2026 Winter Olympics: “Italy is ready”, assures Bach one year before hosting the Winter Olympics in Milan

IOC President Thomas Bach congratulates Italy one year before the Winter Olympics. MAXPPP – Riccardo Antimiani/EIDON

The countdown to the 2026 Winter Olympics reached “D minus 365 days” on Thursday, a symbolic moment celebrated in Milan by IOC President Thomas Bach for whom “Italy is ready”.

While waiting for the queens of alpine skiing Mikaela Shiffrin, Lindsey Vonn and Federica Brignone to explain themselves in Cortina d’Ampezzo or for the figure skating phenomenon Ilia Malinin to shine on the ice of Milan, it was their leaders and officials who had an appointment for a ceremony at the Strehler Theater.

Before formally handing over the invitations to six national Olympic committees, representing the 140 expected for the 25th Winter Olympics in history (February 6-22, 2026), the third in Italy after Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1956 and Turin in 2006, Thomas Bach sent his congratulations to the Italian organizers and authorities.

“Italy is ready, Italy is ready to write the new chapter in its great Olympic history”, he said happily.

“You are excellently preparing the stage for the world's best winter sports athletes”, continued the head of the Olympic body, a message with a positive tone that contrasts with the IOC's “impatience” to know the direction of the 2030 Olympic Games in the French Alps, which former biathlete Martin Fourcade gave up chairing on Monday.

5 billion euros

“Milano-Cortina 2026 is taking its Winter Games to places where sports winter sports are part of the local identity. This approach is fully in line with the Olympic Agenda by making the most of existing modern facilities”, continued Mr Bach, who is preparing to hand over in June after twelve years at the head of the IOC.

To avoid new constructions, to reduce their environmental impact and for a final bill estimated at five billion euros (3.5 billion for infrastructure, 1.5 billion for the Games themselves), far from the pharaonic editions of Sochi (2014), Pyeongchang (2018) or Beijing (2022), the Italian organizers, preferred in 2019 to a Swedish bid, have in fact used overwhelmingly existing competition sites (11 out of 13).

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Consequently, these first Games in history to be officially structured, even in their name, around two cities, present a site map split into seven zones extending from the Dolomites to the Po Valley via Veneto.

The black spot of the bobsleigh track

Bormio and Cortina for alpine skiing, Anterselva for biathlon, Val di Fiemme for Nordic skiing, Livigno for snowboarding and freestyle skiing, the participants in the 2026 Olympic Games will be on familiar ground: every winter, they take part in stages of their World Cup on these tracks, stadiums or ski jumps that have been renovated or expanded to meet Olympic configuration.

For ice sports, which will take place in Milan, Milano Cortina 2026 will transform the Forum, a multi-sports complex, into an ice rink. The speed skating ring will be temporarily installed in a convention centre, a temporary structure that will prevent the organisers from finding themselves after the Olympic fortnight with a facility that is expensive to maintain and little used.

In this area, they already have a lot to do with the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton track in Cortina, whose construction, decided late, a little over a year ago, by the ultra-conservative government of Giorgia Meloni for political rather than sporting reasons, is “the” black spot of these Olympic Games.

Criticised by environmental protection associations, viewed with a jaundiced eye by the IOC, this track, costing 120 million euros, will have to be ready for its approval at the end of March, the next important meeting for the organisers who nevertheless say they are confident and do not see themselves using their plan B, the Lake Placid track, in the… United States.

“There are still problems to be solved, acknowledged the president of the Italian Olympic Committee and the Milano Cortina 2026 organizing committee Giovanni Malago, but we made a virtue of necessity when we thought about and designed this atypical candidacy and nothing can derail our project”.

In the meantime, Milan, but also Cortina and Livigno with shows, Bormio with a “flash-mob” are celebrating this Thursday the D minus one year of these “atypical and innovative” Olympic Games according to its promoters.