After months of anticipation, the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics are almost here — hosted by two picturesque and storied cities in Northern Italy, with venues spread out across the Italian Alps.  Milan Milan is Italy’s fashion and finance capital. It’s a modern city with a long history — home to Leonardo Da Vinci and the striking white marble cathedral, the Duomo. It has canals like Venice, and its own cuisine — famous for yellow saffron risotto and breaded veal cutlets. It also has two soccer teams, with enough fans to fill the massive San Siro Stadium, an 80,000-seat venue that will host the Olympic opening ceremony. The stadium is no stranger to big productions: it was a stop on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the summer of 2024. With the world’s oldest shopping mall, a castle, and world-class public transit, Milan has it all — except for one thing: Milan doesn’t have snow. And so when it comes to the Winter Olympics, Milan can’t do it alone. Cortina 2026 will be the most spread out Winter Olympics ever, with events dotted throughout the mountains of Northern Italy. Many of those events will be held in and around Cortina d’Ampezzo, a small town surrounded by the jagged peaks of the Dolomites, some of the most distinctive mountains in the Alps.  Cortina is the perfect mix of Old World charm and natural beauty, and it’s also historic: it hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics, which were the first ever broadcast live on TV. “So everybody in the world saw Cortina and saw how beautiful it was,” said Giacomo Colli, the deputy general manager for curling at the Olympics, and also a high-level curler himself.  Colli will manage the curling venue, which is a piece of history in its own right. Cortina’s Olympic Ice Rink was the site of the 1956 opening ceremony and the historic hockey tournament in which the Soviet Union won gold during its Olympic debut. Once an outdoor venue, it’s now become a year-round indoor venue, with towering plate glass windows that offer spectators in the old wooden bleachers a breathtaking view of the mountains. Just outside those windows, the new Cortina Sliding Centre, for bobsled, luge and skeleton events, is finally ready, after serious concern a year ago about construction delays. The track has been tested, and the surrounding facilities are scheduled to be finished just in time for the games. Cortina is also the venue for women’s alpine skiing, at the renowned Tofana Ski Area. It’s the same course the men skied in 1956, and it’s now a stop on the women’s World Cup skiing circuit.  “It’s challenging, and all the athletes like the course very much,” said Michele di Gallo, the venue cluster manager for Cortina, adding that skiers find the scenery inspiring. “They can look around and see the most iconic mountains in the Alps.” The Italian skiers like their odds competing at home, but they’ll have to reckon with a sobering fact: Team USA’s Lindsey Vonn has won more races on this very course than anyone in history. And speaking of history, Cortina’s historic ski jump venue will not be part of these Olympics. The Nordic skiing events, including ski jumping, are happening in three other towns around Cortina. Livigno and Bormio Though women’s alpine skiing events will take place in Cortina, the men’s alpine events are happening more than five hours away in Bormio, in the mountains of the Lombardy region north of Milan. Bormio will also host the newest Olympic event: ski mountaineering. In ski mountaineering, also known as “SkiMo,” skiers put special climbing skins on their skis that allow them to scale the snowy mountain without sliding down it. Once at the top, they remove the skins from their skis and race back to the bottom. It’s happening about an hour away from some of the other relatively new Winter Olympic events: freestyle skiing and snowboarding in Livigno. “The mountains are absolutely insane,” said Jaelin Kauf, the U.S. freestyle skier who won silver in the moguls event at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Kauf got to try out the Olympic course back in March, but she’s focused on spending less time skiing over the bumpy snow and more time flying above it.  “We have two jumps in our mogul run,” she said. “And so, really trying to increase the degree of difficulty in my jumps to be able to come out on top at the next games.” And that brings us to an event that used to be held outdoors in the mountains: speed skating. You see, back in 1956, speed skating events were held on a frozen lake in Cortina. It was the last time Olympic speed skaters ever competed on natural ice. Now, in 2026, there will be a first: speed skaters will compete on a temporary track. Milan’s many ice rinks “That’s our major challenge we have with these games: installing temporary facilities, temporary ice rinks,” said Marta Bertolli, the ice sports manager for the 2026 Winter Olympics. “That has never been done before in the history of the games, for the speed skating, for example.” The Olympics will take over two huge convention centers in Milan: One, which is the biggest convention center in Europe, will become the International Broadcast Center, and the other will become the Milano Ice Park — home to a temporary hockey rink and a temporary 400-meter speed skating track, where Team USA’s Erin Jackson will defend her gold medal. “It’s definitely a lot more pressure coming in as the defending champion, but I really love the pressure, I really thrive on it,” Jackson said. “I feel like it kind of gets me to that level where I need to be.” Though some hockey games will be held at the temporary rink, the main hockey venue, known locally as Santagulia Arena, has been under construction for more than a year, and is set to be finished just days before the games begin. 2026 will mark the first time in 12 year that NHL players have competed at the Olympics, but the new venue has stirred up controversy — not just because of construction delays, but because the ice is three feet shorter than a standard NHL rink. “It’s all about just making sure we have ice that is safe for our players,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said in a press conference in December. But there’s no question about the venue for figure skating. The Unipol Forum is an arena built more than 30 years ago that’s become a popular venue for concerts in recent years. Now, it will host the best in the world on ice — and organizers want to give them an Olympic-level experience when they compete. “The only way we can help them as organizers is try to give them the best,” Bertolli said. That goes for both figure skaters and short track speed skaters, who will compete in the same venue. Organizers have been racing to make repairs and upgrades, and build all the temporary structures for judges and media, which will bring the seating capacity down to about ten thousand. But even once the venue is ready for the crush of fans and photographers, there’s another challenge: switching the ice rink between figure skating and short track speed skating, sometimes within the same day. “This means that the temperature and humidity need to change from one discipline to the other discipline,” said Veronica Valente, the venue’s general manager. Figure skating ice is thicker and warmer. Speed skating ice is thinner and colder. Those quick changeovers, which require at least three hours, are supervised by an ice expert with the job title of Ice Master, who’s overseen this very same technical feat at the last two Winter Olympics. With glory and medals at stake, organizers say it has to be perfect — from the time the torch reaches Milan, up until the closing ceremony at the 2,000-year-old ancient Roman arena in Verona.  “For the athletes’ experience, that’s where you need to reach that perfection,” Bertolli said. “When you see their faces, that they’ve finally reached their goal, their lifetime goal — I think that’s when you will know.” ...read more read less