Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 7-8 (Milan to Cortina)

February 13

It was a beautiful day in Milano - nearly 60F with bright sunshine. Unfortunately, we both felt like hell. Actually, Steve was started to feel a little better and went out a couple of times to get something to eat. Beth slept nearly the whole day. Needless to say, we did not make it to our men's ice hockey game. But since we leave for Cortina early tomorrow morning, we did not want to push our health any more than we already have.

February 14

We arrived in Milano in the rain and we are leaving in the rain. Fortunately, it is more drizzle than hard rain when our Uber picks us up at the hotel around 7:30 AM for the 15-minute drive to the Stazione Centrale di Milano (Milan Central train station). The station is really busy for a Saturday:

We stand around the security checkpoint waiting for a track number for our train to Venice then head to the platform. As usual, there is not enough space for both of our big suitcases, so Beth has to store her suitcase in the neighboring car. Otherwise, our 2 hr trip was uneventful except for almost not getting off the train at the right station because we did not realize that Venice has two train stations.

We are still not sure we've gotten off in the right place but are reassured when we find that our train to Ponte nelle Alpi - Polpet. Unlike the bullet train we took from Milano, this train is more like the train we took from Malpensa airport to Milano. We look for luggage racks and don't find any. But we do find spaces for bicycles, and we figure "Who is going to be riding a bicycle in the winter?" and put our suitcases there. At the next stop, a guy who works for the Doordash equivalent in Italy called Deliveroo gets on. Fortunately, his bike folds in half and he is happy to put it next to the exit. During the 2 hr trip, we start at sea level and gradually go up hill:

 

By the time we reach Ponte nelle Alpi (right picture), you can start to see the real Dolomite mountains. Outside the train station, there is a line to get on a shuttle bus to Cortina. When we asked to store our suitcases, the driver finds that he can't open the luggage areas on the side of the bus. Fortunately, the bus is not totally full, so we stuff our suitcases into the seat in front of us. This worked until the first high-speed corner when Beth's suitcase fell out into the aisle. Steve spent the rest of the 2 hr trip grabbing or holding Beth's suitcase on every left-hand turn!

We arrive in Cortina at about 2:30 PM. Considering that we left Milano at 8:30 AM, you can see why so many people are complaining about how far all of the venues are from each other and why it is so easy to buy more tickets to events in and around Cortina. This is why we broke our trip into two pieces. Beth messages our Airbnb host and are pleased to find that he will allow us to check in ahead of the scheduled 4 PM check-in. Here is what $500/night gets you in Cortina:

The sofa acts as a single bed with a single trundle bed underneath. The bathroom is behind the door on the right on the left picture and there is a big screen TV on the wall next to the desk that you can just see on the left. We estimate the total size at around 215 sq ft. On the plus side, we are one block from the main street in town, and we avoid having a 1 hr each way bus ride to Cortina if we booked a cheaper place further down the valley.

We've got a little time before our 6 PM women's skeleton event starts so we buy some breakfast items at the local store (they seem to sell everything: food, wine, beauty items, books, etc.) and then walk around a bit. We find the Olympic flame next to the main church in town:

The vibe in the town reminds us somewhat of Lillehammer where everyone was walking around on the main street. Fortunately, it is about 60F warmer than in Lillehammer. Even better, Steve made more pin trades in 15 minutes than he had in the previous week! As you can see, there is "wintery mix" falling so we will save pictures of the area until the weather is better. We can promise you that the wait will be worth it!

The final two runs of the women's skeleton start at 6 PM with temperatures in the high 20'sF. This means after 10 days in Italy, we finally get to put on our cold weather gear. There is a river that goes through town and the Eugenio Monti sliding centre is on one side and the curling arena is on the other side. Eugenio Monti won two silver medals in bobsled the last time the Olympics came to Cortina in 1956 and a bronze in Innsbruck in 1964. He is most famous for realizing that the British team of Nash and Dixon had broken a bolt on the bobsled in the first run in Innsbruck and lent them the bolt from his sled. This allowed the British pair to win the gold medal. For this act of sportsmanship, Monti was the first athlete to be awarded the Pierre de Coubertin World Trophy.

Steve typically climbs high up on the course to take pictures because most of the crowd doesn't want to put in this amount of effort, but after seeing how hard a time Beth has climbing up even above the lowest part of the course, he decides to take pictures in the big 360-degree turn at the bottom called the Kreisel where the sliders start going back uphill to the finish area. There are a lot of people down here, so Steve is quite far from the track, but here are a couple of pictures:

Coming into tonight's event, the leader after two runs is Janine Flock from Austria followed by three German sliders: Susanne Kreher, Jacqueline Pfeifer and Hannah Neise and Tabitha Stoecker from Great Britain. No offense meant to the Germans, but we are rooting for Flock because German sliding athletes are like Kenyan or Ethiopian distance runners; sometimes it is nice to have someone else win. But it will be tough: Kreher is only 0.04 seconds behind and Pfeifer is only 0.13 seconds behind.

Flock is ridiculously consistent; after three runs, there is only 0.04 seconds difference between her fastest and slowest runs and she is able to gain time against all of her competitors. There is a 40-minute break between the 3rd and 4th runs so that they can apply water to the track and give it time to freeze. Most of the people who were standing closest to the track head to the beer tent, so Steve takes advantage of the situation and moves into a position right next to one of the Olympic cameramen. He figured that the camera guy knew a good spot when he saw one!

Nearby, there are a group of Brazilians doing what Brazilians do:

A lot of the European sliding powers tend to look down on entries of so-called exotic athletes, even to the point of calling them Olympic tourists instead of athletes. But we don't see it that way. Creating ways for teams from other countries to qualify for Olympic events broadens interest in the sport worldwide and that can only be good for the sports.

While we are waiting, we have a nice conversation with a couple from North Carolina who are attending their first Olympics. They were much more adventurous than we have been. They rented a car, booked a room in a fairly centrally located place so that they can attend events in almost all of the venues away from Milano. They are also season ticket holders for the Carolina Hurricane NHL team, so we also commiserate on the difficulty of winning the Stanley Cup championship. They are right where the Sharks were for many years - always a contender but could never quite win.

While we were standing there, Steve traded pins with an Austrian boy and what looked like his little brother. When the Austrian figured out that Steve collected team pins, he came back several times with pins from Latvia and South Korea in order to get a couple more of the pins on Steve's vest.

Steve has always enjoyed trying to get good pictures at the sliding venues. It is a challenge because the sliders are going so fast. Skeleton is actually harder than bobsled because you can't hear the skeleton athletes coming while the bobsleds rumble the track far in advance of their arrival. In the age of film, about three weeks after the Olympics, he would find out whether any of his shots came out and it was always a thrill to get a picture with the whole sled in the frame and reasonably in focus. Now we have autofocus, the ability to shoot up to 20 frames per second and (if the light levels are too low) you can just increase the ISO of the camera to make up for it. Getting good shots is like shooting ducks in a barrel.

In the last round, the sliders go in order from worst to first so at the beginning, Steve is looking for sliders with the coolest outfits. Here are a couple of those pictures:

As you can see, a lot of effort goes into the helmet designs because that is what shows up the best when you are sliding headfirst at more than 70 mph. You probably have also heard that a Ukrainian skeleton athlete was kicked out of the Olympics for having a helmet memorializing all of the Ukrainian athletes who have been killed in the Russia-Ukraine war. The decision to throw him out was tough on both sides, particularly for the new IOC president, who according to reports, made a trip from Milano to Cortina to speak personally with the athlete and his father to try to find an acceptable compromise. The IOC let him wear the helmet in the practice runs and were willing to let him display the helmet in the mixed zone where athletes are interviewed by the press after each run, but they were not willing to let him wear it during competition runs. For more than 100 years, the IOC has tried very hard to keep politics and world conflict out of the Olympics because their view is that sport is the place to bring the world together in peaceful competition, not to push it apart. In the end, maybe both sides won a little. The athlete got much more publicity for the Ukrainian cause than he would have gotten if he had just competed without controversy and the IOC stayed off the slippery slope of allowing geopolitics into the Olympics.

The last few runs were a little anticlimactic. First the British slider and then the three German athletes failed to produce runs that would pass Flock unless she made a major mistake. When it was her turn, she did produce her slowest run of the competition, but that was only 0.06 seconds slower than her first run and was still nearly 0.10 seconds faster than anyone else. Here are pictures of the three medal winners starting with Pfeiffer on the left:

It has been a long day so we just head back to our room after the event and go to sleep. Despite still being a little under the weather, it has been a great day in Cortina. We are really looking forward to the week ahead!