Chris Jones reports from Italy ahead of the Milano Cortina Olympics.
On the wending way into Cortina, there is a reminder of Winter Olympics past: the ski jump from 1956 sits dormant, the ramp in place, its landing area converted into a soccer field. The site is oddly beautiful, filled with the good kind of ghosts. It’s warming to think about the simpler joys that took place here.
Then, Cortina hosted the entire games. Only 32 countries participated. Figure skating was held outside for the last time, the mountains looking on. Television was expanding its influence, but the Olympics remained an in-person experience first.
The 2026 Winter Olympics, co-hosted by Cortina, Milan, and several other sites across northern Italy, have proved far more difficult to engineer, a made-for-TV event built to a global scale.
In Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, a clock is counting down to the start of the Olympics. It feels like everyone is racing it rather than wishing for it to reach zero. Construction delays at the Milano Santagiulia hockey arena have dominated the conversation when locals have thought to talk about the Olympics at all.
In stunning Cortina — where curling, the sliding sports, and women’s Alpine will be held — there is the same kind of last-minute frenzy. The sound of construction echoes through the trees, and there are worries, as there have been winter after winter, that its famed slopes haven’t received enough snow.
But on the town’s cobbled streets, the preparations feel more joyful, more present, more likely to end happily than they do in Milan. There are pretty banners strung up everywhere, tied to balconies and festooning woodpiles, commemorating 1956, celebrating 2026.
If in Milan you need to close your eyes to imagine these Olympics going well, in Cortina you need to squint only a little.
The Stadio Olimpico del Ghiacco, the curling venue, is the 1956 hockey rink fully refurbished. This week, it was still surrounded by construction debris, including an alarming amount of duct work, and the entrance was blocked by trucks and men in orange safety vests.
The building itself, angular, almost crystalline, made of copper and wood, still looked gorgeous in the sun.
The track at the sliding centre is complete, also built where the 1956 original ran. The surrounding spectator infrastructure is unfinished — to the degree that earthmovers were still lifting rocks out of the way this week — but World Cup events have already been held on it.
Because of its heritage, it’s not an especially wild or thrilling run. What struck fear in bobsledders in 1956 will present more of an intellectual challenge to modern sliders. It will reward the technicians over the animals.
“It’s a really fun track,” Jane Channell, a Canadian skeleton athlete, said in a recent interview. “It’s tricky. It’s flowy. It’s not really like any other track out there.”
“It’s not hard to finish your run, but it’s very hard to be fast,” Canadian luger Embyr Susko said after she took her turn on it. “It’s been a really fun challenge to try to find speed.”
Speed won’t be nearly as elusive for the skiers, providing the snow comes, or at least enough cold to make it. The iconic run from 1956, at Tofane, will be used by the women again. (The men will race at Bormio.) It is a fearsome course, fast and treacherous.
Cortina sits in a saddle formed by the spectacular Dolomites, distinct from the neighbouring Alps because of their geology. They are paler, craggier, crumblier than their cousins. They don’t look forbidding, exactly. They look strangely delicate, with all the usual risks and rewards that fragility presents.
So, too, do these Olympics.
It’s possible the Italians will pull off a miracle. Nothing ever happens here until it happens.
It’s also possible that we’re on the brink of an Olympic-sized disaster.
But if there is a reason for optimism, it’s to be found under the bright blue skies in little Cortina, not in mighty, industrial Milan. They’ve made good memories here before. The old ski jump is a monument to them. They will make good memories here again.
In a little pocket between the curling arena and the sliding track, something else is being built. This week, it looked like a pile of scaffolding, a jumble of raw materials waiting to be assembled.
A stocky construction worker stood nearby, surrounded by mountains to climb, surveying the next month of his life through the cloud of his cigarette.
“Cos’è?” a visitor asked him.
“Disco,” he said. Then he smiled, put his cigarette in his mouth, and began to dance to music only he could hear.
In Cortina, there’s still time to dance. In Cortina, there’s still time for everything.
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