2026 Winter Olympics Live Updates: Opening Ceremony Will Formally Kick Off Milan Games
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The Winter Games of Milan-Cortina d’Ampezzo will formally kick off on Friday with opening ceremonies, where pledges of sportsmanship and peaceful international competition will come against the backdrop of a fraying world order (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/world/europe/olympics-world-order-war.html).
Many details of exactly what will take place at the ceremonies in northern Italy have been closely guarded, but some have been announced, and we can predict others based on tradition and precedent. Here is what to expect:
At the main ceremony, in the San Siro stadium in Milan, the athletes will enter behind their national flags in the Parade of Nations. This year, there will be not one but four such parades, with the other three in the far-flung host sites for these Games: Cortina, Predazzo and Livigno.
There is likely to be an exclusively up-tempo celebration of Italian culture and history. At Beijing 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/04/sports/olympics-opening-ceremony), we got a snowflake dance. At Pyeongchang 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/sports/olympics/opening-ceremony.html), the choreography featured hundreds of Korean janggu drums. And Sochi 2014 (https://archive.nytimes.com/sports.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/live-coverage-2014-winter-olympics-opening-ceremony/) presented a version of Russia’s past that included the Bolshevik Revolution but skipped over Stalin. Italy will probably follow suit, perhaps highlighting the country’s achievements in science, visual arts and music (opera!), and maybe throwing in some references to the internationally revered 19th-century military hero Garibaldi.
Scattered protests were taking place in Milan, including one on Friday morning in opposition to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose personnel are in the country to advise Italian security forces during the Games. Another protest was taking place outside San Siro, a century-old landmark in one of Milan’s poorest neighborhoods, over high prices and a lack of affordable housing.
The Olympic flag will be carried into San Siro with great pomp. This year’s bearers will be an international crew that includes the Olympic marathon champ Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya; Tadatoshi Akiba, a former mayor of Hiroshima, Japan; and Pita Taufatofua (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/sports/olympics/rio-summer-games-reflections.html), the oiled-up, bare-chested athlete from Tonga who created a stir at the opening ceremony in 2016, 2018 and 2021. No official word yet on his attire this year.
Two Olympic cauldrons, said to be inspired by the work of Leonardo da Vinci, will be lit, one in Milan and the other in Cortina.
Scheduled performers include the Italian pop and opera singer Andrea Bocelli and the American pop star Mariah Carey.
There will be speeches. Many speeches. There will also be the reciting of the Olympic oath by Italians representing the athletes, officials and coaches at the competitions. (The oath begins, “We promise to take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules and in the spirit of fair play.”)
There’s an almost homey feel at the far-flung Livigno Snow Park, where Italian fans by far outnumber fans from anywhere else. There are plenty of kids running around in the snow, waiting for the ceremonies to begin.
Josephine de La Bruyère
Reporting from San Siro stadium in Milan
San Siro stadium, where the opening ceremony in Milan will take place, is filling up. Some in the crowd are grumbling about the strikes against the aging stadium: grimy seats, mobbed concession stands and scarce bathroom stalls. But Leah Hall and Lottie Beitzel, from Atlanta, said that San Siro’s pricing on food redeemed it. “We’re used to ridiculous venue prices in America,” said Beitzel, 43. She said she often pays $15 for a beer in the United States, but San Siro had spritzes for 10 euros.
Marco De Meo, 29, is one the many local residents here dressed up like Krampus, a mythic monster popular in the folklore of northeastern Italy, who is reputed to “cast away bad spirits.” De Meo said that the town had called his cultural organization to come to the opening ceremonies here in Cortina to start the Olympics off right.
For the Parade of Nations, national delegations mostly march in alphabetical order. But Greece, the historical home of the Games, leads off, and the host country, Italy, closes out the procession. Just before Italy will be the hosts of the coming Olympics. With the United States set to host the next Summer Games in Los Angeles, its athletes will march after the final alphabetical country, Venezuela. So the U.S. competitors will march in after those from a country where President Trump recently ordered a military intervention (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/us/politics/rubio-military-quarantine-venezuela-oil.html) and the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
Milan skips a focus on fashion after France made it a cornerstone of the Summer Olympics.
The last Olympics — the Paris Summer Games in 2024 — was, famously, the most fashionable Olympics ever.
LVMH Moît Hennessy Louis Vuitton — otherwise known as the largest luxury group in the world and the parent company of Dior, Givenchy and Louis Vuitton, among others — stepped up as a headline sponsor, the first time a big style name had taken such a prominent role. Those Games were about celebrating and sharing the glory of France, from the Eiffel Tower to the Seine, and the art of fashion was part of that story.
To that end, LVMH not only had its logo splashed around various Olympic venues like the usual sponsors, but many of its brands took center stage. Chaumet redesigned the Olympic medals. Louis Vuitton designed the trunks for the medals and the Olympic torch. Berluti outfitted the French team for the opening ceremony, and Dior dressed Celine Dion, Lady Gaga and Aya Nakamura for their performances.
Given that Milan, like Paris, is a global fashion center and one of the big four fashion week cities, you’d think they might have taken a page from the last Games and tried to get a fashion sponsor, too. But, no brand apparently ponied up, maybe because the Winter Olympics offer less opportunity for creative dressing, maybe because the uncertain global economic climate has rendered major sponsorships less attractive, or maybe because the Winter Olympics are traditionally less popular among viewers (and potential consumers) than the Summer Games.
That doesn’t mean there are no big fashion names involved, but their participation is on a smaller team or individual level.
It’s too bad. Given the increasing interdependence of sports and fashion, and the fact that increasingly, sports stars are more effective brand ambassadors than movie stars, it seems like a missed opportunity.
The preshow at San Siro stadium has begun, with the Italian radio personality Marco Maccarini getting the audience pumped up in Italian, and saying, “Let’s spread peace, love and harmony all over the world!” in English. Sign language interpretation is being broadcast on four huge screens around the stadium, but global spectators may need to consult their translation apps.
Milan athletes welcome the return of a typical Olympic experience.
Brittany Bowe, an American speedskater competing in her fourth Olympics, will be honest: Winning an Olympic medal four years ago in Beijing wasn’t the joyful moment she thought it would be.
Standing on the podium with a bronze medal around her neck, she said, “felt quite empty.” Because the grandstands in Beijing were, for the most part, empty.
Leading up to the 2022 Beijing Games, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was quickly spreading across the world. China responded by barring foreigners, and most local spectators, from Olympic events. Only specially invited and screened Chinese visitors could attend, leaving most of the venues almost vacant.
Friends and family members of the Olympians had to stay home and watch them on TV.
“I think it was kind of the same for a lot of athletes,” Bowe said at a news conference on Wednesday in Milan. “It’s like, you’ve accomplished this thing you’ve been working for all your life, but you don’t have the people that you love and care about the most to share it with.”
Now Bowe and other athletes who competed in Beijing can’t wait for fans to start filing in. These Olympics, which officially open on Friday, will be the first Winter Games since Pyeongchang in 2018 with paying fans in attendance.
Casey Dawson, one of Bowe’s teammates in Beijing, is looking forward to “a little extra noise” coming from the stands. He said that the sound of cheering helps block out the pain he feels in his legs during races. (In speedskating, a sport that requires incredible cardiovascular endurance and lower body strength, that’s a legs-on-fire kind of pain.)
“I feel like the crowd almost carries you through the finish line,” Dawson said. He won a bronze medal in Beijing, in the team pursuit, after missing the 5,000-meter event and showing up just 12 hours before the 1,500 because he had tested positive for Covid weeks earlier and needed two negative tests to enter China.
He took 45 tests before he could get on a plane. Even then, his luggage did not make it, and he had to compete on borrowed skates.
“The whole Covid-19 pandemic tainted the experience,” he said on Wednesday.
The few spectators allowed in Beijing had to follow strict rules that left many venues in near silence. They wore masks and were told not to cheer so they wouldn’t spread the virus if they had it. They could applaud. But even that didn’t happen as it should have.
Spectators at some events, including ice hockey, seemed unfamiliar with the sport they were watching. So they clapped at the wrong moments, or didn’t clap at all.
The Beijing Games were stressful and, in many ways, lonely. There was the monotony of daily Covid tests, and the fear of testing positive and being thrown into isolation for weeks at an undisclosed location. Traveling outside the Covid-free bubble was forbidden, with everyone taking buses from their housing to the venue and back — and nowhere else.
Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the reigning world ice dancing champions and U.S. champions, said they felt grateful that those Games had not been canceled. Now, in Milan, at their fourth Olympics skating together, they are going out of their way to meet athletes from other countries, a usual highlight of the Olympics that barriers and masks had diminished in Beijing.
Chock and Bates, a married couple, also came prepared to mingle and trade pins with other competitors, an Olympic tradition (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/business/paris-olympics-pin-trading.html). They brought 100 pins custom-made with the likenesses of their toy poodles, Henry and Stella.
“This is just the most incredible experience so far, and being able to socialize with other athletes, trade pins freely and openly without having to worry so much about Covid or bubble restrictions, has just been incredible,” Chock said. “You see the buzz, the excitement amongst the athletes, and it’s so beautiful because that’s what the Olympics is about, it’s about uniting people.”
Bowe, 37, is excited to have her family and friends in Milan, especially because she has said this will be her final Olympics.
Four years ago, they watched her compete from more than 7,000 miles away, on a big-screen TV at a watch party in Ocala, Fla., her hometown.
Now they will watch in person, with her mother, Debbie, wearing her usual blue knit gloves with alternating red and white pompoms on each finger. They are the same gloves she has worn again and again, all over the world, at her daughter’s events, so Brittany can easily spot her.
In Milan, Olympic organizers followed new sustainable goals for the Games by scheduling some events in old facilities, including San Siro stadium, where the main opening ceremony will be staged. But developers have scrambled to get other venues ready in time. Less than a month before ice hockey players arrived in Milan to compete, their venue, Santa Giulia Arena, was an active construction site. We took a look at Italy’s race to the finish (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/world/europe/italy-milan-olympics-ice-hockey-rink.html) last month.
Non-sporting celebrities have started arriving for the opening ceremony in Milan. The singer Usher and the actors Michelle Yeoh, Stanley Tucci and Jeff Goldblum are among those to have so far walked the red carpet at the Teatro Alla Scala. Snoop Dogg, who’s already spent a lot of time watching curling, is in Cortina.
The 2026 Winter Games feature a lighter, minimalist torch.
For the past two months, the pre-Games relay of the Olympic torch has drawn crowds and applause as it zigzagged across Italy (https://www.olympics.com/en/milano-cortina-2026/olympic-torch-relay), passing through some 300 towns and more than 60 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
On Friday, the torch will get a global close-up when it ends its Olympic journey at not one, but two cauldrons in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, a first that reflects these geographically expansive Games. The cauldrons are at the Arco della Pace in the heart of downtown Milan and in Piazza Dibona in Cortina.
Over the years, Olympic torches have come in various forms and sizes. Some have been ornate, others curved. The 2026 torch design goes back to basics with a sleek, metal rod, which is named “Essential.”
Carlo Ratti, who was responsible for the design, said the name reflected the hallowed sense of the torch and its ancient role.
“The flame is a sacred thing, not an object,” he said, so the designers opted for “an essential shape around the technical core to put the emphasis on the flame.” He added that it was the lightest torch ever made, weighing just over a kilogram, or roughly two pounds, when the gas canister is empty.
Last year, Ratti curated the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/arts/design/venice-architecture-biennale-climate-population.html), and that, too, informed the design of the torch in terms of “sustainability and how can we use materials in a more effective way,” he said in a telephone interview.
The torch is made from recycled and recyclable materials, including aluminum and brass. For the core, Ratti partnered with Cavagna Group, which he described as a company typical of Italy’s industrial fabric, “a niche company that is a world leader in something very specific.” Cavagna came up with the engineering for the burner, which is powered by a biofuel produced from food waste. The burner is refillable and can be used up to 10 times.
He said the design team “fell in love with the mechanism” and wanted to share it with the world. As a result, a window in the torch allows viewers to see the moment of ignition as well as the flame inside. The outer finish is made of a material that acts as a mirror, reflecting the surrounding environment.
“We took a different approach” from the design of past torches, Ratti said, adding that the torch was usually about “covering and adding and we worked by subtraction and revealing.”
“Ultimately, the torch is a symbol, and what is important are the values it conveys,” he said.
Spectators are streaming into Livigno Snow Park, a couple of hours after fresh snow fell on the already blanketed ski town nearly 6,000 feet high in the Alps.
In Cortina, the co-host of the Games with Milan, the opening ceremony is expected to feature more than 1,000 athletes parading through a white arch and up the main drag, lined with luxury shops and cafes. A second cauldron will be lit, but famous entertainers are not expected. Onlookers are starting to show up, though not in huge numbers.
These ceremonies have a tough act to follow: Italy’s last Olympics spectacle.
When Italy last staged the Winter Games, in Turin in 2006, its opening ceremony (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SgI_-UKM9c) was filled with spectacle. It began with an athlete striking an anvil with a hammer — each blow setting off pyrotechnics — and ended with Luciano Pavarotti (https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/arts/music/07pavarotti.html), the opera star, singing “Nessun Dorma.”
In between, a racing driver spun a Ferrari Formula 1 car in a series of celebratory donuts (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/sports/nascar-daytona-victory-donuts.html), and a supermodel emerged from a giant fake scallop shell to evoke Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus (https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/birth-of-venus).”
The team behind today’s Milan-Cortina Games’ ceremonies has a tough job to similarly impress viewers and cultural critics, not least because other recent opening ceremonies have been so memorable. Think of the 2012 Summer Games in London that began with Queen Elizabeth II and James
