Action is well underway at the 2026 Winter Olympics, and following the opening ceremony (6 February), the focus is on the snow and ice arenas of Milan and Cortina. On a personal level, I have been looking forward to Milano–Cortina 2026 since my early involvement in the bid, when I supported the team by developing initial venue cost benchmarks for their submission to the IOC.
Since then, I’ve had the privilege of working across several projects connected to the Games’ delivery, watching the concept evolve from an outline vision into a fully realised enterprise. One that is now welcoming nearly 3,000 athletes across 25 venues.
While the world’s attention is naturally drawn to the sport itself, the journey to hosting these moments of sporting drama can be just as headline‑grabbing. What value does a major event like the Olympics truly create for its host, and what is the real cost of delivering the venues and infrastructure that make it possible?
The staging of the 2026 Winter Games represents an immense and intricately coordinated effort involving the Organising Committee, international Olympic bodies, and both local and national governments. How competition is enabled, how venues are delivered, and what legacy the Games leave behind is shaped years in advance, during the earliest phases of planning.
Ambition versus Accountability
High on the agenda for potential future host cities should be thinking about the capital costs and megaproject risk. Put simply, do you know what needs delivering, and are you clear on what it will cost?
The scale and extent of hosting a Games means a huge number of stakeholders and many interfaces and areas of scope for delivery.
Hosting requires coordination across:
- National, regional, and municipal governments
- International sports federations
- Organising committees
- Local communities
Governments and organising committees must deliver major projects on time and on budget, while balancing local development goals and international expectations, an inherently complex governance challenge. Yet, having to also navigate dozens of venues and service packages, interdependent schedules, and supply chains, all under a non‑negotiable opening date, makes it feel like even more daunting.
Take, for example, transportation and infrastructure demands. Host regions often need to build or upgrade significant transport links such as roads, rail lines, and metro systems to move athletes, spectators, and media between dispersed mountain venues. Such developments are costly and typically face tight completion timelines.
Setting a baseline scope for delivery that is realistic and understood is critical. Estimating, allocation ownership of, and tracking cost is a huge task, and one which should be high on your agenda from the start. The only thing more reputationally damaging than cost overruns for project delivery would be late delivery, which is not an option in an Olympics.
Do you need to build it?
Another crucial consideration is to be clear on the business case for permanent infrastructure. For a winter Olympics, the perennial push and pull of the need to provide high quality infrastructure to support the sport programme often manifests in a look toward the mountains.
The IOC is clear in their expectation that future hosts should be mature, regularly hosting world championship level events at proposed venues. Venues should have the capacity to extend to meet the needs of an Olympics. This is normally an easy ask for city-based ice sports such as hockey, figure skating, and curling, but it can present a bigger challenge on a mountain where sliding and ski jumping are involved.
For the 2026 Winter Olympics, a full redevelopment of the sliding track in Cortina was eventually opted for, costing in the region of €85-90m. While this will give Milano-Cortina 2026 a brand-new, world-class venue for the Games, it also presents the region with the need for a strong legacy business case to keep the venue operational post Games.
It is common that venues benefit from legacy financial support from the region. However, long-term viability depends on their ability to generate income beyond the Games. This can include:
- Future elite competition
- Elite training venue use
- Tourism revenues via taxi bob rides
- Community & age group use (local clubs)
The Games provide a high-profile launch for an amazing new venue, but it is the careful planning of legacy use which is where the effort should be focussed. The ambition should be nothing short of a podium finish because anything less will leave operators in a tricky position in the decades post Games.
Why Milano–Cortina as a dual host matters
Milano–Cortina is utilising a multi‑cluster arrangement. This approach has been developing for more than a decade. Sochi 2014 and Beijing 2022 both operated across distinct venue zones, and the French Alps’ approach for 2030 reflects a continuation of this trajectory.
What is significant about Milano–Cortina is the first dual host of the Winter Olympics to be officially acknowledged and structurally embedded in the hosting model. With that direction of travel in mind, it is worth exploring what is driving this shift, and how such a hosting model influences the timeline for planning and delivering Games venues.
Multi-cluster Games demand earlier coordination across jurisdictions, more complex governance structures, and longer lead-in times for transport, accommodation, and temporary overlay. Venue delivery schedules become less about a single critical path and more about synchronising multiple parallel ones, often under different regulatory regimes and political leaderships. In that context, the timeline for planning and construction is not just extended but front-loaded, placing a premium on early decisions, robust interfaces, and absolute certainty around immovable milestones.
The climate challenge
Something that is becoming an increasingly central consideration is climate (un)reliability and snow conditions. Rising temperatures, and more unpredictable and reduced snowfall, all directly affect the viability of snow competition venues. In just 24 years, only around half of the cities that have previously hosted the Winter Olympics will remain cold enough to host snow sports naturally, according to a 2024 IOC study.
Similarly, research also shows that only 56% of infrastructure-ready mountain locations, will meet snow and temperature requirement to be able to host a Winter Olympics in the 2050s, dropping to as low as one third by the 2080s.
The work around for unpredictable snowfall is artificial snowmaking, which is costly, energy-intensive and consumes a lot of water. The 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics organisers estimate needing approximately 946 million to 960 million litres of water for artificial snowmaking, enough to fill 384 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
For every future Games cycle, the impact of climate change will become more of an issue. One consideration is moving the Games forward in the calendar to ensure colder conditions, a particularly pertinent issue for the Paralympic winter Games which occur three weeks after the Olympics. That would be no mean feat in an already packed international competition calendar.
Another option is for the IOC to create a pool of climate stable hosts to manage risk. If this is to be the case, those considering hosting a Games in the near future need to weigh up the increasing difficulty of mounting the necessary infrastructure for a one‑off event versus the return on investment. Without the prospect of return Games or hosting of other major events and championships, it might not be in their best interests.
More than a moment in time
The Winter Olympics remains the pinnacle of global winter sport, but hosting it is becoming an increasingly complex, high-stakes decision. Future host cities will need to demonstrate more than vision and ambition. They must show discipline: clarity on scope, realism on cost, rigour in governance, and a credible legacy plan for every permanent asset created. The question is no longer whether a city can host the Games, but whether it can do so in a way that delivers lasting value for communities, athletes, and the sport itself.
As climate pressures intensify and the pool of viable hosts narrows, the balance will continue to shift from building new, bespoke venues toward smarter reuse, regional collaboration, and repeat hosting models. Those cities that succeed will be the ones that treat the Games not as a moment in time, but as part of a long-term sporting, economic, and environmental strategy.
In the next era of the Winter Olympics, the real gold medal will be won not on the slopes but in the decisions made long before the opening ceremony.
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