The 2026 Winter Olympics will be held across Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, after the two cities were selected with a joint bid. It will be Italy’s third time hosting the Games – after Cortina in 1956 and Turin in 2006 – but the first time ever it will be across a region. The two host cities are 250 miles apart by road, and athletes will be staying in six different Olympic Villages spread across northern Italy.
There are four venue clusters, and each will host certain sports, often grouped by similarity. Milan will host ice sports, like hockey and skating events, while Cortina will boast sliding sports – luge, bobsleigh and skeleton – and curling, along with biathlon and women’s alpine skiing.
The rest of the skiing and snowboarding events will be split across Valtellina and Val di Fiemme, totalling 116 events across 16 disciplines. Ski mountaineering makes its debut as the only new sport in the programme, while several events have been introduced to already existing sports.
Steps are being taken toward gender parity in the Games with the introduction of events like the luge women’s doubles and women’s large hill ski jumping, while women will be competing across the same distance as men in cross-country skiing for the first time.
When do the Games start? The 25th edition of the Games will begin on Friday, February 6 with the opening ceremony at the San Siro Stadium in Milan, although some curling and snowboarding events will begin on Wednesday, February 4. The ceremony, entitled ‘Armonia’ (Harmony), will feature performances from Mariah Carey, as well as renowned Italian singers Laura Pausini and Andrea Bocelli.
There will be events every day until the closing ceremony on Sunday, February 22, which will be held at the Verona Arena.
Who are the Brits to watch? With Team GB confirming its 53-athlete squad at the end of January, there will be Brits in action across 19 days of competition and plenty of medal prospects to keep an eye on.
Some of Britain’s best prospects come in freestyle skiing, with world champion Zoe Atkins competing in the halfpipe and Kirsty Muir, silver medallist at the Winter Youth Olympics in 2020, representing Team GB in the women’s slopestyle and big air events.
Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson will be aiming to be the first figure skating medallists for Britain in the ice dance event since the famous Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.
Other highlights Looking elsewhere, this edition marks the first time since Sochi 2014 that ice hockey players from the National Hockey League (NHL) will compete on the Olympic stage. Among the favourites are Canada, the United States, Sweden and Finland as their teams benefit from the return of the NHL’s talent pool.
Another star to keep an eye on is American snowboarder Chloe Kim who is going in search of a three-peat in the snowboard halfpipe. She rose to stardom in PyeongChang in 2018 when she became the youngest woman to win gold in her discipline, at just 17. She came out on top again four years later in Beijing, becoming the first woman to win two Olympic halfpipe golds. Having struggled with her mental health in the aftermath of the Games, she contemplated retiring. But rather than stepping back, she has rediscovered her motivation and passion and has set her sights on a third straight gold, something no woman has ever achieved in the event.
How to watch The BBC does not have wall-to-wall coverage of the Games as it has done in previous years. There will be TV coverage on BBC One and BBC Two of “all major events from 9am to 10pm each day”, as well as a second stream, Olympics Extra, which will be available on BBC iPlayer and the BBC Sports website and app to show “additional” events from 8am to 11pm.
Highlights will go out across BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport social media channels as well, with BBC Sport also covering events with live text, day-by-day guides and the medal table.
TV coverage will be led by Claire Balding, Hazel Ervine and Jeannette Kwakye, while Katie Smith and Maz Farookhi will deliver daily coverage and interviews on BBC Radio 5 Live.
The full Games will be broadcast on TNT Sport and Discovery in the UK for subscribers.
Are Russia and Belarus competing? Neither Russia nor Belarus are competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics, after being banned as a result of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Athletes from both countries competed at the 2022 Games in Beijing, China, with Russian athletes competing under the Russian Olympic Committee after a state-sponsored doping scandal resulted in athletes being unable to compete under the Russian name, flag or anthem.
Athletes from both countries will compete under the Individual Neutral Athlete (AIN) banner, after a ruling by the International Skating Union in December 2024 which allowed them to participate in the Games under this condition. The delegation will not march in the parade of nations at the opening ceremony, and will not receive an official ranking in the medal tables, as occurred in the 2024 Summer Olympics.
What happened at the last Winter Olympics? Norway came out on top overall in 2022, with the most gold medals (16) and the highest medal total (37). Thirty-four of their athletes finished on the podium and two of their biathlon athletes, Marte Olsbu Roeiseland and Johannes Thignes Boe, set a joint-record for winning five medals each at a single Games.
Great Britain will be desperate to improve their performance in the medal table this time around, as they ended the Beijing Games 19th overall with just one gold and one silver medal. Both came from curling events, with the men’s team taking silver and the women’s team clinching gold on the last day of competition.
Some of the standout performances included China’s Ailing (Eileen) Gu becoming the first freeski athlete to win three medals at a single Games, with two golds and a silver on her Olympic debut, and Nathan Chen excelling for the United States with two golds and a bronze in the figure skating.
Italian speed skating star Arianna Fontana, who will be representing the 2026 hosts at her sixth Games, became her country’s most decorated Winter Olympian as she brought her medal total to 11 in Beijing.
