Thursday marks one year until the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics and the Canadian Olympic Committee hopes this current swell in national pride gets channelled into support for the country’s athletes.
The COC is in full tilt preparing for the Milano Cortina Games, in which events are spread across clusters in Northern Italy, and will feature many Canadians thriving in international competition. Also, NHL players will be playing for the first time since 2014.
Plenty of themes will excite Canadians at a time when patriotism is on the rise. Threats of tariffs from the United States have Canadians in a lather, buying Canadian-made goods and fuming over remarks from U.S. President Donald Trump about making the country its 51st state.
“There’s a lot going on in the world where supporting Team Canada and seeing Canada win is as important as ever to Canadians,” said David Shoemaker, chief executive officer of the COC.
“If we’re now in this mentality of ‘let’s beat our counterparts,’ well let’s do it on the ice, let’s do it on the snow, and we’ll feel very good about that.”
Tariffs could also affect Team Canada if they mean a trade war that shrinks the Canadian dollar.
Shoemaker says that while private investment in Olympic sport continues to grow through the COC’s marketing partners, government financing for sport is another story. Many Canadian sport federations are suffering because there hasn’t been an increase in core government financing in more than 20 years. Meanwhile the costs of training and competing continue to rise.
“The imminence of a trade war can only make that worse,” Shoemaker said. “The cost of equipment and travel, a shrinking dollar. That’s our real practical concern.”
Canada has a hot medal pace to keep. It won 26 medals at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and 27 at the Summer Games in Paris.
“Our athletes are still the best athletes in the world that seem to have a magical ability to do more with less,” Shoemaker said. “They proved that in Paris, I have great confidence that they’ll prove that again in Milan.”
The 2026 Games will feature the return of NHL players, who missed the 2018 and 2022 editions. This will also be the first Olympics in the PWHL era.
“I think that the pressure to win both women’s and men’s hockey has probably never been higher,” he said.
This is the fourth time an Olympics has landed in Italy. The country was winter host twice – Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1956 and Turin in 2006 – and the Summer Games in Rome in 1960.
Sixteen sport disciplines will be contested at these Olympics and another six in the Paralympics.
While the 2026 event is dubbed the Milano Cortina Games, events will staged across a swath of Northern Italy spanning some 22,000 square kilometres. It will be the most widespread Winter Olympics and Winter Paralympics in history.
Athletes will compete in three other mountain clusters, while the closing ceremony is in Verona, in the northeastern Veneto region.
The sliding track in Cortina, slated to hold bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events, is racing to be ready, with builders working flat out. Moving sliding events to Lake Placid, N.Y., is reportedly the Plan B if the centre isn’t ready on time.
“The organizing committee and the IOC remain confident that it’ll be ready,” Shoemaker said. “I’ll share in their confidence until they tell me that it’s not ready.”
As for the COC’s to-do list, selecting its chef de mission for the 2026 Olympics is imminent.
It is also working on its hospitality plans for the Games. The COC typically hosts one big Canada Olympic House in a central location for athletes, their family, friends and other fans to gather at a Games, but because there are several competition zones in 2026, the COC may have a few pop-up Canada House locations.
Canadians have been owning World Cup podiums lately, from Mikael Kingsbury’s domination in moguls to skier Jack Crawford winning the prestigious alpine race at Kitzbuehel and Marielle Thompson being atop the ski-cross world.
“We’re showing up in world championships and World Cup season this winter, and that’s usually a good barometer for how we’ll do,” Shoemaker said. “I’m confident it will be one of our best ever Winter Games performances.”
The 2026 Olympics take place from Feb. 6 to 22, with the Paralympics from March 6 to 15.
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