Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics ‘about taking the sport to its people' – Team GB chief Eve Muirhead

New York Times

05-02-2025

Olympic curling champion Eve Muirhead believes Milan-Cortina 2026 will be a mix of the Winter Games' past and future as it combines alpine resort settings with a wide geographic spread of existing venues to keep costs down.
The four-time Olympian retired as an athlete shortly after she won gold at Beijing 2022 but last year was named as Team GB's chef de mission for the 2026 edition in northern Italy.
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The Games, which officially open at Milan's San Siro Stadium on February 6 2026, return to Italy for the first time in 20 years, with Turin having hosted in 2006.
As well as the return to a more traditional setting, Milan-Cortina's defining feature will be its massive footprint, or what the organising committee are describing as 'the most widespread Olympic and Paralympic Games ever'.
This is a reference to the 'cluster' approach they are using, with the Games' 116 events being staged in four main centres: Cortina d'Ampezzo, Milan, Val di Fiemme and Valtellina. A fifth, Verona, will host the closing ceremony on February 22.
'The way Milano-Cortina is looking at it is the principle of adapting the Games to its territory,' explained Muirhead.
'So it's about taking the sport to its people — something that hasn't been done before but I think we'll see again in the next Winter Olympics in the French Alps (in 2030).
'I think it's a massive positive because a lot of these sports are used to competing on these different sites, they know the slopes, the rinks, the fields of play, like the back of their hands because they've competed in World Cups and World Champs there.
'Having those smaller clusters is going to be more like a World Championship-type environment. As an athlete who's competed at the Winter Olympics, I know how much it means to try to replicate that as much as you can, because that's what we do yearly — we compete at these majors.'
As well as the opening ceremony, Milan will host most of the skating events, including ice hockey, while Cortina, the host of the 1956 Winter Games, will stage some of the skiing events, biathlon, curling and – all being well – the sliding events.
Bormio and Livigno in the Valtellina valley will host more skiing and snowboarding, while Val di Fiemme is the place for ski jumping, cross country skiing and speed skating.
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'When I come away from Cortina, Milan or Livigno, especially, it's very much an alpine, skiing, winter feel and that's just perfect for a Winter Olympics,' said Muirhead, whose new role means the 34-year-old Scot will be the leader of the British team in Italy.
'I competed in Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang and Beijing and you wouldn't really class them as alpine villages, but when it comes to Milano-Cortina it definitely has that feel.'
But with 250 miles separating Milan and Cortina, the 2026 Games are a significant departure from the IOC's traditional host-city model. Not that the IOC had much choice — it had to try something new.
The decision to go to Beijing in 2022, only 14 years after it hosted the Summer Olympics, was an attempt to bring the Games to a big, new audience. The fact that the next two editions of the Games are in more typical surroundings would suggest that experiment did not completely work.
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Several candidate cities in Europe dropped out of the selection process for 2022 because of concerns over costs, and worried that interest in staging the Winter Games was waning, the IOC relaxed its requirement that a single place should host the majority of events, allowing bids from much broader locations. It also promised to make a bigger financial contribution to the hosts' costs.
Despite this, bids from Calgary and Sion in Switzerland for 2026 were both withdrawn following public referendums, and bids from Graz in Austria and Japan's Sapporo also failed to materialise. This left Milan-Cortina against another cluster-based bid from Stockholm and Are, a resort 400 miles north of the Swedish capital.
The Italian bid won the 2019 vote 47-34 and has spent the last six years slowly preparing for the country's fourth Olympic Games.
However, there is still one very important venue to be finished, the sliding centre in Cortina that will host the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton competitions — events that have been medal opportunities for Team GB in recent Games.
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After considering cheaper options, such as reopening Turin 2006's closed sliding centre or holding these events in Austria, the Italian government decided to back a complete rebuild of Cortina's Eugenio Monti track. But work on the £100million project did not start until last year following delays in finding a contractor and securing funding.
Given the uncertainty over whether it will be finished in time, the IOC quietly announced just before Christmas that it had a plan B: Lake Placid in upstate New York, the host of the 1980 Games and, arguably, the best sliding venue in the world.
The bosses of Milan-Cortina 2026, however, remain adamant that there will not be an American cluster during their Games.
'I had a call with the organising committee a couple of weeks ago and they are doing monthly checks on the sliding centre and all is up to speed and up to date,' said Muirhead.
'There's still some work to do on it but they're still very positive come the next check in mid-February and homologation in March.
'Right now, we're all focused on sliding being in Cortina. If that does change, we go with it and it will be all hands on deck to make it work. But at the minute, it's looking very positive that it will be in Cortina.'
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(Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images)