January 30th
My name is Steve and I'm an Olympiholic. While that sounds like I should be in some sort of 12-step program, I have nothing but positive things to say about my Olympic obsession and have no interest in giving it up. The 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Milano-Cortina will be the 15th Olympic Games that my wife Beth and I have attended, beginning (gulp)46 years ago at the Lake Place 1980 Winter Olympics.
If you are new to these blogs, welcome! If you have read my previous Olympic (or other) blogs, welcome back. I will try not to be redundant. Either way, my goal with these blogs is to give you an idea of what it is like to be an Olympic spectator. We are now four days out from our departure for Milano, so I thought I would take some time to give you an idea of the planning that has gone into getting us where we are now. Our past experience always involves the same steps in the same order: buy tickets, buy plane and other transportation tickets, find other things to do in the host city, and finally, find a place to stay. Let's take those steps one at a time.
In November 2024, we signed up on the Milano-Cortina 2026 website for a drawing for having the first chance at buying tickets. In January 2025, we received an email from the organizing committee telling us that we would get an email between February 5 and February 20 telling us when our timeslot would be to initially buy tickets. There would be many more opportunities to buy tickets as time went on, but we were hoping for one of the earlier time slots in order to have more choices. We eventually got an email indicating that our time slot would start at 10 AM central European time on February 7th and last for 48 hours. 10 AM central European time is 1 AM here in California so that wasn't very convenient, but I'm an Olympiholic, so I woke up to be one of the first in line. Despite that, there was still a 25-minute queue to get into the ticketing website. The rules are that one person can only purchase 30 tickets in order to prevent ticketing resellers from buying up all of the prime tickets, so Beth also created an account that I used to log in about a week later to buy more tickets.
There were surprisingly few tickets to marquee events like Women's figure skating, but Beth and I are pretty non-denominational when it comes to what events we see. Over the years, we've had great times at almost any events we've gone to no matter what the sport. Over the course of the next six months, we purchased tickets to 17 events:
February 6 - Opening Ceremonies
February 7 - Women's 3000m speed skating
February 8 - Women's Ice Hockey France vs Sweden
February 10 - Women's 500m, Men's 1000m & mixed relay short track speed skating
February 11 - Men's Ice Hockey Slovakia vs Finland
February 12 - Men's Ice Hockey Czechia vs Canada
February 13 - Men's Ice Hockey Italy vs Slovakia
February 14 - Women's Skeleton Heats 3 and 4
February 15 - Women's Monobob Heats 1 and 2
February 16 - Women's Curling Round Robin
February 16 - Men's Curling Round Robin
February 17 - Women's Curling Round Robin
February 18 - Men's Curling Round Robin
February 19 - Men's Curling Semi Finals
February 20 - Women's Two-Women Bobsled Heats 1 and 2
February 21 - Women's 12.5 Km Biathlon Mass Start
With tickets out of the way, it was time to work on transportation. We can't fly directly from San Francisco to Milano, so we have to change planes in places like London or Rome. San Francisco to London is 11 hr, 14 min while San Francisco to Rome is 12 hr, 10 min. This was a little too long to spend stuck in a typically cramped economy-class seat, so we decided to split the trip in half by going from San Francisco to Montreal in the morning, having dinner during our layover and then flying directly to Milano, arriving there in the morning of the following day.
Milano-Cortina will be one of the most spread out Olympic games ever! We had taken a look at in-country transportation and found that it is a royal pain to get from Milano to Cortina. It is only 160 miles between the two as the crow flies, but as in the old Maine joke, "you can't get there from here". It is 255 miles to drive and an almost 4 hr trip by high-speed train to Venice and low-speed train to Ponte nelle Alpi-Polpet followed by a 30-ish minute bus ride to Cortina. There was just no way that we would want to stay in Milano and do this twice in a day to see any of the events in Cortina. Since there are events near Cortina that we really want to see (Bobsled, Skeleton, Curling, Biathlon) we decided that we would break our trip into two parts - Feb 4-14 in Milano and Feb 14-22 in Cortina. Finally, since Venice is quite close to Cortina, we decided to spend a 3-day "weekend" in Venice after the Games are over. The airline options from Venice are more limited so we can't break up the long flight and will instead fly Venice to London and then have a long flight from London to San Francisco. Since we are traveling in the same direction as the sun, we leave Venice around 11 AM and arrive in San Francisco at about 6 PM of the same day. With the logistics decided, we booked our flights about six months ago and our train tickets about 2 months ago.
We have clear divisions of labor while working on planning. I work on event tickets and some of the transportation tickets while Beth works on housing and finding interesting non-event things for us to do. For Milano, the things that require tickets are seeing Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and a tour of the Duomo - the huge gothic cathedral in the center of Milano. Beth also has a long list of other things to do in case we have time, such as an exhibition on 3,000 years of the Olympics, that don't require advanced ticketing. At the same time, she made reservations for the two places in Venice that require advanced ticketing: the Doge Palace and St. Mark's basilica. About the only thing that requires advanced tickets in Cortina is a ride up the Gondola which we have, so far, decided to pass on.
Finally, it was time to deal with housing. Throughout our Olympic adventures there has been a pattern to housing. A couple of years out, the Olympic family (International Olympic Committee, the National Olympic Committees, sports federations, broadcast media and families of potential Olympic athletes) reserve all the hotel rooms in the city and there is no availability for the rest of us. Of course, if you have stupid amounts of money, it is always possible to reserve rooms at multi-thousands of dollars per night. Seeing the high housing costs, every Airbnb host jacks up their prices in the hopes of paying a year's worth of mortgage in a few weeks. So, we wait. Eventually, all of the Olympic family people start to sort out how many rooms they actually need and begin cancelling their reservations. Hotels, which thought that they were completely booked out are now half full and cut their prices. Those price cuts trigger corresponding cuts from the Airbnb people and the whole thing becomes a game of chicken where the longer you wait, the less you pay. This process has happened at every Olympics we've gone to - until now. The first problem was Cortina. The population of Cortina is only about 7,000 in the summer and 40,000 in the winter so there aren't too many hotels or Airbnb's. Two months before the Games, there were still very few rooms and hotel prices were all multi-thousands of dollars per night. We could have found cheaper housing by booking a hotel in one of the many small towns between Cortina and the Ponte nelle Alpi-Polpet train station, but that would have meant spending unknown hours per day on buses going from the hotel to the Olympic venues - something we really wanted to avoid if we could. We finally settled on an Airbnb in Cortina that is a studio apartment with a sofa bed for a mere $500/night. By far, the most we have ever paid for Olympic housing! But the upside is that we are within walking distance of both the sliding center (skeleton, bobsled) and curling stadium. Booking a hotel in Venice was no problem as it is the off season there and we found a nice place right near the grand canal. This left us to deal with Milano. We watched hotel prices literally for months. There was plenty of availability, but prices remained stubbornly high. I really wonder if the hotels are using some sort of AI to set prices instead of panicking when they have a bunch of rooms become available. In any case, we waited until about three weeks before we were scheduled to leave to book a nice hotel in the Navigli neighborhood of Milano, to the southwest of the Duomo, for a little over $300/night - at least it comes with a free breakfast and is a short walk from the nearest subway station!
With preparations out of the way, we can spend our last couple of days at home focusing on the really important stuff like setting up our video system to record all of the many, many Olympic events we will miss while we are gone, and figuring out how to bring enough clothes to be comfortable from sub-zero to 50F in rain/snow and everything in-between without bringing such large suitcases that they are a pain to schlep on taxis, buses, trains and perhaps water taxis. We'll check back in on Tuesday (February 4th) as we set out on this adventure. Stay tuned!
