Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 16 (Cortina to Venice)

February 22

Moving day again in Italy. We've got a 10:30 AM bus back to the Ponte nella Alpi - Polpet train station. We get up and have a quick breakfast. We packed the night before leaving us about an hour before we have to walk down to the bus terminal. Steve decides to take one more walk through town and see if he can trade some pins. It is another beautiful morning in Cortina:

But as you can see, there are very few people up and about on a Sunday morning except for the German bobsleigh fans who are on their way to the sliding center to see Johannes Lochner win the gold medal in 4-man bobsleigh. He manages to give away two of his last five giveaway pins but is not able to add anything to his collection.

The bus ride goes better than before. The driver already has the storage compartment open, and we are able to store our suitcases there after a little rearrangement. We notice that one of the other things in the compartment is a curling broom and remember that the men's tournament ended last night with Canada beating Great Britain 9-6, much to the dismay of the Scottish spectators.

It takes less time to get down the mountain than it took to go up so we get to the Ponte nella Alpi - Polpet station with about 40 minutes to wait before our train to Venice. When the train arrives, we try to store our bags where the bikes go, but someone beat us to it, and we have to drag our suitcases up one set of stairs to find a place to put the bags. On the 90-minute train ride, Steve tries to grab a few pictures that show the changes in the countryside as we head toward Venice:

On our way to Cortina, we changed trains at the Venice - Mestre which is on the mainland. This time, we stay on the train and ride across a long causeway to the Venice - Santa Lucia train station which is right on the grand canal. We were not quite prepared for what a tourist trap this part of Venice is. We see gondoliers hawking rides on their boats along with a lot of porters looking for clients. It is only later that we realize that the process of getting your suitcases from the train station to your hotel may require rolling them along cobblestones and over multiple bridges. Hiring a porter does not seem like such a crazy idea in that case. Fortunately for us, our hotel is only about 100 yards from the train station. We make our way up a narrow alleyway, and we can tell we are off the beaten path as the only people walking here appear to be locals. While a lot of the businesses and hotels along the alleyway look quite seedy, our hotel, The Venice Times, does not (photos courtesy of The Venice Times):

This is another boutique hotel with only 27 rooms. Most importantly, it is great to have a queen-sized bed after more than a week sleeping on a single and a trundle bed! We've got 2-3 hrs until dinner so we decide to walk around and see how far we have to go before we get away from the tourists. Beth suggests that we try to find this historic Jewish section of Venice. Most of the foot traffic is headed to either the Realto shopping district or to San Marco square and again, we can tell immediately when we have turned off the main route. We never do find the Jewish section, but we do get some pictures of what the "real" parts of Venice look like:

In the upper left of these six pictures, you will see a small floating dock. This is the Venice equivalent of a subway station. There are boats called the Vaporetto that make regularly scheduled trips to similar docks. You buy a single ride ticket or a pass for 24, 48 or 72 hours that you can use as many times as you want in that period. Except for a tiny piece of Venice near the train station that is used to service the cruise ship port, there are no roads in Venice that are large enough for cars. Everything that you would normally do by car: police, ambulance, FedEx, garbage collection, etc. is done by boat. In the bottom left picture, you see the type of boat that people in Venice would have if they owned a boat and how they park them along the sides of the smaller canals. And you get used to walking over bridges, a lot of bridges!

We find a restaurant that is close to the main tourist route, but just far enough off that the prices look reasonable. Because we prefer to eat early, we are the only ones in the restaurant and the waiter is happy to give us a table in the front window so he can show other potential diners that yes, there are people eating here. We are pretty pizza'd out from our stay in Cortina, so Beth goes for clams and spaghetti and Steve goes for a porcini mushroom ravioli. On our walk back to the hotel, we have gelato at one of the dozen or so gelaterias that we passed.

We try to watch some of the Closing Ceremonies, but it was honestly difficult to figure out what was going on in Italian. Fortunately, we've got it recorded at home so we can better appreciate it. We thought that it was interesting that they had to light an Olympic cauldron in Verona in order to extinguish it - one of the consequences of these very spread-out Games. We enjoyed the handoff to the French Alps for the 2030 Winter Olympics and Steve vows to work hard enough on his French over the next four years that he can actually have conversations in French.

This is as good a place as any to discuss our thoughts on the 2026 Winter Olympics. On the plus side, we loved the Olympic vibe in Cortina. We saw outstanding performances in almost every event we watched, highlighted by Franchesca Lollobrigida's win in the women's 3000m long-track speed skating.  We had been worried that being Americans would be a problem, but all of our interactions with both spectators and the general public were very positive. We felt welcomed no matter where we went. The venues themselves were good enough - not great, but good enough to not detract from the performances. On the negative side, the organizers managed to figure out a way to make one of Italy's greatest strengths, their food, a weakness at the venues where the food was generally terrible. The spread-out nature of these Games was also a big problem. It was hard to get to the other venues and while the transportation options were generally okay once you found them, it was often not clear how to get from point A to point B. Probably the biggest short-coming for us was the complete lack of Olympic vibe in Milano. You could walk around in many areas of the city and have no idea that the Games were even taking place. We think that this was due to lack of buy-in from the Italian public with most deciding that the costs of tickets were too high. The organizers should have done more to make it possible for most Italians to afford attending at least one event and get some Olympic spirit. With all this said, we'd rate these Olympics somewhere in the middle of the pack compared to the other 14 we've attended. Not horrible but could have been much better.

Tomorrow, we have tickets to visit Saint Mark's basilica and the Doge palace. Enjoy!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 15 (Cortina)

It is now March 1st and we are back in California. Thank you for sticking with us to the end! As a bonus, we are including our adventures in Venice for 2+ days after leaving Cortina. Now that we are a little less jetlagged, we hope to finish up the blog in the next 3-4 days. Enjoy!

February 21

Today are the first two runs of the men's 4-man bobsled, the premier sliding event of the Winter Olympics. It is a brilliant sunny morning in Cortina:

Our skiing days are sadly in the rear-view mirror, but we can't help but wonder what this place is like in the summertime. It surely is gorgeous in the winter! Speaking of skiing, here is one of the strangest pins that Steve ever traded for:

What possessed someone to produce a pin featuring the physics of skiing? In any case, it appealed to nerds in us.

A German guy asks Steve if he will take a selfie with him and Steve obliges. Steve tells him that he would wish Germany luck, but he doesn't think that the Germans will need it as it is very likely that they will sweep this event. The man laughs and agrees but says that the order is important because he is a supporter of the German #2 driver, Francesco Friedrich. Judging from what the Germans are wearing, there are two big tribes of supporters, those that support Friedrich and those that support his nemesis (and the best driver in the world), Johannes Lochner. Lockner has announced his retirement after the Olympics and his supporters are wearing custom ski jackets that say, "One last dance for Team Lockner". Did we mention that Germans take their sliding sports very, very seriously?!

Back at our favorite corner, the sunshades are down to avoid the track melting before the run even starts. As we are trying to decide what to do, the track workers start raising a few of shades and our favorite OBS cameraman (full disclosure - he is the only OBS cameraman we've met!) is revealed. We ask him if this means he slept in his position and he laughs. With sunshine, we notice that holes have been cut into the supports for the railings next to the track, so you get little 26s when the sun shines:

We've spoken to Americans at this position for both of our previous sliding events and we make it 3 for 3 when Daniella from Oregon joins us. She reminds us that she was actually at this location last night but got here later and was further back in the crowd. She tells us that her father's family is from the next valley over from Cortina. She says that her career is telling people what to do so she jumps into the job of keeping random people from walking into the cameraman's line of sight.

As with the previous event, the start order in run #1 is in world cup order so Team Lockner from Germany goes first:

Those three blue helmets behind the driver are the push athletes. They don't look very big here, but don't let the view fool you. An empty 4-man bobsleigh weighs more than 450 lbs and it is these guys' job to get the sled up to speed during a 5+ second, 55-yard sprint. They are all the size of National Football League linebackers with the same combination of strength and speed. We wish that we could share some pictures of these pushers loading into the sled after their sprint. But Steve wasn't willing to climb to the top of the track to see if the organizers made it possible for spectators to get a good view of the start. We did talk to one person in Venice who said that there were no good viewing places in the start area - all of the prime spots were taken by camera crews.

In any case, it is really ballet to see these huge guys get into the sled in less than a second without knocking each other out. For the rest of the ride, all they get to do is gaze at their navels (to keep their helmets and shoulders out of the slipstream), handle the 5-6 g's that gravity inflicts on them coming down the course and pray that the driver does not do something crazy that will make them slide on their helmets down the track at 80+ mph with a 450+ lb sled on top of them. Here is another view:

Only the last push athlete, the brakeman, has something to do at the end of the race, which is to pull on the brake so that they don't crash into the barrier at the end of the track. Sounds like a great job, right?!

Lochner and his crew set both the start record and track record on their first run to take the lead followed by Friedrich, the British team of Brad Hall and the Swiss team of Cedric Follador. The third German sled of Adam Ammour is 5th. Here are some pictures from the first run:

Between runs, we see a bunch of what we think are starlings riding the thermals:

The second run is a little more challenging; both for the drivers and for us. As the sun moves across the sky, the track workers gradually close more of the sunshades on "our" turn. This forces the OBS cameraman to move forward which changes where the line is drawn beyond which the spectators can't go. An Italian couple ignores the people who have been standing there for hours and walks right to the front. This means that Steve has to try to shoot around them and Beth has trouble seeing anything.

The second run goes from #25 to #1 and then #26 and #27 afterwards. The fifth sled down is the Austrian sled driven by Jakob Mandlbauer. They flip the sled upside down in turn #7. You don't need to have a track announcer tell you there was a crash; you can hear the sled making way more noise than it should as it rumbles toward you. Here is a picture as it slides by us:

Remember that there are four large guys under that sled - and they were going over 70 mph when they flipped. When it goes by, Steve, remembering that the last part of the track is uphill, says that the sled is going to come back. Sure enough, the noise stops for a second and then picks back up. The sled goes all the way around the 360-degree curve again and comes to rest at the low point of the track. The track announcer says that everyone is out of the sled and looks okay. The sled is eventually brought back to our curve where there is a gate that can be opened to remove the sled and put it in a truck. But something is wrong: it is taking too long to restart the competition. Eventually, one of the athletes is brought to our curve on a stretcher and backboard. We find out later that Mandlbauer, who as the driver is the only one whose head is above the sled's cowling while racing, complained of neck and back pain when they got him out of the sled and they treat him as if he has a broken spine. Fortunately, testing later showed no factures, and he was later released from the hospital.

Most of the second run was uneventful. The Germans go 1-2-3 on the run although the order was Ammour, Lochner and Friedrich. They are followed by two Swiss sleds and the Italian sled of Patrick Baumgartner. After the three German teams go, it is time for the two lowest ranked sleds, the French sled driven by Romain Heinrich and the sled from Trinidad and Tobago driven by Axel Brown. Heinrich crashes in the same curve as Mandlbauer. Fortunately, after they slide by us toward the finish line, they don't slide back down the hill. We suspect that there is someone up there with a hook to catch the sled before it slides back down. Since Mandlbauer's crash was the first in any of the sliding competitions, perhaps they weren't ready to catch the Austrians, but they did catch the French. The track announcer tells us that the French team were all able to walk away from the crash and appear to be okay. Again, the sled is brought back down to our curve:

Since there is only one more team to go and there is a fairly lengthy delay to clear the track, most of the people make their way to the exit. We didn't think that this was fair to the team from Trinidad and Tobago, so we elect to wait. Unfortunately for Axel Brown's team, they also crash in turn 7 and the whole process is repeated. Brown is later quoted as saying that he went to pull on the D-rings that bobsleds use to steer and the D-ring snapped off so he had no steering at all. Fortunately, his team is okay, and they are able to walk away from the crash. Here are some pictures from run #2:

Tomorrow is moving day after eight days in Cortina, so we eat lunch in our room and spend the afternoon packing and blogging. Steve goes out to trade pins for a little while, but he mostly gives away pins. The Closing Ceremonies are tomorrow in Verona, and we hope to be in our hotel in Venice in time to watch on TV. Enjoy!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 14 (Cortina)

We are just finishing our two days in Venice after the Olympics as we start on this blog post. Tomorrow is going to be a very long day as we leave Venice at 11:30 AM and fly to London (90-minute flight) followed by an 11.5 hr flight from London to San Francisco arriving at around 6:30 PM on the same day. Steve pays British Airways an exorbanant price for WiFi so that he could complete the entry before arriving in San Francisco. We hope that you enjoy it!

February 20

Today, we have the first two runs of the women's two-woman bobsleigh. We are typically not jingoistic when it comes to the Olympics and if anything, we have a preference of having unexpected teams win medals. Unlike the monobob a couple of days ago when the USA surprisingly took the gold and bronze medals, today we expect close to a sweep of medals by the German team. Why is there a difference? The main one is that in monobob, every team uses exactly the same sleds with exactly the same runners, so it comes down to the skills of the individual drivers. In all other bobsleigh races, each team provides their own equipment and it is basically a technology arms race. This gives the German team a huge advantage, because, as a member of the British team explained to us, Germany spends more money just on bobsleigh research and development than the British team spends on all of their winter sports combined!

Now that we know that the best place to get pictures (without a climb up to the top of the track which neither of us is up for) is on the big 360-degree Kreisel turn at the bottom of the course, we walk over and say buongiorno (good morning) to the OBS (Olympic Broadcast System) cameraman we first "met" during women's skeleton. We know that his requirements for an unobstructed view are what allows us to have an unobstructed view as well. We are just staking out our position next to the cameraman when a couple of women from Florida come up and ask us if this is a good spot to watch the race. We tell them that they have come to the right place! We are here quite early, and several people come up and ask to take pictures of Steve's pin outfit or to take selfies with him. Such is the life of an Olympic celebrity! A couple more come up and ask if they can have a pin which gives Steve an opportunity to keep emptying his pocket with giveaway pins.

The start order in the first run goes in order of world ranking so the current world champion Laura Nolte from Germany goes first, sets a start record and recorded a time of 56.97 seconds, breaking her own track record set last November. Her top speed on the track, close to where we are standing, is slightly less than 80 mph. Second up is Canadian turned American and two-time Olympic champion, Kaillie Armbruster Humphries. Kaillie just turned 40 so no matter how good her brakewoman is, she doesn't have a start time that can compare with Nolte's 5.09 seconds. Kaillie's start is 5.17 seconds. Conventional logic is that a tenth of a second at the start translates to three tenths of a second at the bottom, so Kaillie should finish up about 0.24 seconds behind Nolte. But this doesn't take into account how good a bobsleigh pilot Kaillie is. She sets the track record with a time of 56.92 seconds!

The rest of the first run goes pretty much according to the world rankings. Lisa Buckwitz of Germany is in 3rd place, Kim Kalicki of German is in 4th followed by two Americans, 41-year-old Elana Meyers Taylor and 28-year old and former push athlete turned driver Kaysha Love.

One of the reasons that Steve, in particular, loves the sliding sports is the challenge of getting a decent picture while standing a few feet from a track where athletes are flying by at 80 mph. In the "olden times" when people used film, Steve would have to wait until 2-3 weeks after the Olympics to find out if he even got any pictures with a bobsled in it - with bonus points if the sled was in focus (autofocus was not a thing then either). Now, it is like shooting ducks in a barrel. Steve's Nikon Z6iii has continuous autofocus and can shoot 20 frames a second. If he needs a shorter exposure time to freeze the sled in place, he can just crank up the ISO of the camera; then all he has to do is point the camera where he wants the picture and push the button when he hears the sled coming. Sure, he may have to erase 10 or 11 photos of empty track to get one with a bobsled, but that takes only a few seconds. Here are some of his pictures from the first run:

There is about a 45-minute wait between the end of the first run and the start of the second. We want to keep our position, so we just hang out. Steve trades a few pins and gives away a couple, but there doesn't seem to be much interest today other than from gawkers. Just before the start of the 2nd run, a guy with photo accreditations comes up, stops in front of us and asks if he can take a picture of Steve's pin outfit. Afterwards he asks Steve for his name to get his release to use the photo commercially. Then he goes over and talks to the OBS guy in Italian. It looks like he's asking if it is okay for him to stand here. Steve notices that unlike most of the Olympic photographers who use Canon equipment, this guy has a Nikon camera with a 400mm f2.8 lens - that's a $14,000 lens that, by itself, weights more than 8 lbs. His accent sounds like he is from New York, but when Steve asks him where he is from, he says France. We're not sure if he is putting us on or not. He takes a picture of one of the forerunners while Steve is doing the same. He asks to see Steve's image - and it is exactly the same except that Steve's bobsled is very small in the frame while in the photographer's picture, the sled fills the frame. Apparently, this was proof to him that Steve knew what he was doing and he was quite pleasant to us while he took pictures through most of the 2nd run.

Unfortunately for the American bobsledders, the 2nd run was much more like what we expected. Nolte, Buckwitz and Kalicki go 1-2-3 with Armbruster Humphries 4th and Kaysha Love 5th. Meyers Taylor made a major mistake at the top of the course (where you absolutely cannot make a mistake) and ends up with only the 21st best time in the 2nd run. Here are some of Steve's pictures from the 2nd run:

It is a little past 9 PM when the event gets over. We had a good-sized lunch because we knew that were not going to feel like eating after the event and then try to go straight to bed - and we need to get some sleep because our event tomorrow is the men's 4-man bobsleigh at 10 AM so an early start is required on our last full day in Cortina. We head for our room and munch on a couple of cookies before going to bed.