scheduling changes and media obligations followed her giant slalom gold-medal win.

And even though she returned to the mountain to earn her a silver medal in the combined event — a gritty, resilient performance that, in hindsight, looks similar to Biles' bronze-medal comeback in Tokyo last summer — her trip to South Korea was widely considered a bust.

"The disappointment from those failures feels incredibly real," Shiffrin told SI's Greg Bishop. "Even now."

But in the wake of her father's untimely death, a back injury that has limited her training, and the crushing expectations ascribed to her many years ago, Shiffrin has managed to shift her perspective heading into her third Olympic Games. Bishop details that transformation with stunning detail in Shiffrin's cover story.

Erin Jackson had an entirely different trajectory in her sport than Shiffrin's. The 29-year-old began seriously competing in speed skating far later than most of her peers.

Jackson punched her ticket to the 2018 games for Team USA despite having only four months of training on ice ahead of qualifiers. Since then, she's blossomed into the world's top-ranked speed skater in the 500-meter event, winning four of the eight most recent World Cups in the race ahead of qualifiers for this winter's games.

In her cover story, Sports Illustrated's Stephanie Apstein takes readers through Jackson's remarkable journey to Beijing.

Next up is Jessie Diggins, the cross country skier who became Team USA's first-ever woman to earn a gold medal in her sport with a come-from-behind victory in Pyeongchang four years ago. Since then, the 30-year-old has become a dominant force on the international circuit.

And last year, she earned "the most prestigious individual title of her career, becoming the first American to win the multistage Tour de Ski," as Sports Illustrated's Michael Rosenberg writes in her cover story. Two months later, she became the first woman from the US to capture the overall FIS Cross-Country Ski World Cup title.

She's a favorite to win gold in Beijing, but Diggins is less concerned with results than she is with the effort that goes into crossing the finish line. Rosenberg captures the Minnesotan's commitment to the process — and the pain that comes with it — in Diggins' cover story.

Team USA hockey's Abby Roque rounds out the slate of cover athletes. The 24-year-old center will make her Olympics debut in China as the Americans look to defend their gold medal without several of the veterans pivotal to the team's winning efforts in Pyeongchang.

Roque's inclusion on the 23-player roster has added significance; she's one of a small group of Indigenous athletes who have been tapped to represent the United States on sports' biggest stage. The Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan native grew up as a member of the Wahnapitae First Nation tribe.

When she left her home to play hockey at the University of Wisconsin, she was shocked to find how little most of her peers knew about Native American culture. Now that she has such a prominent platform, she's focused on "doing what I can to make it visible to people, so they know you can make it this far" as a competitor from an under-represented community.

She is the lone nonwhite player heading to Beijing with Team USA's women's hockey team, according to Sports Illustrated.

"I'm lucky to have gotten all the way here," Roque told SI's Alex Prewitt for her cover story. "So I need to continue to push hockey to become more diverse."

Though all four cover stories and photos dropped digitally on Tuesday, readers can pick up a copy of Shiffrin's, Jackson's, Diggins', and Roque's Sports Illustrated issues from newsstands beginning Thursday. And sports fans can tune in on NBC to watch all four stars in action at the 2022 Olympics from February 4 to the 20th.