Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 0 (Milan)

February 6

After another crummy night's sleep, we wake up just in time to grab a shower and get down to breakfast before they close down at 10 AM. This means that there will not be much exploring around Milan today before we leave for the Opening Ceremonies. For weeks, the organizing committee has been bombarding us with messages saying that the gates to the stadium open four hours before the show starts at 8 PM and that they strongly recommend that we come on the early side. Four hours seems a little crazy to us, so we plan to get there two hours early. The stadium is in the same general direction as the ice hockey game we saw yesterday, so we know that we will need to leave the hotel around 3:30 PM.  Steve also has to work on the blog (it doesn't write itself!) so we decide to walk around the canals that the Navigli (pronounced nah-VEE-lee) neighborhood is known for, have a good-sized lunch (since we will be eating stadium food for dinner), and then head to the Opening Ceremonies.

We ask the concierge directions to the canals. He tells us that it is just across the plaza across the street from the hotel and then throws in a complication to our plans. He tells us that the Olympic Torch relay is going to be down by the canals at 3 PM.

The walk along the canal is quite scenic even through there are bars and restaurants every few feet on both sides:

Along our walk, we run into one of the same groups of Dutch women that we saw yesterday at the Duomo. We told them that we thought that they were working at Holland House today and they said that they were, but that it doesn't open until 3 PM. We told them that we would try to stop by sometime during our stay in Milan since it is so close to our hotel.

We cross over the canal at one of the bridges so that we can walk back in the sunshine although it is already a balmy 55F. On the bridge, we see that the Italians also have the tradition of couples putting a lock on the bridge to celebrate their everlasting bond:

We find a restaurant (as opposed to a bar that serves some food) and order a couple of pizzas (one porcini mushrooms, white ham and gruyere cheese and the other tomato and cheese) along with a side salad and some grilled vegetables since we are both seriously short on veggies compared to our normal diets. The pizzas were about 12" in diameter, but since they have a very thin crust, they were still about a single serving each.

Feeling much better, we continue back toward the hotel and can see that a crowd is developing along the canal. We find a place to stand on a bridge near the end of the canal. A group of English-speaking people arrive shortly later and we strike up a conversation. It turned out that they are from Oakland, CA and that, except for a brief visit at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, this is their first Olympics. They are very interested to hear what we are going to see in Milan and what we have thought about previous Olympics.

After about 15 minutes, we see a guy dressed in the almost all white uniforms that the Olympic torch bearers wear. We guess that this is the person who the current torchbearer will hand off the Olympic flame to. He arrives by kayak:

so we are wondering if the torch will also be arriving by kayak. We are also trying to figure out from which direction the torch will arrive. This is hard to tell because people are now lined up about three people deep along both sides of the canal. Three PM comes and goes, and while the police presence has increased, the torch arrival does not seem imminent. We only need a quick stop at the hotel before we have to leave so we decide to wait. More police arrive and move the crowd on the opposite bank away from the canal, but it isn't clear how that helps the torch arrive or meet up with the next torchbearer, who has now situated himself on the shore near where the gondola was in the previous picture.

While we are trying to figure this out, the crowd behind us toward our hotel suddenly increases and we realize that the current torchbearer (the white beanie barely visible in the center right) is going to go along the opposite bank. Here is a picture:

As you can see, running with the torch is a misnomer. He can hardly even walk fast given the crowds. We would love to see how the handoff of the flame is accomplished, but we are now overdue to leave for the Opening Ceremonies, so we head back to the hotel and then off to the metro.

There are two stations that we use to get to the stadium. We choose the station that is a longer walk from the station thinking that most people will take the other option. The crowd at the station is not very big so this might have been the right decision. When we exit the station, we are surprised to see that there are no signs for where to go nor Olympic volunteers to tell us. We decide to follow the crowd, at least until we can call up Google maps and find that the crowd was, in fact, going in the right direction. We eventually see signs, but they seem to have been located to help people who have driven and parked in a parking lot, not to help people taking the metro.

Despite being old folks, we tend to walk faster than most people and we arrive at the security line about 2.5 hrs before the show starts. Because of all of the Olympic pins that Steve is wearing and the backpack which has his camera, going through security is so much fun - remove the hat, backpack, vest, iWatch and for a second Steve thought that they were going to ask for his coat also (they have the magnetometers cranked up for those requiring "special" screening). It takes a couple of minutes for him to put himself back together before the volunteers can scan our tickets. This gives the volunteers plenty of time to ask about the pins and for Steve to give away some.

Once past security, we still have over two hours and we decide that the best way to kill time is to stand in the food line which appears to be moving at glacier-like speed. While we are waiting, Beth strikes up a conversation with the two women behind us who turn out to be college students at Case Western Reserve who are spending a semester abroad, one in Florence and the other in Milan.  They only have a weekend to spend at their first Olympics and want to know all about our experiences. This line is moving so slowly that Beth is able to leave the line, get into the fairly long line for the lady's room, go through that line and find Steve almost still in the same spot!

We finally get to the front of the line and find that they have tomato and mozzarella calzones. We think that a nice warm calzone sounds good to warm us up before 4+ hrs in an outdoor stadium. Just like the other day, we place our order and then wait. We finally get our calzones, which are nice and warm, only to bite into them and find that the middle is cold. Bummer! But sustenance is sustenance and we eat them anyway.

Now it is time to figure out where our seats are, and we look for a sign. We see plenty of signs - one for the Olympic family entrance and one for the press entrance but nothing for spectators. Time to find a volunteer. The first says go to the green section. We don't see anything that indicates colors. The next says, keep going in the direction you are going. The third says the green section is around the corner. Finally, we find a Canadian volunteer who looks at his map and says that we are entering at the ground level (as opposed to one of the huge spiral stairs at the corners of the stadium) at door 18. We thought that it was weird that we would be entering the stadium at the ground level because we purchased C level seats and expected to be up in the nose-bleed seats at the top of the stadium There is also nothing on our ticket that says anything about door 18, but this was specific enough that we do what he says and find door 18. At the door, a woman gives us each a program and an LED light to wear on our wrists that will be part of the light show. From there, we find our way to our seats which are in the 11th row from the bottom on the opposite end of the stadium from a stage. Our section seems to be almost entirely Canadians and Americans, and we hear one of them say that because the Italians are not buying as many tickets as expected, the Opening Ceremonies did not sell out and everyone who bought their tickets early were moved down closer to the field so that the stands would look full on TV. This is fine with us!

At 7:15 PM, the warmup act comes on, but it is almost entirely in Italian, so we don't know what is going on. The only thing that we can figure out is that their job is to teach us the dance moves that go with the official Milano-Cortina 2026 song. The other thing that was interesting was that there was a woman doing sign-language on the big screens and would sort of dance to the music to convey the beat of the song when there were no lyrics.

We can't say that we understood everything in the Opening Ceremonies although it did include the many contributions of Italians to world culture. So rather than try to explain it, we'll just include some of the better pictures and then include some comments:

We generally liked the artistic program although there were times when we had no idea what was going on.  We especially liked the part where color was added to the black and white notes with the big- headed characters representing Italian composers Puccini, Roselli and Verde.

The parade of nations was a little disjointed being conducted in five different venues. Just a woman wearing white and carrying a sign with no one behind them was strange, although this was a logical outcome of having such a spread-out Olympic Games. There would have been no way to get the athletes from the other venues to Milan and back without affecting their game preparations, but it also would not have been fair to the athletes, most of whom marching in the parade of nations is the highlight of the Olympics, to have missed the Opening Ceremonies just because they happened to play the "wrong" sport.

Of the nations, Israel was definitely booed the most while Ukraine was clearly applauded the most. The United States had some boos, but it was mostly positive, except when Vice President Vance was shown on the big screen. The boos from Vance were mostly from the Canadian and US fans around us. When we thought about it, we realized that even in a country that is fairly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, the Olympic ideals of equality of all people and bringing the world together for peaceful competition is antithetical to MAGA so it is not likely that would get much love from either the Americans or anyone else.

We thought that new International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry from Zimbabwe did a great job in her first primetime speech as the first female IOC president. 

We wished that the lighting of the Olympic cauldron had been better. We are sure that it was spectacular if you happened to be at the Peace Arch, but watching on a big screen was just like watching it on TV except more expensive.  If you want to see more about what the Italians were trying to get across during the Opening Ceremony, check this out: https://www.olympics.com/en/milano-cortina-2026/ceremonies/the-olympic-opening-ceremony 

After the Ceremonies finished, they made an announcement asking people in our grandstand to wait for 20 minutes before departing. We decided that since it was already 12:30am and we had about an hour to get back to the hotel that we would go anyway. Once outside, we realized why they had made this announcement. Our way was blocked by security escorting the last of the Olympic athletes out of the stadium and on to their buses back to the Olympic Village.  When they finally let us go, the crush of people got close to dangerous levels. But once we got out of the stadium area, the walk back to the metro went smoothly. In fact, since we walk fast, we beat a lot of people back and the train we got on was full, but not overly so. The only problem was getting on an M4 metro train going in the wrong direction. But we only added one extra station. By the time we got back to the hotel and got settled into bed, it was about 2:15 AM. Tomorrow (long track speed skating) is going to be a long day!