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!

Paris 2024 - Day 10 (July 26th) - Free day

Today, we have a free day. The Opening Ceremonies are this evening, but we decided that we did not want to sit along the Seine and watch barges full of athletes go by without being able to see all of the other parts of the Ceremony going on. While we always enjoy the Opening Ceremonies, we are glad that we skipped this one because the weather forecast is for thunderstorms. But free does not mean that we are just sitting around our Airbnb. Beth, always on the lookout for cultural things to do, has booked us tickets to the Palais Garnier – home to the French National Opera. The Palais was built in 1669 by Louis XIV and has a capacity of just under 2,000 people.

Beth had bought audio guidebooks for us, but Sean and I both found that the guidebooks, although it has all kinds of information about the architects and which was the Phantom of the Opera’s box, forces you to be at a certain place at a certain time, turn in a certain direction and generally makes the experience much less spontaneous. Here are some of the pictures that I took:

So much beauty! It was really a spectacular place. It is about 1 PM when we finally get outside. Since we have time, Sean would like to go to the Centre Pompidou, even though we don’t have tickets, since it is not far away. To sweeten the deal, he gets on his phone and finds us a highly rated Vietnamese restaurant that is particularly known for its Bahn Mi sandwiches. It is a really tiny and popular place. We have to sit outside and dry our seats off from a recent shower, but the sandwiches were great!

The Centre Pompidou, more accurately known as the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, opened in 1977 and was named after Georges Pompidou, who was President of France from 1969-1974. It was built in an architectural style known as high-tech architecture and was universally hated when it opened. The outside looks like a building still under construction and built out of the tubes used for gerbil runs. Since it opened, it has grown on people and is one of the more highly visited museums in Paris. There was no problem just walking in, but the security people asked that I wear my backpack on my stomach to avoid knocking artworks over. This made it difficult to take pictures. We visited two exhibitions, the first on mostly art from the late 18^th to early 19^th centuries. I really liked the neo-impressionists and abstract artists like Mondrian. But the best part of the top floor was the view: 

We also went to a special exhibition on the design of children’s furniture. Sean stops in the bookstore and buys a book on Architecture. It is still a little drizzly when we get done so we head to the Metro and go home. But before I go, I get this picture of the air conditioning ducts:

There is something like 50 restaurants within a mile of our Airbnb so figuring out what to eat for dinner is tough. We aren’t very hungry and don’t want to miss the Opening Ceremonies, so we go for quick and light. We walk around for a while before deciding. One interesting thing in Paris is that there is no problem with having your restaurant next to another serving the same type of food. We see side-by-side sushi restaurants and another street with at least 5 creperies. But tonight, our choice is a Lebanese restaurant. While we are waiting for our food, we ask the owner what he thinks about the Olympics and he tells us that it is so bad, this is the last night before he closes the restaurant and goes to Lebanon for a month. He says that he normally gets his food for the day about 7-8 AM, but now, because of security concerns and road closures, his food is arriving at 2-3 AM and unlike normal, there is no chance of getting a second delivery if he guesses wrong on demand. Too bad, because the food was good enough that we would have considered coming back a second time!

The rain picks up just as we get back to our Airbnb. We are really glad that we do not have to go back out to go to the Opening Ceremonies! Beth is watching the Opening Ceremonies on the TV, which happens to be in our “bedroom” while I work on my pin project of keeping track of all of the NOC (National Olympic Committee) pins and trying to figure out whether they are legitimate or not. There are so many pins! Every so often, Beth will call me to look at part of the Opening Ceremonies. It is really tough to figure out what is going on in a foreign language. Among the parts that I liked were Zidane (one of the great soccer players of all time) carrying the torch through the Metro, the guy that we are calling “death” rowing his rowboat through the catacombs of Paris, the subjects of the paintings in the Louvre jumping out of their paintings and running around, the Minions sinking their submarine with javelins (although it is not clear to me whether they belong to the “story” of the Opening Ceremonies or are just added in for no reason) and the horse galloping down the Seine. By the way, we think that the figure riding the horse is Sequana, Goddess of the Seine and daughter of Bacchus, God of Wine. After the fireworks, the Eiffel Tower lights up:

I’m sure that this ceremony will be viewed by some as controversial, but the purpose of the Opening Ceremonies is for the host nation to introduce itself to the world in the way that it wants. And this ceremony was typically French. Steps for the day: 12,594.

Sochi Olympics Day 0 - Memories of Past Opening Ceremonies

The XXII Olympic Winter Games in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, Russia are now officially underway. Unfortunately, through the miracle of television, we on the west coast of the US still have another 8 hours or so before we can watch the Opening Ceremonies. Normally, I'd be railing against NBC for once again, failing to understand a world which includes instant communications. But this time, I'm inclined to cut them some slack because they are going to be streaming over 1500 hours of live coverage during the Games - I just have to figure out how to adjust my sleep schedule to accommodate the 12 hour time difference between Sochi and Cupertino! With some time on my hands, I thought that I would take a few minutes to give some of my impressions from past Olympic Opening Ceremonies and what I look forward to in the Opening Ceremonies in Sochi.

 

Beth and I have been fortunate enough to attend four Opening Ceremonies: Lillehammer (1994), Atlanta (1996), Nagano (1998) and Vancouver (2010), but the first one is the most special. The Opening Ceremonies for the 1994 Olympics were held in the Ski Jump stadium at the top of the hill above the village of Lillehammer in the early evening. We had left the relative comfort of the home that we were staying at near Hamar and boarded an Olympic transportation bus to Lillehammer around noon with the plan of getting something to eat and then looking around before heading up the hill around 4pm to find our seats. Lillehammer is probably the last Olympics held in a small town. With a population of perhaps 35,000, we found Lillehammer bursting at the seams as hundreds of thousands of spectators flooded into town. We could not find a single restaurant that was not completely packed so we ended up in a big plastic tent that had been setup to provide warmth and some fast food to spectators. There we stayed until it was time to leave for the Opening Ceremonies. The hill was pretty steep and we saw a number of people slip on the ice and slide back down the hill, but we managed to make it to our seats near the back row of the stadium. Stadium makes it sound much more solid than it really was. Imagine a natural bowl with the Ski Jump off in one direction and the rest of the bowl surrounded by bleachers. Each seat at the Opening Ceremonies has a seat package that includes all sorts of things that spectators will need to take part in the entertainment portion of the evening. All I can recall in our seat package was a program and what looked like a white, wearable garbage bag - I guess the entertainment director wanted to create the image of the stage surrounded by snow, rather than spectators. I wasn't about to complain as it did add another, albeit feeble, layer of insulation against the mind-numbing cold. By the time the ceremony started, the temperature was well below 0F. It also became clear that no one was going to sit on the metal bleacher seats - I guess for fear of freezing to them. At least when standing, we could move around a little to generate heat. The atmosphere in the stadium was electric. Part of that was the natural thrill of the opening to the Olympics after seven hard years of preparation. But there was also a palpable sense of fear. The plan was for the Olympic flame to be brought into the stadium by a ski jumper. However, in practice the day before, the ski jumper had crashed and injured himself. So the organizers had to go with the backup jumper and a good part of the nation had an image in their minds of another crash and the Olympic torch tumbling end over end in front of a projected worldwide audience of perhaps a billion people. Much of the opening ceremonies went by in a blur - I remember trolls, Vikings, people in horse-pulled sleighs and a bunch of nymph-like things that created the world out of an egg, but everyone was focused on that Ski Jump. Finally, the athletes were in place and everyone turned to stare up the hill. After a few moments, we could see (or thought that we could see) a weak flame. Then the flame started moving downhill, faster and faster and finally, the backup jumper landed short, but respectably in the Stadium and you could hear a sound very much like an entire nation starting to breathe again followed by a huge cheer.

 

 

Two years later, we attended our first Summer Olympics in Atlanta. We tried again to get Opening Ceremonies tickets, but were not been as lucky in the ticket lottery. But at the last second, we were told that after final placement of the TV cameras, space for a few more tickets had been found, would we like them? Of course we would! Atlanta was every bit as hot as Lillehammer was cold. The organizing committee had somehow convinced the International Olympic Committee that the average temperature in Atlanta in August was 89F. Of course, what they didn't say was that that this was the 24hr average. So when we arrived in the Stadium, the temperature was well above 90F with about 110% humidity. The Ceremony started out great - five compressed air-powered spirits in the colors of the Olympic rings rose from the corner of the stadium. They called forth the tribes of the world during the playing of composer John William's song Summon the Heroes. The tribes, also in the colors of the rings, arrived and went into a great drum solo written by Grateful Dead and Planet Drum drummer Mickey Hart. This was followed a little later by a section called Summertime which tried to explain the culture of the Old South and it's rebirth after the Civil War. From there, things went way downhill culminating in a section involving cheerleaders, pickup trucks and spotlights. I remember that it seemed to take forever for the athletes to enter the stadium because more than six times as many athletes took part than had been in Lillehammer. But the most memorable event was the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. I am not sure whether there was any question who was going to light the cauldron in Lillehammer (it was the Crown Prince), but I remember a huge amount of discussion about it in Atlanta. Finally, after several laps around the stadium by memorable US athletes, the torch was handed off to the greatest boxer of all time, Mohammad Ali. Despite the obvious effects of Parkinson's disease, he was able to light the cauldron and received a huge ovation from the crowd.

 

 

Another two years and we managed the three-peat by securing Opening Ceremony tickets to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Nagano, with a population of perhaps 350,000 was a much different place than the town of Lillehammer. I remember that the bus dropped us off quite some distance from the Stadium. I was wearing a black Norwegian hat and ski vest, both covered with Olympic pins, and dark glasses. The people in the neighborhoods we were walking through just stopped what they were doing and looked at me. To them, I might as well have been from Mars. The Opening Ceremonies began with a huge group of workers in traditional outfits constructing eight two-ton wooden gates at each entrance to the stadium. This was followed by a parade of Sumo wrestlers, led by the Yokozuna (Grand Champion) Akebono who was actually from Hawaii. Akebono blessed the stadium and then the athletes entered the stadium, each team led by a Sumo champion and a child from the Nagano area. Japan definitely wanted to blend tradition with technology so the music was conducted by Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa featuring simultaneous links with symphonies on five continents. Finally, the Olympic cauldron was lit by figure skater Midori Ito wearing a beautiful traditional kimono. On the way out of the stadium, I was stopped by a reporter from Japanese network NHK. The reporter asked me if I thought that the Ceremony was "too Japanese". I told her that it was my belief that one of the purposes of the Opening Ceremonies was to introduce their city, region and nation to the world and that anything that they felt was important to include was fine with me.

 

 

Our last (so far!) Opening Ceremonies was in Vancouver in 2010. This was our first indoor Opening Ceremonies and was very much appreciated as it seemed like it rained constantly while we were there. This was also Sean's first Opening Ceremonies although you could argue that it was his second as Beth was four months pregnant with him in Nagano. It was certainly his first Opening Ceremonies with a view! Just like in Lillehammer, our seat package included a colored Garbage bag to put on. But there were a bunch of lights and other doodads as well. By 2010, the Opening Ceremonies have grown into a huge spectacle viewed by 3-4 billion people and the audience is expected to contribute. Each section of the Stadium had a "teacher" whose job it was to instruct us in our jobs for the Opening Ceremonies. While she tried hard to make sure that we "got it", probably two-thirds of the people in our section failed to do any of what they had been instructed to do! My favorite part of the Opening Ceremonies was the welcome by the First Nation tribes, but I also enjoyed a section covering the immigrant and British periods in Canadian history and music. I paid more attention than usual to the people chosen to carry the Olympic flag into the arena. You could tell how honored people like actor Donald Sutherland and hockey legend Bobby Orr were to have been chosen for this task. I was also moved by the tribute to Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili, who was killed during a training run earlier in the day. While it was almost a given that the greatest hockey player of all time, Wayne Gretzky, was going to light the Olympic cauldron, the design of the cauldron, the malfunction of one of the four arms of the cauldron and the fact that four athletes would light the cauldron simultaneously still made it exciting to watch.

 

 

So what do I expect from the Opening Ceremonies at Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi? I have no idea what to expect, and that is part of the charm. As I told the reporter in Nagano, the Opening Ceremonies is a chance for the organizers to tell the story of their city/region/country that they want to tell. In the US, we have been hearing about Russia, and the Soviet Union before that, since I was a small child. But this was always about what our government wanted us to know about them. Since the US, foolishly in my opinion, chose to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, this is really the first time that Russia, particularly southern Russia, gets a chance to tell us what they want us to know about them. This is part of what the Olympics is all about - bringing the peoples of the world together, learning a little about each other and learning how to compete with each other in peace. Bring on the Games!