Robert Sroka is an assistant professor of sport management at Towson University.
When the flame is lit for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics on Friday, it won’t happen in one place. For the first time, the Opening Ceremonies will be split across four locations. Athletes will participate in parallel parades hundreds of miles apart, connected by satellite feed. Even the cauldron will burn in two cities simultaneously.
Milan-Cortina is the most geographically scattered Olympics in history. The two host cities sit 160 miles apart, a roughly five-to-six-hour car or train journey. Cortina is closer to Munich than Milan.
Competition venues sprawl across 8,500 square miles of northern Italy, spanning eight towns and three regions. Athletes will be housed in six Olympic Villages. Snoop Dogg might need a helicopter.
This sprawl threatens to dilute what makes the Olympics special. While Milan-Cortina may deliver spectacular television, the dispersed format risks sacrificing the Olympic spirit that athletes and spectators have experienced at the most successful Games.
The venue troubles extend beyond geography. Milan’s new Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena remains a construction site. Seating capacity has been reduced, and the ice surface is somehow too small. Maybe it’ll be finished by the first puck drop.
It’s an echo of Torino 2006, when workers were still covering arena dust with Olympic branding on Opening Day. Organizers hope that Milan-Cortina will avoid the legacy failures of Torino, such as the closed luge and bobsled track that cost $100 million and the abandoned ski jumping venue. And there’s Torino’s Olympic Village, which spent years unoccupied.
Indeed, many of Milan-Cortina’s remote mountain venues, such as Anterselva or Stelvio, were selected because they have a history of delivering the same events on the World Cup circuit. These choices minimize the possibility of white elephants, a positive development for the Olympic movement.
However, this sprawl intended to mitigate legacy concerns will create a two-tier Olympics. Milan, with its transport links, name recognition and accommodation supply, is the center of gravity. Figure skating, speed skating and the first hockey tournament with NHL players since 2014 cluster there. But the snow sports that define winter athletics will feel peripheral.
Accommodation in the mountain towns is scarce and prohibitively expensive. Milan’s prestige ice events have sold reasonably well; some of the mountain clusters still have many affordable tickets available. The Alpine and Nordic venues may feel more like glorified World Cup tour stops than Olympic celebrations.
We’ve seen scattered Winter Games before. Albertville 1992 spread competition across nine villages in French Savoie. Few speak nostalgically of Albertville. Post-Albertville, subsequent organizers explicitly didn’t want a similar diffusion at future Games.
The difference now is that broadcast and sponsorship revenue run the Olympic machine on a scale absent 34 years ago. NBC paid $7.75 billion for U.S. rights through 2032. These revenue streams, however, are reliant on attractive host cities in time zones that connect with key audiences, namely North America and Europe.
With top-tier winter candidates such as Oslo and Krakow, Poland withdrawing from 2022 bids out of cost and legacy fears, the International Olympic Committee needed to reconsider regional hosting to acquire recognizable European and North American host locales that would maximize broadcast and sponsorship rights.
This tension led to Milan-Cortina and a similarly dispersed French Alps concept in 2030. Whereas the two pandemic Olympics had to be repurposed on the fly, these are truly “made for TV” events from the outset.
And broadcast is where Milan-Cortina will shine. After consecutive Winter Games in Asian time zones (PyeongChang and Beijing), the Olympics return to Europe with Milan’s Duomo and the Dolomites as a backdrop. Ratings are expected to be the best since Vancouver 2010.
But the Olympics aren’t just a content delivery system for Peacock. Those present in Paris can attest to the Olympic spirit that weaved through the raucous crowds at Montmartre, among the half-million lining the streets for cycling road races. It was likewise felt in Vancouver and Whistler, where 2010 venues were clustered in two locations just 58 miles apart. It also filled Lillehammer in 1994, where a Norwegian town of 23,000 created what many regard as the single best Winter Olympics. The compact, walkable concept, natural beauty and warm atmosphere left an impression decades later, even inspiring the premise of the Netflix show “Lilyhammer.”
What these successes share is concentration and setting. The magic happens when everyone — especially the athletes — is in the same amazing place (or two) at the same time. Without sufficient concentration of athletes, fans and activity beyond the venue, much of the festival experience that differentiates an Olympics is lost.
When Milan-Cortina closes in a third city, Verona, viewers will have witnessed exceptional athletic feats in beautiful settings. The ratings will make future rights packages more valuable. But athletes will find that Olympic spirit isn’t something you can effectively parcel out across a mountain range.
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