The name of these Games might be Milan, but fans say that it’s in mountain towns that the essence of the Winter Olympics has come alive.
In Bormio, a medieval town nestled in the Italian Alps, throngs of ticketless Olympics spectators turned out over the weekend for the men’s downhill skiing race, packing the streets at the bottom of the daunting Stelvio course and briefly blocking traffic.
“We all made a point to be here,” said Lucia Gerber, 33, a Bormio resident who watched the race with her father over the weekend. “Though we could use more big screens!”
The 25th Winter Olympics have taken on the air of a charming neighborhood festival in town, where residents mingle on cobblestone sidewalks and chalet balconies within a snowball’s throw of the world’s best skiers whooshing down the mountains.
About 130 miles away in Milan, the Games’ major host city, the vibe is different.
There, athletes and spectators ride the subway alongside commuters and schoolchildren to venues many miles apart. Olympic signage is subdued. Some of the biggest crowds have formed outside the Gothic-style Duomo cathedral, Milan’s best known monument, where an Olympics megastore has been erected.
The city feels at times like it is hosting a midsize business convention rather than one of the world’s premier sporting events.
“Have you been to Milano?” Gianluca Lorenzi, the mayor of Cortina d’Ampezzo, a wealthy ski resort town in the Dolomites serving as the Games’ second hub, asked a reporter this week, seizing the chance to throw a little shade. “This is so different. In Cortina, you can breathe the Olympic atmosphere.”
“If you go to Milan,” he added, “it’s impersonal.”
Distance may be the defining feature of these Games, which stretch nearly 8,500 square miles after Olympic officials urged organizers to make use of existing sporting venues rather than build many new ones. The organizers have talked up the opportunity for visitors to enjoy the variety of northern Italy — the history and style of Milan, where the skating and hockey competitions are being held, and the mountain towns such as Bormio, Livigno and Cortina, which are hosting skiing, snowboarding and sliding sports like bobsled and luge.
But for many spectators, the distance has diluted some of the typical Olympic energy. Veterans of past Winter Games called Milan beautiful and cosmopolitan but said they missed having athletes and fans packed into one place.
“It does affect the vibe, to be honest,” Debbie Bowe, the mother of the American speedskater Brittany Bowe, said on Sunday outside the Duomo.
“Here, with few different venues, we don’t have the blessing to jump on a quick train ride to just watch the bobsledding,” she said of Milan. “So we’re pretty much just focused around the ice on this trip, which I’m not complaining about. But it’s different.” (On Monday, her daughter finished fourth in the women’s 1,000 meters.)
Spectators were largely absent from the 2022 Beijing Games because of the coronavirus pandemic, and many athletes said they were thrilled to be competing in front of fans again. But the athletes themselves are spread out, too, with six separate Olympic villages dispersed across the venues in northern Italy.
Tim Puttre, a Los Angeles resident attending his fourth Olympics, lamented what he called a lack of excitement in Milan as he strolled in front of the Duomo.
“I’m not happy about it for the athletes,” he said. “There’s no one gathering and talking. Usually, the Olympic experience is there’s a main town or like a downtown somewhere that everyone meets.”
The official 2026 Olympics motto is “IT’s your vibe,” with the capital letters representing Italy. Christophe Dubi, the executive director of the Olympics for the International Olympic Committee, scoffed at a reporter’s suggestion that the Games have lacked ambience in Milan.
“I am feeling the vibe,” Mr. Dubi said. “Are you feeling the vibe?”
He then proceeded to plug the mountain towns. If “you go now to Livigno or Cortina and you don’t feel the Olympic atmosphere,” he said, “you are from another planet.”
To be fair, part of the issue is simple math. Milan is a commercial and fashion capital of 1.3 million people, in which Olympic spectators can easily get lost in the crowds. Cortina, Bormio and the other mountain towns each are home to a few thousand year-round residents, and the Games are the biggest event to be held there in many people’s lifetimes — although Cortina did also host the Winter Games in 1956.
In Cortina, “the winter sport feeling is here,” said Andreas Ehret, standing in a line outside the official Olympics souvenir shop wearing a handcrafted poncho made out of German flags.
He and his partner, Sabrina Kreis, had watched cross-country skiing in Tesero, a village in the Dolomites known for its arts and crafts, and were preparing to head to Anterselva, near the Austrian border, to watch the biathlon. Then it would be on to the ice hockey in Milan, where they were excited for the event but not so much for the city itself.
Sandy Cavinato, who lives in Switzerland but has a vacation home in Cortina, declared that Milan was not a fitting host. “Maybe Summer Olympics, but not winter,” she said.
In the smaller towns, the Olympics have felt almost cozy. The American skier Alex Hall, who won a silver medal in slopestyle, said that the atmosphere in Livigno is markedly different from the past two Winter Games in which he competed — in Pyeongchang in 2018 and in Beijing — and in a good way.
“It feels less Olympic-y and more homey,” he said in an interview. “It’s almost calming. It doesn’t blow everything out of proportion.”
Scott Colby of Steamboat Springs, Colo., whose son, Jason Colby, 19, competed in ski jumping, joined other athlete families in a parade on Saturday organized by local Olympic officials in Predazzo, a town of about 4,500 in the Dolomites. It drew about 500 people.
“I thought it was going to be just walking down the road, but there were people lined up in the street and a funk band leading us,” he said. “Predazzo really got into it.”
Not everyone in the mountains has embraced the Games. In Cortina, many residents complained about Olympic-related construction snarling their picturesque town. Bormio residents also spent months griping about Games-related logistics and security, Richi Gerber, 68, said as he watched the men’s downhill from the street below. They fretted that few people would attend events because tickets were expensive.
“This morning, I checked one last time — 2,600 euros ($3,100)” for the priciest seats, he said, shaking his head.
But the ticket prices didn’t matter for residents who could just walk down to the end of the course and join in the street party for free.
The revelry grew after two Italians, Giovanni Franzoni and Dominik Paris, secured the silver and bronze medals in downhill skiing, behind Franjo von Allmen of Switzerland. The D.J. at an après-ski cafe blasted Nirvana and AC/DC. A waiter juggled trays of Aperol spritzes to a standing-room-only crowd on the patio.
Two friends, Samantha Sosio and Valentina Martinelli, both 25, said they walked about half an hour from their homes to be at the foot of the course for the final.
“Now,” said Ms. Sosio, who had draped herself with an Italian flag, “it feels like we’re embracing the Olympics more.”
Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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