MILAN, February 5. /TASS/. The 25th edition of the Winter Olympic Games kicks off this week in Italy, marking the first Games in Olympic history to be held in two cities, which this year will take place in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo. An interesting note about these Olympics is that 90% of the sports competitions will be hosted by well-established venues, not brand new ones as are usually built ahead of the events.
The Olympic competitions already started on February 4 in curling mixed doubles but they were marred by problems with lighting. The women’s ice hockey tournament and qualifying for men’s Big Air snowboard started on February 5. The team competitions in figure skating are scheduled to begin on February 6, the day of the official Opening Ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
On the docket in Milan will be competitions in ice hockey, figure skating, speed skating and short track, as well as the Opening Ceremony, which will take place at the San Siro football arena. This grand stadium is home to two Italian top-tier football clubs - Milan FC and Inter FC.
The official Opening Ceremony is scheduled to start at 8:26 p.m. (20:26 in European time) local time on Friday (7:26 p.m. GMT) in honor of the year 2026. The official closing ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games will take place in Italy’s northern city of Verona, where a special amphitheater has been set up for it. For the first time since the 1984 Olympics, the Opening and Closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics will be hosted at different venues. It takes more than an hour to get to Verona from Milan by train, about five hours to travel between Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, and approximately two hours between Milan and Val di Fiemme, where the ski competitions will be held.
Olympic venues in Milan are located in the suburbs of the city, including the cluster where the arena for ice hockey and skating competitions is located (in the trade and exhibition center), as well as the Main Press Center and the International Broadcasting Center of the Games are located. The organizers decided to use long-existing facilities, with the exception of the Santa Julia Arena, which will serve as the main ice hockey palace of the Winter Games. Medal ceremonies will take place in downtown Milan, at the city square next to the Duomo Cathedral.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) as well as the organizers of this event in Italy thus decided to move away from the practice when the Olympics were hosted by a region in which the entire infrastructure had to be built from scratch. This was the case in Russia’s Black Sea resort city of Sochi, where two Olympic clusters were built by 2014, in the coastal and mountainous areas. The distinctive feature of the 2014 Games in Russia’s Sochi was that all the Olympic venues, including the Olympic Village, were located in one place, within walking distance of each other.
Infrastructure problems
These Olympics will be the fourth Winter Games hosted by Italy, following the Cortina d'Ampezzo (1956), Rome (1960) and Turin (2006) Games. Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo became the capitals of the 2026 Games, as announced at the 134th session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne on June 24, 2019. Italy won out over Sweden’s Stockholm bid by a significant margin (47 to 34 votes).
Despite the cost savings and the lack of a need to build new facilities, the organizers of the Olympic event faced a number of financial problems, as the Director General of the Olympic Games, Andrea Varnier, said at the most recent IOC session. The country allocated a great deal of funds to combat the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, according to him.
Building the two major Olympic facilities, the bobsleigh track in Cortina d'Ampezzo and the Santa Julia ice hockey arena, was not a hotly contested issue. The construction of the luge facility cost about 120 million Euros (some $141.5 million) amid a budget of 3.4 billion Euros (over $4 billion) for the Games, and the construction process was criticized heavily by environmentalists.
It was also rumored that this expensive project, as it happened after the Turin Games, has no future, since luge, bobsleigh and skeleton competitions are not popular in Italy. Construction of the track began only two years before the start of the 2026 Olympic Games, and the IOC previously recommended that the Organizing Committee relocate competitions to neighboring Austria or Switzerland. The organizers even considered a backup track in Lake Placid, in the United States.
The ice hockey arena was commissioned as an emergency project as the Games drew near. For the 2014 Games, the Bolshoi Olympic Arena in Sochi hosted the Junior World Championships as a test event a year before the actual event, whereas in Milan it was expected that the palace would be commissioned only a few months before the Olympics. In this regard, the National Hockey League (NHL), whose players will participate in the Olympic competitions for the first time since 2014, has serious concerns about the quality of the ice after a hole was discovered on the ice surface at one of the practice matches in early January.
Speculation swirled earlier that the US-based NHL might not allow its players to travel for the Olympics in Italy, which would have been an image disaster, but that didn't happen. The participating teams have been training at the arena since late January. The head coach of the French men's national team, Yorick Trey, told TASS earlier that he had no complaints about the quality of the ice. The number of spectator seats in the arena was reduced from the announced 14,000-seat capacity to 11.800.
Russia’s squad missing athletes
A total of 116 sets of medals will be awarded in 16 sports disciplines at the Olympics in Italy, which is seven more than at the previous 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The men’s and women's parallel moguls in freestyle skiing, women's two-man luge races, women's ski jumping, and mixed skeleton team competitions were added. A new Ski Mountaineering competition is also on the Olympic program for the first time, set to include both men’s and women's sprints, as well as team competitions.
Owing to criteria stipulated to compete in Italy, all the strongest Russian athletes will not be able to compete in Italy. Thirteen Russians were cleared to compete at the Olympics under a neutral status, while 15 Russians competed at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Compared to the Summer Olympics, the Winter Games still face a high level of resistance to Russians being allowed to compete due to the powerful lobby posed by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, as well as Germany.
Many Russian athletes failed to qualify for the 2026 Olympics because of the late invitations and neutral-status approval, when the qualifying tournaments for the Olympics were already over.
On top of everything, the IOC upheld the ruling barring Russian ice hockey players from participating in international competitions. Because of this, the Russian ice hockey team will miss the Olympics (the last time it did not participate in the Games was in 1952, when none of the Soviet athletes competed in Oslo). Russian hockey players won silver medals at the 2022 Games.