The 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics will be remembered for the harrowing sight of the American skier Lindsey Vonn being airlifted to a hospital, the last-day, last-gasp victory by the United States in the men’s gold medal hockey game, and the impressive medal haul in Para alpine skiing by the Austrian siblings Veronika and Johannes Aigner.
But the Games will also be remembered as a major step by the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, which end on Sunday, toward becoming a regional event, spanning long distances. The Milan-Cortina Olympics had by far the biggest footprint of any previous Winter Games, spanning more than 22,000 square kilometers, or 8,500 miles, in northern Italy. And that distance was almost even bigger.
It was only as the Olympics neared that organizers were confident that they could stage the sliding competitions — bobsled, luge and skeleton — in Italy at all. Construction of the $120 million Cortina Sliding Center pushed so close against the deadline that the International Olympic Committee had given serious consideration to staging those events in Lake Placid, N.Y. Such thoughts and discussions will become commonplace as the I.O.C. seeks to safeguard the future of the Winter Games, an event that because of climatic and economic challenges has become harder and harder to find hosts for.
“Go abroad if need be,” Christophe Dubi, the I.O.C. official responsible for the Games, said in an interview during the Olympics in Milan, referring to the possibility of holding the sliding events elsewhere. The Italian hosts, he noted fought to keep everything at home. “From an I.O.C. standpoint, we had the door wide open, including when we said the timeline was incredibly tight. We said, ‘Listen, we still have this option — we can use something outside.’”
The I.O.C. has had to pivot toward flexibility as the number of bidders for its marquee winter event has started to dwindle, amid criticism about sustainability, changing weather and the economic and infrastructure demands it places on host cities. For the last edition, in 2022, it was left with just two choices: Almaty, Kazakhstan, and its eventual choice, Beijing.
Yet more changes could be on the horizon.
The Olympics is primarily a made-for-television event, and being spread out across several venues in even distant locations doesn’t affect the broadcast. Overall viewership of the Milan-Cortina Olympics, including the opening ceremony, was the highest for a Winter Games since the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
Kirsty Coventry, who has just overseen her first Olympic Games as president, has instituted a review of how the Games are run and how hosts are chosen, among a number of other reviews of the I.O.C.’s operations. The early results of a process the I.O.C. calls “Fit for the Future” are scheduled to be revealed at a major meeting of the group’s members this June.
Within the Olympic movement, senior officials have already publicly called for significant changes, including a pitch for the creation of a group of permanent Winter Olympics venues that the I.O.C. could rotate through every four years. The biggest proponent of that idea is Johan Eliasch, a businessman who heads skiing’s global governing body. Mr. Eliasch said having a fixed calendar of permanent hosts would reduce the burden on building costly infrastructure that can quickly become obsolete after the Olympics have moved on.
Some of that can be seen in Italy, where Olympic venues in Turin, where the country previously hosted the Winter Olympics in 2006, are in various stages of disrepair. Photos of those sites went viral after they were posted on social media.
“It’s a no-brainer,” Mr. Eliasch said of permanent Olympic sites. “Cities don’t want to bid for it because they know it’s going to be complicated, and it’s definitely uncertain.”
Mr. Dubi said it would not be straightforward to pick a few venues. The I.O.C., he said, conducted a study of potential Olympic sites and found there were 10 regions in the world that would have the right combination of temperature and altitude to host future Winter Games. Predicting a region’s long-term interest in hosting an event, however, is complicated.
“What if the community has changed political leadership, or economically the region is not anymore in capacity to host?” Mr. Dubi said. “You have to have options.”
The regions interested in hosting, Mr. Dubi added, are likely to evolve over time, and those that currently see themselves as winter sports hubs might not host in the future. “You can have in Salt Lake now a fabulous interest and 25 years from now they will have moved on to something else, and maybe the Games are not as appealing,” he said.
Salt Lake City will host the Winter Olympics for the second time in 2034, and in 2030 the Games will take place in the French Alps, but not entirely. To save on costs, speedskating will take place at an oval outside France, Mr. Dubi said. It would be the second consecutive French Olympics where events have been spread out: The surfing competition for the Paris Olympics was held on the Pacific island of Tahiti. Organizers of the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles have announced that canoeing and women’s softball will take place in Oklahoma City.
For the I.O.C., the future of its flagship events — some of the biggest in all of sports — requires meeting the needs of many different constituencies, including the participants.
Making connections, feeling part of a community and cheering on teammates has long been part of the athlete experience at the Olympics. In Italy, with its scattered venues, that was more challenging than ever. Competitors were housed in several athlete villages, some hundreds of kilometers apart, and the opening ceremony involved events taking place in six locations simultaneously.
Many athletes are following the debate around the future of the Games. Salomé Kora, a Swiss bobsledder, considered the state of the sliding center in Turin and how it has sat unused for years, inked with graffiti and with weeds now growing in crevices, before speaking in favor of a rotation of host cities.
“So much money is invested in infrastructure that is often not really used afterward, and it’s such a shame,” she said. “Sliding tracks really need love and a lot of work to keep them up, and it’s really expensive.”
She added that the Games would be held in the same city only once every six or eight editions, which would mean athletes would be unlikely to compete in the same host city twice. “And if they did, they would be complete legends,” she said.
Others understood why the Games had needed to be spread out in Italy but bemoaned what had been lost.
Conor McDermott, a member of the United States speedskating team, shared a village in Milan with the hockey players and figure skaters. Everyone else, including two of Mr. McDermott’s friends who were skiers, stayed in the mountains. “It’s awesome to meet and hang out with the hockey players and figure skaters, but it would have been nice to see more sports and also meet everyone else,” he added.
Heather Knight contributed reporting.
Tariq Panja is a global sports correspondent, focusing on stories where money, geopolitics and crime intersect with the sports world.
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