Some athletes celebrate Olympic medals with champagne. Dominik Paris might celebrate his with a distorted guitar, a half-stack, and a chorus that sounds suspiciously like a downhill run at 130 km/h.
At 36, the Italian speed specialist finally grabbed his first Olympic medal, taking bronze in the downhill at the Milan–Cortina Games — on the Stelvio slope in Bormio, no less. A mountain he knows intimately. A mountain he’s conquered seven times on the World Cup circuit. A mountain that apparently waited until his fifth Olympics to say: fine, you’ve earned it.
And because the universe enjoys symmetry, Paris didn’t do it alone. His teammate Giovanni Franzoni, 24 and very much the future of Italian alpine skiing, slid onto the podium with silver, turning the downhill into a red-white-green celebration with Swiss racer Franjo von Allmen taking gold.
For Paris, it was long overdue.
“The Olympics is really special — you never know what’s going to happen,” he said.
Translation: sometimes even legends have to wait 15 years for the right breakdown.
From Fourth Place to the Podium (Finally)
Paris has 24 World Cup wins, a world championship title in super-G (2019), and a reputation as one of the most powerful downhillers of his generation. Yet the Olympic medal kept slipping away. His closest call? Fourth place in Pyeongchang, 2018 — the sporting equivalent of missing the encore by one song.
This time, everything aligned: home snow, home crowd, a course carved into muscle memory, and a younger teammate pushing the pace.
“It’s cool having a future in our team that pushes everybody,” Paris said.
Veteran translation: the kid is fast, and I like it.
Franzoni, for his part, knew exactly what this meant.
“This is the biggest stage to share a podium with him,” he said, calling Paris a legend and thanking him for a season’s worth of advice.
No irony here — just respect.
Groove Metal, Gravity, and Going Loud
Now for the part that makes Paris impossible to file under “normal Olympian.”
When he’s not racing downhill, Dominik Paris is the frontman of Rise of Voltage, an Italian groove metal band formed in 2017. Their debut album, Time (2018), arrived right on schedule. Their second release, Escape (2024), went heavier — because of course it did.
Tour dates kick off in June. One assumes the setlist may now include at least one song inspired by standing on an Olympic podium, staring down Stelvio, and thinking: this mountain hits harder than most riffs.
Paris himself keeps expectations grounded:
“I’m, for sure, a better skier,” he joked. “But if you listen to metal, I’m not so bad.”
Modesty aside, few athletes can claim they’ve headlined both World Cup start gates and club stages — and fewer still can say they finally nailed Olympic bronze while mentoring the next generation.
Heavy Metal, Heavy Legs, Heavy Medal
There’s something poetically metal about this whole story.
A veteran. A brutal slope. Years of near-misses. A home crowd. A younger ally. And at the end, not gold — but something earned, scarred, and real.
Bronze, after all, isn’t polished perfection. It’s grit. It’s weight. It’s honest.
Which makes it a pretty fitting award for a downhill racer who screams into microphones when he’s not screaming down mountains.
Expect the next Rise of Voltage record to be loud. And if there’s a track called “Stelvio”, don’t act surprised.