In the countdown to this weekend’s Closing Ceremony, Olympic Games Executive Advisor Michael Pirrie looks at how Milano Cortina 2026 Produced Sporting Brillance in Turbulent Times With A New Look Games
Two years after he descended down Stade de France and clutched the Olympic flag, Tom Cruise’s starring role in the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics Closing Ceremony may seem less like a Hollywood handover to LA 28 than a rehearsal for a new European installation of Mission Impossible, the plot shifting this time to the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.
The latest Olympic extravaganza had real-world overtones from the MI franchise, set amidst the glamour and glitz of the fashion capital Milan and picturesque Alpine settings in the Dolomites. With sabotaged rail services, cyber-attacks, athletes carrying riffles, confessions of betrayal, fraud convictions, and competition venues on a continent under constant nuclear missile threat from Russia, Ethan Hunt would have felt right at home.
After taking the Olympic torch and flag with the famous five rings to the International Space station on previous Games expeditions, success at Milano Cortina against such a backdrop may have seemed more like an Apollo moon shot as the planet turned to the Olympic host nation hoping for something special like a lunar landing.
If so, visitors might have initially felt they had landed on the dark side of the moon following heated street protests over the presence of members from the feared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and other ‘Houston we’ve had a problem’ moments in the countdown to Games lift off.
THE OLYMPIC COMEBACK CONTINUES
Milano Cortina wasn’t always perfect, but it was impressive and got many of the big things right.
The host city and regions overcame doubts and concerns with a masterplan that focused initially on two of the key success factors which turned Sydney 2000, London 2012 and Paris 2024 into iconic Games – a unifying Opening Ceremony and early medals table success.
Ceremonies pioneer Ric Birch and friend and collaborator Marco Balich – who was the creative director for the Milano Cortina ceremony – have helped to turn the Olympic showpieces into the world’s biggest live productions that tell the story of the host city and nation and welcome the world to the Games.
Opening ceremony success has become vital to how host cities and nations feel about themselves and about supporting and participating in the Olympics at Games time, and Milano Cortina launched the Olympics in grand style under Balich’s direction.
In contrast to the outside troubled world, the ceremony was dedicated to ‘Harmony’, bringing together a series of striking images, motifs, and superstar performers portraying Italian society, culture and history in high impact ways to a proud host nation, while also familiar to international audiences.
The ceremony was daring and relevant, and captured the imagination of local and global audiences, generating record viewership and broadcast ratings in all key markets.
Italy brought in some of its biggest names for this opening and Andrea Bocelli’s monumental demonstration of the power of the human voice also set the stage for the human opera of sport that followed.
Milano Cortina’s pivotal transition from ceremony success to competition success was perfect. After the widely acclaimed curtain raiser, Italy’s dream-start continued, winning its most medals ever across the first two days of competition.
This established the foundations for Games success, with a vibrant party atmosphere filling venues and celebration sites, and radiating out around alpine regions and towns before eventually cutting through Milan’s deeply entrenched football, finance, fashion and music cultures.
The excitement continued to grow in this second week with venues nearing capacity and demand for tickets soaring among locals as the home team continued to deliver unprecedented performances, hauling in Italy’s greatest ever gold medal tally at the Winter Games.
Above all, organisers have delivered high performing venues, competition sites that have enabled athletes to perform in challenging conditions.
Despite the inevitable logistical and weather challenges of winter sports on an Olympic scale, Milano Corina was also able to maintain the all-important competition and broadcast schedules enabling athletes to also tell their stories.
The athletes have delivered electrifying performances that have created Games fever like in Vancouver 2010, London 2012, and Paris 2024. One small remote mountain village with an annual population of around 4,000 people is reported to have swelled to more than 25,000 for the Games
Strong broadcast and digital figures show fans around the world have embraced Milano Cortina in record numbers. The Games has a major global presence on social media, streaming, and broadcast platforms, with rights holders saying the Games was exceeding their expectations
In Italy, remarkably, two out of three people have watched some coverage of the Games and local tourism, hospitality, hotel, retail, transport and related services and support companies report strong business benefits.
After the politically threatening and soulless Covid hit Beijing Winter Games four years ago, the Olympic spirit is back.
Millano Cortina has been riveting and innovative and challenged many of the norms, protocols and expectations of world sport
‘DARING GREATLY’
Audiences have been gripped by the Olympic drama of sport and life, where a lifetime of preparation, silent early mornings, long days, and unseen sacrifices and setbacks, all to perform on the world’s biggest stage can come down to a single moment.
There were heart breaking near misses, heart pounding come-from-behind showstoppers, unfathomable mistakes and unlikely miracles.
Few performances were more dramatic that Norway’s Tormod Frostad who won the men’s freeski big air on the last jump of the night or more unlikely than the Japanese pair’s gold medal victory from fifth place.
Milano Cortina was constantly surprising and revealing – ‘Snow Princess’ Eileen Gu failed to defend two gold medals from Beijing, a repeat money couldn’t buy for the world’s highest paid winter athlete who earned an estimated $23 million last year.
In a fleeting moment, a lifetime of training and preparation collide with the fault lines of life and new directions in life are determined in less than a second or a single breath.
“I skied so great and I still couldn’t get it done so that’s what really hurts,” said Norwegian skier Atle Lie McGrath.
“Sports wise, it’s the worst. It’s not the worst moment of my life, but it’s the worst moment of my career,” said the five-time Slalom World Cup winner and current World Cup leader, whose Olympic medal calculations collapsed when he just missed a gate while leading with a gold medal in sight.
“It’s been one of the toughest moments of my life with everything that’s been going on,’’ he said, saying it “felt impossible” to carry on after the death of his grandfather at the start of the Games.
Milano Cortina also tested tolerance and acceptance of athletes along with speed and endurance. Sport became therapy.
Competitors showed moral bravery, confessing to the world about the darkest moments of their lives as well as the best atop of the medal podium and found safety and redemption at the Games.
“I proved I belong here (at the Games) today…”, said French biathlete Julia Simon, who won gold in the unlikeliest of circumstances, four months after admitting to fraud charges.
“I don’t have anything left to prove to anyone…”
MORAL OF THE GAMES
Tensions between sport and politics and protests and the personal encircled and helped to shape the character and personality of the Games.
Milano Cortina challenged how we think about sport and achievement in life beyond stadiums.
While Olympic medals represent the lifetime pinnacle for athletes, the two most discussed and enduring moments from Milano Cortina involved medal failures.
Vladyshav Heraskevych and Lindsey Vonn defined the Games with unforgettable moments conjured from rare moral, mental and physical bravery that captured global attention and admiration more than any medal.
As the Olympic flame begins to fade on Milano Cortina 2026, Vonn’s uncommon courage and attempt to medal despite a crippling knee injury that ended one of sport’s great comebacks, with the whole world watching, focused a global spotlight on the human spirit that will endure long after the flame is extinguished.
While Vonn did not medal and had to be evacuated off the mountain, she instantly became part of the mythology that surrounds the Games because, as her sister said: ‘She dared greatly,’ referring to a famous line in a 1910 speech by US President Teddy Roosevelt, meaning that in the face of potential failure it is better to act valiantly than to remain a spectator – the human spirit does not shine because it never fails but it shines because its dares, knowing it might.
The disqualification of Ukraine skeleton racer Vladyshav Heraskevych for seeking to wear a helmet in competition depicting athletes killed by Russia transcended the Games
While the gesture was solemn and not theatrical, the disqualification triggered immediate global attention and disapproval which will live long in the world’s memory of the Games and international sport and politics.
Despite the sympathetic efforts of the new IOC president to personally speak with and support the athlete, the controversy, significantly, revealed a major gap in international understanding and support for the core Olympic principle of political neutrality in the circumstances of the disqualification.
The global revolt was not just a response to the Olympic rules; it was also an expression of collective grief that still surrounds Russia’s war on Ukraine and Putin’s unrelenting slaughter of human life, which continued during the Games.
The IOC ruling and worldwide response will debated in sport and society for decades.
For many watching around the world, the helmet was not a political prop but a profound memorial symbol, and the reaction highlighted how traumatic Russia’s apocalyptic assault on Ukraine remains for the international community, on which the Olympic movement depends.
This was also demonstrated at the Opening Ceremony when the Ukraine team received the warmest and loudest reception of any team as it entered other the host nation.
Thedisqualification has opened a global conversation about how institutions respond to aggression and whether neutrality is morally sustainable or even possible during war today.
The incident was one of the first major crises to confront new IOC president Kirsty Coventry, who, while arguing that ‘beliefs don’t change rules’ demonstrated, by meeting with the Ukrainian athlete, that leaders can still respond to the humanity behind beliefs and profound grief.
Significantly, the fall out is likely to impact quiet discussions underway within parts of the Olympic movement at Milano Cortina 2026 about Russia’s possible pathway back to full participation at the LA 28 Games, even as Putin attempts to freeze Ukrainian families to death by continuously targeting energy sites
The global reaction to the disqualification over a memorial helmet in response to Russia’s murderous war, means decisions about future Russian involvement at the Games will now have even more profound moral and reputational implications.
Ultimately, for Ukraine’s excluded athlete, keeping alive the memory of fallen compatriots slaughtered while defending their sports proud nation from the calamitous Russian invasion, was more important that memories of an Olympic medal.
Milano Cortina was part of a wider Olympic comeback that began with the recent Paris Games, the most successful since London’s landmark 2012 Games.
This was followed by more than a decade of disruption and despair in world sport, sparked by the Russian government’s covert state sponsored athlete doping programs that corrupted world sport and Putin’s subsequent catastrophic war on Ukraine.
NEW GAMES MODEL & DIRECTIONS
This Games has been pivotal for IOC management as it attempts to redesign its flagship events around an evolving model used at Milano Cortina 2026
The new Games prototype has led to growing interest in how the Olympic world organizes, conducts and finances the planet’s biggest and most complex sporting events, dependent on high level international management and cooperation.
The Milano Cortina model was designed as a more geographically extended event, predominantly based on existing and temporary venues and infrastructure in Milan and across northern Italy to reduce costs and environmental and community impacts.
The new approach is intended to make it more affordable, sustainable, and appealing for cities and regions to stage the Games, which generate vital revenues relied upon by world sports bodies, federations, national Olympic committees, athlete development and welfare, and other programs.
While the IOC contributes the equivalent of $US 4.5 million every day to help support athletes, sports organisations and Olympic projects worldwide, the development of the new model will be vital for growing revenues from future editions of the Summer and Winter Games, the principal sources of income for the Olympic movement.
CONCLUSION
The Olympic Games has been a constant positive presence in an ever-changing world, but that world is now changing the Games. Milano-Corina 2026 has been both volatile and brilliant.
The Games was not flawless, but it was spectacular and grand in its ambitions and showed why the world needs an event like the Olympics in a multi crisis world.
While much was done to separate sport and politics at the Games, it is ironic that a senior Italian political honoree perhaps best distilled the essence of Milano Cortina 2026
“In the epochal change we are living through there is a need for hope, and sport contains and transmits this precious value,” Italian President, Sergio Mattarella, said last Decembers as the Olympic flame arrive in the host nation.
The athletes kept the Games on track with performances that cut through the global gloom and politically charged environment that surrounded Milano Cortina and its search for harmony.
Milano Cortina proved to be an expression of the new IOC President’s vision for the Games as envisaged in her first Opening Ceremony speech in charge of the Olympic Movement.
“The spirit of the Olympic Games is about much more than sport. It is about us – and what makes us human,” she said.
Harmony may have been on thin ice and the Games never reached the moon but sport reached new heights.
Whether hurtling down mountainsides at 140 km/h or spinning so high in the air that oxygen masks, parachutes or air traffic controllers might be needed to land safely, the freestyle skiers, snowboarders, and other winter athletes left us awe struck with electrifying performances that took audiences into new frontiers for sport and set broadcast viewing records.
Milano Cortina has shown that more than ever the Olympic Games sits at the crossroads of sport and modern society, reflecting humanity’s greatest aspirations and deepest struggles, reflected by participating nations and their athletes.
Declaring harmony in turbulent times with daily news cycles filled with conflict was bold and necessary.
Milano Cortina did not fail because the world remains in conflict. It would have failed if it stopped insisting that chaos was inevitable.
On the fragile alpine slopes shadowed by conflict, uncertainty and anxiety, athletes launched themselves into high-risk, high-flying, almost death-defying, snowboard and ski stunt-like routines that also seemed lifted from a Mission Impossible trailer.
In a world marked by geopolitical tensions and violent conflict, Milano Cortina 2026 also offered something hopeful – proof that even in unsettled times, the Winter Games and sport can still adapt, endure and inspire.
Athletes from nearly 100 nations showed up in Italy and showed that sport can temporarily still rise above division, fear and uncertainty, and in the countdown to the Closing Ceremony this weekend, Milano Cortina leaves a legacy and challenge for future Games organisers to continue searching for harmony and hope.
