Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 5 (Milan)

 February 11

Today, we are off to Men's Ice Hockey. But before that, you might want to see what my Olympic gear looks like:

Steve's been adding a few pins to his pin vest every day and still has a few to go, but he is definitely noticing the added weight (counting the 20 giveaway pins and about 10 "high level" pins to trade in the pockets). On the plus side, we've had dozens of conversations and one TV interview because of the outfit.

Today's event is our first at the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena. You may have read about this stadium. In what appears to be typical behavior, this stadium was not finished until four days before the start of the Olympics. We say typical because when we attended the 2006 Olympics in Turin, there was one whole subway line that did not get done in time. But transportation is one thing and venues are completely different. For months, the National Hockey League has been freaking out about this arena as the construction fell further and further behind. They were finally able to do a low-scale test event and a big hole opened up in front of one of the goals! Even worse, it emerged that this ice surface is smaller than NHL ice surfaces and international ice surfaces which are even bigger. They solved the length problem by shrinking the space between the two blue lines, but the width is still a foot or two short. In reality, the stadium was really never finished as the original seating capacity dropped from 16,000 to a little more than 11,000 because seating in one end is partially missing.

Still, it looks pretty nice inside:

As you can see, we are close to the top of the stadium even though these are B level seats. We guess that is because we are the long side of the oval. Today's match is between Slovakia and Finland. Finland is widely expected to be one of the medal favorites because their lineup is almost completely composed of NHL players. But tell that to the Slovak fans. They came in huge numbers:

Up here in the nose-bleed section, we have mostly Finnish fans other than the American families on either side of us. The stairs to the seats are pretty steep which usually means that everyone can see quite well. Unfortunately, they constructed railings in front of the first row in the upper bowl to keep people from falling out of the stands and the top railing is at about eye level. As a result, everyone in the first row leans forward to see. This blocks the view of the people in the row behind them and so on. So, Steve can only take pictures at the far end of the rink.

We are rooting for Slovakia, because one of their players, Pavol Regenda, plays for the San Jose Sharks. Here is a picture of Pavol (#84):

Pavol already has an Olympic medal from the Beijing Olympics because he was not in the NHL during the Olympics (NHL players did not attend the Beijing Olympics). The rosters in Beijing consisted of minor league players from North America and professionals playing in Europe.

The Finnish fans are shocked when Juraj Slafkovsky, who plays for the Montreal Canadians and was the overall NHL #1 draft choice four years ago, scores about 8 minutes into the game. For most of the rest of the first period, Slovakia held onto the lead thanks to some great goaltending by Samuel Hlavaj.  Hlavaj plays in the American Hockey League (NHL minor league) in the Minnesota Wild farm system. They might want to reconsider having this guy playing in the minors. The Finns finally tied the score near the end of the second period, but total shots at this point were Finland 33, Slovakia 16. Slovakia is only in this game because of great efforts from Hlavaj and his defensemen. Finland put the Slovaks under intense pressure in the 3rd period, but when Dalibor Dvorsky (St. Louis Blues) scores about 7 minutes into the period, all the air goes out of the Finnish balloon, and they give up 2 more goals for a final score of Slovakia 4, Finland 1. Here are some pictures from this game:

Transportation back from the stadium worked really well! The volunteers directed people going to the metro to one of the exits. At the end of a fairly long walk, we see volunteers holding big signs on long sticks saying GO on one side and STOP on the other to keep people walking down the exit path from getting crushed when they reach the point where people are waiting to board the shuttle buses taking everyone back to the metro station. When the bus line gets too long, the STOP sign goes up and when the buses queue is reduces, the GO signs go up. Very simple and effective! When we get to the bus queue, we find that people also have the choice of walking, but the bus ride coming to the arena was about 4 minutes. This seemed like a little too long of a walk, so we wait. We are finally able to get on the fourth bus. By the time we reached the metro station, we find a half-empty training waiting for us - it doesn't get better than that.

The route back to our "home" stop of Vesta requires one change at Duomo and another at the next station San Babila. Since the Duomo station is always packed and we've already walked from Duomo to San Babila, we decide to exit at Duomo and walk to the San Babila station. We are so glad that we did. The area looks great at night:

It is already about 8:30pm when we exit the Vesta station - too late for a big dinner, but we haven't eaten anything since lunch, so we stop at a pizzeria that sells pieces of pizza by weight, and the costs are quoted per 100g. We both get a spinach, goat cheese and sun-dried tomato pizza and Steve gets a tomato and cheese pizza to go with it. Then we head back to the hotel and watch some of the men's singles figure skating on TV before going to bed.

Tomorrow, we are off to Men's Ice Hockey (Canada versus Czechia). Enjoy!

Note: it is now the evening of September 13. Steve is feeling a little better, but Beth is still not doing well so we did not go to our event today (Men's Ice Hockey Slovakia vs Italy). Tomorrow morning, we have a 8:30am train (and bus) to Cortina for the second half of our Olympic trip. More when we have time to write more.