William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, he profiles Erica L. Ayala and Jordan Dabney, who are covering the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 for Black Rosie Media, a multimedia platform that empowers Black women and women of color in sports media.<\/p>\n
Erica L. Ayala dreamed of competing in the Olympics as a child growing up in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really got into speed skating when I was younger, and I always loved skating and going fast,\u201d Alaya said. \u201cI would like, visualize looking up in the crowd, looking for my family, all of that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ayala has made it to the Olympics, but not as an athlete. The 40-year-old pioneering broadcaster\/journalist is among the 3,000 members of the media credentialed to cover the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.<\/p>\n
She and Jordan Dabney are providing dispatches for Black Rosie Media, a multimedia platform Ayala established in May 2022 to empower Black women and women of color in sports media. Ayala is also covering for Olympics.com, the digital hub of the International Olympic Committee.<\/p>\n
Ayala and Dabney are focusing on women\u2019s and men\u2019s hockey in Milano Cortina as well as chronicling the athletes of color participating in other sports at the Winter Games for the more than 22,000 followers of Black Rosie\u2019s podcasts, online newsletter and social media posts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea is to give voice to Black women and melanated people, regardless of how they identify,\u201d said Ayala, who is Black\/Latina. \u201cThroughout the year, we cover primarily hockey and basketball from the women’s sports perspective. When it comes to an Olympics, we first start with women’s sports and provide women’s sports fans with the field of athletes they may be familiar with because of their college ties or their pro ties.<\/p>\n
“We got to know those athletes leading up to the Olympics, talking about them throughout the year. When we\u2019re there (Milano Cortina), it’s an opportunity to do some direct storytelling with those athletes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-463556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}