VERONA, Italy – The Milan Cortina Olympics ended Sunday as the twin flames burning in co-host cities Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo were extinguished during a closing ceremony inside the ancient Verona Arena, a stretch between remote mountain, valley and city venues that made it the most sprawling Winter Games ever.
Announcing the end of the 2026 Games, International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry told local organizers that they had “delivered a new type of Winter Games and you have set a new, very high standard for the future.”
The next Winter Games will be held in neighboring France, which was officially handed the Olympic flag earlier in the ceremony. Following the same spread-out model, the events at the 2030 Winter Games will be held in the Alps and Nice on the Mediterranean Sea, while speedskating will be held in either Italy or the Netherlands.
Over the course of 17 days of competition, a total of 116 medals were contested across eight Olympic sports in 16 disciplines, which this year also includes ski mountaineering. The men’s and women’s cross-country medals in the 50 kilometer mass start were awarded inside the Arena by Coventry, with the final event ending just hours before the ceremony.
Host Italy won its highest ever Winter Olympic medal tally with 30 medals – 10 gold, six silver and 14 bronze – breaking the previous record of 20 medals set at the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994.
“Your outstanding performance united Italians everywhere and played a fundamental role in the success of the Games,” Milan Cortina Foundation president Giovanni Malago said to the Italian athletes sitting behind him wearing headbands emblazoned with ”Italia”.
The closing ceremony paid tribute to Italian dance and music – from lyric opera to 20th-century Italian pop, to the DJ beats of Gabriel Ponte, who brought the 1,500 athletes to their feet and dancing while colorful confetti exploded on stage. Just before the athletes harnessed their youthful energy for these Games, Italian Achille Lauro gave the last word with the song “Innocianti Giovanni” or the song of carefree youth.
The 2½-hour ceremony began with a moody tribute to Italian lyric opera, in which the stage director not only excited the finale’s cast, including Achille Lauro, but also awakened long-dormant opera characters in boxes within the amphitheater’s tunnels.
On stage, Madama Butterfly in bright pink and green dress and Aida in golden tiers were pulled out of mirrored boxes, while 17th-century musicians played the delightful “Libiamo ne’ liti calici” from “La Traviata,” a nod to the Arena’s long history as the venue for a summer opera festival.
The opera characters, led by the clown Rigoletto, wandered out into the piazza, mingling with stunned athletes who were flag bearers for their countries, some of whom took out their phones to film.
In a later sequence, internationally acclaimed ballet dancer Roberto Bolle gives his first aerial performance inside a blazing ring representing the sun. They were lowered onto a stage that mimicked a Venetian lagoon filled with gondolas, where they danced to a soulful song by Italian singer Joan Thiele.
In a key moment, the Olympic flame, encased in a Venetian glass vessel, was carried into the Arena by the Italian gold medal winners of the 1994 Lillehammer Games. When someone raised the flame in the center of the stage, the Olympic rings illuminated in white appeared on the stone steps behind the stage, surrounded by national flags.
It was the first Olympics for Coventry, a two-time Olympic champion in swimming, who watched much of the ceremony with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
About 12,000 spectators joined the athletes and officials for the closing ceremony, a far more intimate affair than the opening ceremony starring Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli inside Milan’s San Siro football stadium, which was attended by more than 60,000 people.
The Milan Cortina Games span an area of 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 sq mi), ranging from snow sports in Milan to biathlon in Enterselva on the Austrian border, snowboarding and men’s downhill in Valtellina on the Swiss border, cross-country skiing in Val di Fiemme, north of Verona, and women’s downhill, curling and sliding sports in co-host Cortina d’Ampezzo. Are included.
The closing ceremony concluded with the extinguishing of the Olympic flames in two cauldrons unprecedented in Milan and Cortina, watched via video link to Verona. The light show replaced fireworks, which are not allowed in Verona, to avoid disturbing the animals.
The opening ceremony of the Milan Cortina Paralympics will also take place at the Verona Arena on March 6 and the Games will run until March 15.
