Even with the Duomo, the city’s towering Gothic basilica, and La Scala, its opulent opera house, spheres and voices reaching for the heavens, for all of its cathedrals of faith and fashion, the museum walls and catwalks, the genius of da Vinci and Versace, Milan’s most intriguing winter image was created not by the hands or minds of man but the forces of nature.
The Alps and the Apennines loom over Milan low on the western side of Italy’s Po Valley. In the winter cold, the two mountain ranges trap the city in a combination of temperature inversions and industrial and agricultural pollution, shrouding Milan in a canvas of a thick, persistent fog, Nebbia di Milano, the fog of Milan, a surreal haze that seems to slow time and motion, both alluring and a bit foreboding, mystical and mythical, casting the city in film noir shades of lights and shadows.
“Milan is beautiful in fog,” the late Italian singer Ornella Vanoni once said, “like a woman with a veil.”
With this month’s Olympic Games in Milan and co-hosted in Cortina, the winter icon of the Dolomites, the veil will be lifted, revealing to a worldwide audience an ambitious and confident city and country convinced it will deliver transformative Games and clarity for the Olympic movement in a time of increasing uncertainty with the specter of climate change and global unrest.
“These Games will take athletes and fans to places where winter sport is part of daily life, showcasing existing world-class venues and celebrating the regions that live and breathe sport,” International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry said. “Milano Cortina will be a new kind of Winter Games: Games where innovation meets tradition, gender equality reaches new heights, and iconic landscapes provide the perfect stage.”
That stage will stretch over 16 days (Feb. 6-22) and across northern Italy from Milan, the Games’ anchor in the west, to within a few miles of the Austrian border in the east, 8,495 square miles, nearly the size of New Jersey, with four competition clusters and six Olympic Villages, creating the largest Games footprint in Olympic history and providing the template for future Winter Games that reflects both IOC’s emphasis on using existing facilities and the realities of climate change.
“They’re trying to show that the Winter Olympics can work,” said Yoav Dubinsky, founder of the University of Oregon’s Olympic Studies Hub.
To do so, the IOC, after underwhelming Games in Sochi in 2014 and Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018 and the 2022 Beijing Olympics held in the midst of a global pandemic and against the backdrop of widespread criticism of China’s human rights record, has returned to its winter safe space, Western Europe.
“With Milan Cortina (the IOC) is back on familiar territory, to back to Europe,” Dubinsky said. “Lots of Winter Olympic Games took place in and around the Alps, and this time it’s the Italians now. So it’s back in familiar territory, in that sense, after Pyeongchang and Beijing, places where the Winter Games were held for the first time.”
The IOC has also followed a trail of millionaires and billionaires to Milan, which over the past decade has emerged as a major global player not only in fashion but in finance, real estate and technology, home to more than 2,600 startups and companies that make up half of Italy’s $34.9 billion total tech value.
“Milano has a greater capacity of attraction for its industry, especially the fashion industry, but also in finance, especially after Brexit,” said Luca Cottini, a professor and Italian cultural historian at Villanova. “Milano became a very, very important destination for a lot of professionals from the UK, and so this really exposed the city to a larger international audience. It is a city that has a capacity of attraction, internationally and globally, for business and for culture that few other cities have.”
“They’re ready to put on a show,” Coventry said. “It’s going to be a beautiful show.”
A show that, for the first time since Sochi, will feature stars from the National Hockey League. The NHL held its players out of the 2018 Games over disputes with the IOC and the International Ice Hockey Federation over financial, marketing, insurance issues and injury concerns. Pandemic-related complications kept NHL players out of the Beijing Olympics four years later.
“The return to the Olympics marks a monumental moment for hockey,” said Marty Walsh, the NHL Players’ Association’s executive director. “Bringing the best players in the world back to the Olympic Games in 2026,” said IIHF president Luc Tardif, “is a major step forward for our sport.”
United States’ Lindsey Vonn celebrates at the finish area of an alpine ski, women’s World Cup Super G, in Tarvisio, Italy, Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026. Vonn, 41 will step into the starting gate atop the Olympia delle Tofane course on February 8 the favorite to regain the downhill gold medal. (AP Photo/Marco Trovati) IOC President Kirsty Coventry meets volunteers, ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (Daniele Mascolo/Pool Photo via AP) South Bay snowboarder Chloe Kim is attempting to become the first woman to win three consecutive half-pipe gold medals despite suffering a torn labrum in her shoulder during a recent training run in Switzerland. FILE – Gold medal winner Chloe Kim, of the United States, celebrates during the venue ceremony for the women’s halfpipe at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 10, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File) Olympic rings are projected on the facade of a building in front of the Duomo gothic cathedral, in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) United States’ Mikaela Shiffrin celebrates winning an alpine ski, women’s World Cup slalom, in Spindleruv Mlyn, Czech Republic, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. Mikaela Shiffrin, the most successful alpine skier in history. (AP Photo/Giovanni Auletta) Workers set the Olympics cauldron at the Peace arch in Milan, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) Ilia Malinin competes during the men’s short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026, in St. Louis. Malinin is one of the favorites heading into the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough) South Bay snowboarder Chloe Kim is attempting to become the first woman to win three consecutive half-pipe gold medals despite suffering a torn labrum in her shoulder during a recent training run in Switzerland. FILE – Chloe Kim, of the United States, runs the course during the women’s halfpipe qualifying at Phoenix Snow Park at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Feb. 12, 2018. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File) Jack Eichel will be marking his Olympic debut. File- Vegas Golden Knights center Jack Eichel (9) celebrates his goal during the third period of an NHL hockey game against the Buffalo Sabres, March 15, 2025, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/Jeffrey T. Barnes, File) Show Caption1 of 9United States’ Lindsey Vonn celebrates at the finish area of an alpine ski, women’s World Cup Super G, in Tarvisio, Italy, Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026. Vonn, 41 will step into the starting gate atop the Olympia delle Tofane course on February 8 the favorite to regain the downhill gold medal. (AP Photo/Marco Trovati) ExpandWhile young NHL superstars like Canada’s Connor McDavid and Americans Jack Eichel and Auston Matthews will make their Olympic debuts in Milan, Alex Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time goalscoring leader, will miss a third consecutive Games, in this case because of the IOC’s ban on athletes competing for Russia in response to the country’s continued invasion of Ukraine. Twenty Russian athletes have been approved by the IOC to compete in Milano Cortina as individual neutral athletes (AINS) after going through a vetting system to ensure they have not actively supported the war in Ukraine and have no affiliation with military agencies.
“The process we used in Paris was successful and that’s the exact same process we’re using now,” Coventry said.
The 2,900 athletes competing in Milano Cortina will include one god, record-shattering U.S. figure skater Ilia Malinin, the self-proclaimed “Quad God,” and the highest percentage of female athletes — 47 percent — in Winter Olympic history.
American women expected to shine
The American women should claim an even bigger share of the headlines.
A U.S. woman hasn’t won an individual Olympic figure skating medal since Orange County’s Sasha Cohen claimed the silver at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, and hasn’t captured the gold medal since Sarah Hughes’ victory at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.
Not only are Amber Glenn, the three-time U.S. champion and winner of last season’s Grand Prix Final, and Alysa Liu, the 2025 World champion, co-favorites for the gold medal, there’s even talk of the pair and Isabeau Levito, the 2024 World silver medalist, pulling a first-ever sweep of women’s figure skating medals.
South Bay snowboarder Chloe Kim is attempting to become the first woman to win three consecutive half-pipe gold medals despite suffering a torn labrum in her shoulder during a recent training run in Switzerland.
“Good to go,” Kim said.
So is Mikaela Shiffrin, the most successful alpine skier in history.
After becoming at 18 at the 2014 Games the youngest ever Olympic slalom champion and then winning the giant slalom gold medal four years later, Shiffrin did not medal in her six events at the 2022 Games, failing to finish in the slalom and giant slalom. She missed part of last season with a punctured abdomen suffered in a crash, but is once again back in top form.
Shiffrin won her 108th World Cup race, dominating the slalom at Špindlerův Mlýn on January 25, and securing the World Cup slalom season title with two events still to go.
“I’m not going to lie — the Olympics have been wonderful to me, and they’ve been like a mosquito, as well,” Shiffrin said. “The attitude I would like to bring is that the Olympics are not happening to me, but I’m happening to them.”
Perhaps the most compelling storyline of these Games belongs to U.S. downhill racer Lindsey Vonn.
Sixteen years after she became the first American woman to win an Olympic downhill, seven years after injuries drove her into retirement, nearly two years since undergoing partial knee replacement surgery, Vonn, 41 will step into the starting gate atop the Olympia delle Tofane course on February 8 the favorite to regain the downhill gold medal.
“I’m not looking to just participate in the Olympics,” Vonn said. “I’m looking to what I can do in the Olympics. That’s my goal. I’m looking forward and I know what I’m capable of. So I have my own expectations. I’m sure the world has their own as well. But I don’t think yours will be higher than mine.”
Vonn had a crash Friday in her final downhill race before the Olympics and injured her knee. But she wrote on Instagram hours after she was airlifted off the course, “My Olympic dream is not over.”
But the woman at the center of these Games is Coventry, 42, the two-time Olympic swimming gold medalist from Zimbabwe. Coventry was elected last March as the first woman and the first African to lead the IOC. Yet for all her firsts, Coventry is expected to continue policies and direction of the previous IOC president, Thomas Bach, who hand picked Coventry to be his successor and had lobbied against the candidacy of Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, track and field’s international governing body, and bitter rival of Bach’s and seen by many as the most qualified candidate.
“Coventry looks like she’s a change candidate, it feels like she’s a change candidate,” said Holy Cross professor Victor A. Matheson, co-author of “Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics.” “But she’s the handpicked candidate of the outgoing guy. Idealistically and administratively, she’s just a continuation of the previous president.”
Politics likely will intrude
One of the legends of Nebbia di Milano, is the legend of “The Changing Life,” the tale of a man who leaves his home in the morning fog and later returns to find a totally different life — a new house, a new wife, new children. The fog had rewritten the man’s reality.
Much of the focus on Coventry in Milan will be on how she and the IOC will navigate their new reality — Life In The Age of Trump.
Coventry said on the day of her election that the IOC faced “a number of difficult challenges” and acknowledged that one of them was “Donald Trump.” Meeting with President Trump early in her presidency would be a “priority,” she said.
Yet more than 10 months since then, Coventry and the IOC have yet to establish formal contact with the Trump administration about the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, she admitted earlier this month.
Coventry said she hoped to meet with Vice President J.D. Vance during the Games in Milan. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also scheduled to attend the Games.
The possibility of a meeting between Coventry and Vance has taken on greater significance with the confirmation by the Department of Homeland Security this week that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will be deployed to aid U.S. security operations during the Olympics, sparking widespread outrage within the host country and further fueling concerns about anti-Trump rallies disrupting the Games.
“They’re not welcome in Milan,” Milan mayor Giuseppe Sala said in an interview with the Italian radio network RTL.
“This is a militia that kills,” Sala continued, calling on Italian authorities to prevent the deployment. “Could we ever say ‘No’ to Trump? This isn’t about severing relations or creating a diplomatic incident, but could we say ‘No?’”
For much of this century, traditional winter sport hubs, especially in Europe, repeatedly said no – no thanks to hosting the Winter Olympics. The Winter Games were such a tough sell that the IOC increasingly relied on authoritarian regimes like China or Russia, as the cost of hosting the Olympics and public opposition have driven fewer and fewer countries from bidding for the Games. Beijing was selected over Almaty, Kazakhstan, as the 2022 host city after four other candidates, including Oslo and Stockholm, withdrew citing costs, high public opposition and IOC heavy-handedness.
The Beijing Games were a public relations disaster for then-IOC president Thomas Bach and the organization.
Members of Congress’ Human Rights Commission, in a rare display of bipartisan unity, in May 2021 called on the IOC to remove the Winter Olympics from Beijing, accusing the IOC and its corporate partners of being complicit in human rights violations by the Chinese government.
Rep. Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey Republican and co-chairman of the human rights commission, dubbed the Beijing Games the “Genocide Olympics” and the name stuck.
Is the “IOC … enabling, coddling thugs?” Smith asked during the hearing. “The answer is yes.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi compared the Games to the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Few places will be able to host future Games
The selection process for the 2026 Games followed an all too familiar pattern for the IOC. Sion, Switzerland, withdrew its bid in June 2018 after a local referendum supporting the bid failed. Graz, Austria, pulled out a month later. Sapporo, host of the 1972 Winter Olympics, withdrew in September 2018. Calgary, host of the 1988 Games and considered the frontrunner for the 2026 Olympics, was forced out in November 2018 after the city council voted to cancel the bid. At least 13 other cities, including Quebec City and previous Winter Olympic host cities Lillehammer, Lake Placid and Innsbruck, expressed interest in the 2026 Games but decided not to launch formal bids.
All of which left the IOC to decide between Milano Cortina and a joint bid from Stockholm and Are, a ski resort more than 300 miles from the Swedish capital. On June 24, 2019, the IOC awarded the Games to Milano Cortina by a vote of 47-34.
“For the IOC, this is an important festival as Cortina-Milan received the nod in a difficult bid cycle when a number of cities, including Calgary, Sapporo, and Sion withdrew,” said Stephen Wenn, a professor and Olympic historian at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University and author of “Tarnished Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Salt Lake City Bid Scandal.”
“Brand-wise, going forward, the IOC wants these Games to succeed and flourish. Yes, Games sites are secured through 2034 with LA, French Alps, Brisbane, and Salt Lake City, but the IOC is seeking some momentum such that cities see hosting to be viable (and continue to approach them with fleshed out bids such as was the case with Brisbane),” Wenn continued, referring to the 2028 and 2032 Summer Games in Los Angeles and Brisbane and the 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics in France and Utah. “Right now, the pool of contenders, or at least those expressing a certain degree of interest for 2036, lacks a western European city, and the IOC likely would like to see that change.”
The IOC is banking on the Milano Cortina plan of using primarily existing venues across a region, reducing costs and the environmental impact of the Games. The IOC hopes this will provide a template for future Winter Olympics and make hosting more attractive to potential host countries.
These Games will feature four competition clusters:
*Milan will be home to the ice sports, ice hockey, figure skating, long and short track speed skating. San Siro, the city’s iconic soccer stadium, home to both AC Milan and Inter Milan, will host the opening ceremony next Friday.
• The Cortina d’Ampezzo cluster will host the sliding and women’s Alpine skiing events as well as curling.
• Valtellina will hold the snowboard and freestyle skiing, snow and ski mountaineering and men’s Alpine skiing events.
• Val di Fiemme will be the Nordic sport cluster.
The closing ceremony on Feb. 22 will be held in Arena di Verona, the 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater.
“There’s some uniqueness to Milano Cortina,” Dubinsky said. “First of all, it’s the first time that two cities are bidding together. They’re not adjacent to each other. That’s one factor, but there’s also the factor that there’s no competitions in clusters that are (only) a few hours away. So it’s a way of the challenge to say we’re trying to create some sort of a template that countries will will be able to use that decentralizes the need of an Olympic village where everyone is together, but enables a more feasible way of hosting without the burden of having (to build) so many venues and moving forward, that may be the way to go.
“Less and less places and countries and cities that are able to host the Winter Olympics due to a wide variety of reasons, ranging from climate change or climate crisis and shorter and warmer winters to requirements of using existing facilities. So this is a way of using existing facilities, but spreading them across a wider region. The French Alps will perhaps work in some capacity. Along those lines, there’s a bid in Switzerland that is also going to be kind of countrywide, rather than centralized in a metropolitan area, so it’s likely to influence the idea of how to host the major Olympics.”
Research suggests the IOC may not have any choice.
In a new study conducted by the University of Waterloo in Canada, in collaboration with the University of Toronto and the University of Innsbruck, researchers analyzed 93 potential winter sport host locations that the IOC had identified as having existing Olympic-level facilities. Of those 93 locations, only 52 would remain “climate-reliable” to host the Olympics if their countries continue with current climate policies, and just 22 to hold the Paralympics, typically held a month after the Olympics. Without snowmaking technology, the number of potential Olympic hosts drops to just four by the 2050s, the study found.
“Climate change is altering the geography of where the Winter Olympics and Paralympics can be held,” said Daniel Scott, a Waterloo professor and the lead author on the study.
“It’s not going to get better,” Dubinsky said. “It’s going to get worse for the IOC. There are less and less countries that can host. That means that Winter Olympics will be probably coming back to familiar territories. More than that, there will be a need for more flexibility in the way of hosting, perhaps more regions, maybe even collaborations between countries.”
These Olympics come with their own set of logistical, financial and environmental challenges, not least of which is their $4.7 billion price tag, with the Italian government picking up at $1 billion in infrastructure and security costs.
So why would Milan want the Games?
“It’s a good question, because there’s no clear objective, like you can say, renovating East London,” Dubinsky said, referring to how the 2012 Games were used to redevelop an impoverished part of London. It’s not along those lines, but it’s a way of showing that they can host in a sustainable way.”
But for longtime Milan watchers, hosting the Olympics is a natural next step for a city that hosted Expo 2015, the World’s Fair, and that in the last decade has transformed its skyline and become a prominent landing spot in global migration trends and, according to Forbes, the “most dynamic and the most expensive property market in Italy.”
Especially after Brexit, Milan has become the destination of choice for millionaires lured by the 2017 change in Italian tax policies, which features a 7% flat tax for retirees and new residents on foreign income. Milan’s residential prices have increased between 15 to 28% over the past five years, according to Forbes.
“With Milano and the Olympics, you have to look at it within the longer trajectory of the last 10, 15 years,” Cottini said. “Milan is the landing spot in Italy if you want to do business in Italy. Milan is the Italian New York City, Italy’s go to city.
“In a way, Milan doesn’t need the Olympics. But in a way, the Olympics legitimize what’s been going on in Milan the last 10, 15 years.”
Corruption investigation in Milan
The success of Expo 2015 catapulted the political career of Sala, the events director, who was first elected Milan’s mayor in 2016. In July, prosecutors confirmed that Sala was among the targets of a widespread criminal investigation into corruption related to the city’s unprecedented urban development over the past two decades, including construction for the Olympic Games.
Sala said he would not resign.
“My hands are clean,” he said.
Prosecutors allege that developers bribed officials to expedite building permits and approve projects.
Milan, prosecutors allege, was “a commodity to be plundered.’’
Milan’s most infamous recent construction project is Arena Milan, an “almost ready” $330 million ice hockey venue. Not only was the project months behind schedule, but when the ice surface was finally installed and measured, the rink was found to be wider and three feet shorter than agreed upon by organizers. Although workers continue to put on finishing touches on the arena, NHL officials have been convinced the venue is playable.
“You’re not going to go to Milano for nothing,” Tardif recently told reporters.
Cortina has had its own venue controversies. The rebuilding of the area’s sliding center has drawn intense criticism over its cost and environmental impact. Although the IOC suggested that sliding events be held on tracks in nearby Switzerland or Austria, the Italian government chose to proceed with the $136 million project that included clearing a popular forested area near the facility. Mayor Gianluca Lorenzi received death threats.
Delays in road construction and other infrastructure projects forced Milano Cortina officials to reduce the number of tickets available for events in the Cortina cluster by 15 percent. Congestion concerns, however, remain. With the Games just days away, the $29.8 million Apollonio-Socrepes gondola is still not fully completed. The gondola line was designed to transport as many as 3,000 people per hour to skiing events. But the project didn’t break ground until July and then experienced further delays as the result of legal challenges, ground fractures and the threat of landslides.
“Italy will be ready,” Fabio Massimino Saldini, CEO of SiMiCo, the group responsible for the design, planning and construction of Olympic venues, recently told a French TV network.
The world will find out when the veil is lifted on Friday, but it might be worth remembering another of the legends of Nebbia di Milano, the ghost story of La Dama Velata, the Veiled Lady. An elegant yet mysterious woman, dressed in black, giving off the scent of violets, according to legend, would emerge from the fog and lure men into Sempione Park. Once in the park, the woman removed her veil, revealing her face to be not that of a beautiful woman but an empty skull, the sight of which drove those who followed her mad.
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