By ANDREW DAMPF and STEVE DOUGLAS

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Standing on a tower overlooking the cliffs of the Cortina downhill course, there is someone who is just as involved in the biggest skiing races of the Winter Olympics as Mikaela Shiffrin and Breezy Johnson.

Martin Bochatay is the drone cam pilot for the money shots inside the iconic Tofana schuss, the narrow chute between two walls of Dolomite rock.

He is part of a team in control of the buzzing machines that are flying right behind Olympians as they go for gold at the Milan Cortina Games, offering stunning and high-pace visuals to TV viewers back home.

“In my mind, I’m not flying a drone. I’m flying with the skiers,” Bochatay told The Associated Press before the Olympics. “It’s an immersive thing. … The skiers don’t see us. But I’m right there with them. You become the drone.”

A drone follows Philipp Raimund, of Germany, as he soars through the air during his first round jump of the ski jumping men’s normal hill individual at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Predazzo, Italy, Monday, Feb. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Drone cams have become ubiquitous in showcasing the speeds and angles of skiers, lugers, snowboarders, ski jumpers and other Winter Olympians at these Games.

“The skill of those drone pilots is just phenomenal,” U.S. bobsledder and flag bearer Frank Del Duca said. “It gets a really unique perspective.”

Viewers have noted the humming noise coming from the machines, sparking the question: Is it putting off the Olympians in the biggest moment of their lives? Norwegian downhiller Kajsa Vickhoff Lie says that’s not an issue.

“No, you just maybe hear them on the start, but you don’t hear them when you ski,” she said.

The drones are tiny and zoom beyond 100 mph

Drone cams made in inauspicious impact on Alpine skiing 11 years ago when a primitive, massive machine came crashing down from the sky and nearly smashed into Austrian great Marcel Hirscher during a slalom race.

These days, the drones are agile, tiny — they weigh around half a pound — and can easily accelerate to speeds beyond 100 mph.

Drone pilot Jonas Sundal, from Canada, holds one of the drones being flown at the ski jumping venue during the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Predazzo, Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

In all the sports, there are rules preventing the drones from overtaking the athletes, and they must keep a safe distance behind the competitors.

Pitch, roll and yaw: how to fly a drone

The drones actually contain two cameras. There’s a high-quality camera for broadcast purposes that is actually controlled by the TV production unit in a truck below the course.

“They can adjust whether it’s too bright, the balance, without us doing anything,” Bochatay said.

Then there’s a lower-quality camera that the pilots use to see where they are going. Those are the images that the pilots see in the goggles they wear to fly the drones.

A drone operator captures video ahead of an alpine ski, men’s super-G race, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Bormio, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Gabriele Facciotti)

The pilots have a remote control that requires two hands to hold, and contains two main switches to input the flying commands of pitch (front-to-back), roll (side-to-side) and yaw (vertical axis); plus throttle (up/down or altitude control).

“There’s always these four,” Bochatay said. “It’s not like you move one then the other. It’s everything at the same time.”

There’s also a low-tech issue: the batteries for the drones need to be changed constantly — and kept in warming cases due to the cold temperatures — requiring a “pit stop crew” to quickly sub in new batteries between runs.

Flying footage can be ‘nauseating’ but beautiful

Two things were important to Olympic broadcasting officials: Showing off both the beauty of the venues and the point of view of the athlete.

A drone follows China’s Lin Qinwei as he starts for a men’s skeleton training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

And the International Olympic Committee is delighted with the results as they look to bring viewers closer to the action. Maybe too close.

“Looking at the screen in the downhill, I almost feel motion sickness,” said Pierre Ducrey, the IOC’s sports director. “That’s how much we are able to project ourselves thanks to this new way of broadcasting the sport.”

U.S. bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor agreed.

“I’m not concerned about the drone or anything like that,” she said, “but I will say I was watching the luge footage the other day and I was like, ‘This is slightly nauseating.’ I don’t know if I could watch this all the way down the run.”

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Lie, the Norwegian skier, likes how the drones showcase a key aspect of skiing: It’s cool to see the speed a little bit more for the spectators.”

AP Sports Writer Tim Reynolds contributed to this report.

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

By MICHAEL CASEY and MARK SCOLFORO

BOSTON (AP) — A college student deported to Honduras while traveling for Thanksgiving in November must be returned to the United States within two weeks, a federal judge in Boston ruled Friday.

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U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns issued an order that required the return of 19-year-old Babson College freshman Any Lucia Lopez Belloza by the end of February.

Stearns said he had hoped the Trump administration would come up with a solution after it acknowledged mistakenly deporting Lopez Belloza. Having failed to do that, Stearns said, he was compelled to act. He said it was up to the courts to determine her rights and the legality of her removal.

“This is not an issue for the Executive to prejudge and arrogate to itself, whatever stance it may choose to take in litigating the removal issue before a court of law,” Stearns wrote.

Asked about the decision, the Department of Homeland Security e-mailed a statement saying Lopez Belloza received “full due process” and a final order of removal. The federal agency said she entered the U.S. in 2014 and that the removal order was issued by an immigration judge the following year.

The government has said she missed multiple opportunities to appeal. But Lopez Belloza said her previous attorney told her there had been no removal order.

Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, said previously that the government’s response “spills a lot of ink on the difficulty of a student visa, but it fails to address the numerous simple solutions available to itself to rectify its ‘mistaken’ deportation.” Pomerleau could not be reached for comment late Friday.

Lopez Belloza, who has no criminal history, was detained at Boston’s airport Nov. 20 as she prepared to fly home to Texas for the holiday. She was deported two days later.

She has been staying with her grandparents in her native Honduras, a country she had last been to more than a decade ago.

Babson has offered her support to continue her studies remotely, as she pursues a business degree.

Scolforo reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — In a near-empty courthouse, in front of almost no one, the appeal by New Zealand’s most reviled killer was heard in muted fashion with little mention of the details of the country’s deadliest mass shooting.

Such is New Zealand’s desire to smother the racist motivations of Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslims praying at two mosques in the city of Christchurch in 2019. Tarrant, a self-professed white supremacist, referred to other perpetrators of hate-fueled massacres when he committed his attack and other mass shooters have cited his actions since.

Yet it’s rare to encounter the Australian man’s words in New Zealand, the country where he migrated with a plan to amass semiautomatic guns and carry out the slaughter.

Officials have sought to curb the spread of his views, including through a legal ban on his racist manifesto and a video he livestreamed of the shooting. The effort to prevent public exposure to Tarrant is perhaps most apparent in New Zealand’s courts, where he sought this week to recant his guilty pleas.

A three-judge panel in the Court of Appeal in Wellington heard final arguments Friday by Crown lawyers opposing Tarrant’s application to have his admissions in 2020 to charges of terrorism, murder and attempted murder discarded. He is serving life in prison without a chance of parole, but the case would return to court for a full trial if he is allowed to revoke his guilty pleas.

Opposing lawyers say his appeal has no merit

The 35-year-old told the court this week he didn’t want to plead guilty and made the “irrational” admissions during a “nervous breakdown” induced by his solitary and austere prison conditions. But Crown lawyers opposing his appeal bid said in their response Friday there was no evidence for the claims that he was seriously mentally ill.

Experts had ruled Tarrant was fit to enter pleas, and his former lawyers and prison staff didn’t raise concerns either.

“It’s difficult to see what more could’ve been done,” Crown lawyer Barnaby Hawes told the court. Tarrant, he added, “is an unreliable witness and his narrative should be treated with caution.”

The evidence against Tarrant — including his own livestream of the massacre, in which he filmed his face — was so overwhelming that a guilty verdict was assured if he had fought the charges in a trial, the lawyers said.

“Pleading guilty to charges where his guilt is certain can’t be seen to be irrational,” Hawes said.

The subdued hearing defies the tension over the case

One topic nearly absent from the weeklong hearing was any mention of the hateful motivations Tarrant cited for committing the crimes. Lawyers both supporting and opposing Tarrant’s bid avoided reference to his white supremacist views, and proceedings unfolded in the quiet and stolid way New Zealand court cases usually do.

But there were signs the court sought to limit the public’s exposure to Tarrant, as New Zealand’s justice system has done before. Almost nobody was permitted to view the gunman’s evidence and the appeal bid unfolded in front of nine reporters, nine lawyers, a few court staff, and an empty public gallery.

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Tarrant was permitted to watch the proceedings by video conference from Auckland Prison, but his image was not visible in the courtroom except when he gave evidence. Apart from in Christchurch, where the bereaved and wounded survivors watched a livestream of the hearing at the local courthouse, the shooter was invisible.

The approach New Zealand has enacted — in which even news outlets name the shooter as few times as possible in each article — stands at odds with the publicity given to trials for racist mass killers before, including widely covered proceedings for the Norwegian murderer Anders Breivik, whom Tarrant years later cited as an inspiration. Crown lawyers urged the appeal judges Friday to thwart the prospect of the matter returning to court in a lengthy public trial, which would happen if the Australian’s bid to recant his guilt was successful.

“Keeping this case alive is a source of immense distress” to the shooter’s victims, Crown lawyer Madeleine Laracy said. “It doesn’t allow them to heal.”

A swift ruling isn’t expected

The judges’ decision will be released later. New Zealand’s appeals court delivers 90% of its judgments within three months of a hearing’s end, according to the Court’s website.

If his bid to revoke his guilty pleas is unsuccessful, Tarrant’s case will return to the appeals court for a later hearing where he will seek a review of his life sentence.

By DAVE SKRETTA

MILAN (AP) — The last conversation that Maxim Naumov had with his parents was about following in their footsteps to the Olympics.

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Now the American figure skater has done it.

The 24-year-old Naumov finished his Winter Games debut with an emotional free skate Friday night, just over a year after Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were among 67 people killed when American Airlines Flight 5342 crashed into a military helicopter on approach to Ronald Reagan National Airport and fell into the dark depths of the Potomac River.

It wasn’t a perfect program. Far from it. Naumov fell twice on quad salchows and was uneven throughout.

But the point total wasn’t the point.

When it came to an end, a crowd packed inside the Milano Ice Skating Arena to see American teammate Ilia Malinin go for gold gave him a standing ovation. Among them was actor Jeff Goldblum, who took in the performance with his wife, Emilie.

“To be honest, I just feel proud,” Naumov said afterward. “I feel proud of the journey that it took to get to this point. That is what I look toward right now. What it took to get here has been indescribable, inwards, getting up every day when I didn’t want to and pushing through the difficult times and the uncertainty of it all. I’m able to have some perspective on that. And I’ve had a lot of perspective in lots of areas in my life this year and skating is no different.

“So yes,” Naumov said, “there were some mistakes today, but man, I’m just happy and proud to be standing here today and getting through all the difficulty of this year and still standing on my feet and continuing to push onward.”

His students from Tomorrow’s Champions, the youth academy based at the Skating Club of Boston that was founded by his parents and Naumov now runs, certainly were proud. They had a watch party happening back in the U.S. while a small group sitting above the kiss-and-cry area waved a homemade sign with red and blue lettering that red, “Let’s Go Coach Max!”

“Hey, what’s up guys!?” Naumov said upon seeing them, smiling and waving.

Naumov set his free skate to the song “In This Shirt” by The Irrepressibles, a mournful ballad that delves into the issues of heartbreak and loss that the skater knows so well: “I am lost in a rainbow,” the lyrics say, “now our rainbow is gone.”

Naumov had finished fourth at the national championships in Wichita, Kansas, last January before heading home to the Boston area, while his parents — world pairs champions-turned-coaches — stayed behind to participate in a youth development camp.

Their plane was carrying more than two dozen members of the tight-knit figure skating community when it crashed.

Naumov recalled the first hours and days following the crash during an interview with The Associated Press. He remembers feeling like “I just wanted to rot, basically.”

Things such as getting out of bed, answering the door and checking the mail seemed insurmountable chores, and there were moments when he wondered whether he wanted to keep skating at all.

He still finds looking at photographs difficult, including the ones he pulled from a family album tucked above the refrigerator that he brought to the kiss-and-cry area. The idea of looking at videos of his parents still reduces him to tears.

Maxim Naumov of the United States reacts to his scores after competing during the men’s free skate program in figure skating at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

But in the end, Naumov explained, he found purpose in putting on his skates again. He wanted to fulfill a dream that he shared with his parents by making it to the Olympics; they were fifth at the 1992 Albertville Games and fourth at the 1994 Lillehammer Games.

He also wanted to turn an unimaginable tragedy into a story of perseverance and ultimately triumph.

“It’s something that is allowing me to keep pushing forward. Keep moving,” Naumov said. “You know, continue to go and do things that are difficult no matter what obstacles get thrown at you. Skating is a tool for that. I think we can all do that.

“Whatever life throws at you, if you can be resilient and push just a little bit more than you think, you can do so much more.”

Associated Press writer Colleen Barry contributed.

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics