When Colorado voters rejected the Winter Olympics in the 1970s, they did so over two major concerns that are still present today: soaring costs and permanent damage to fragile mountain landscapes.

Nearly 50 years later, the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics are addressed these concerns head-on and tested a new approach in which the Games are not concentrated in one city, but instead spread out across a region.

The Games, jointly hosted by Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, spanned venues nearly five hours apart, offering a blend of vibrant urban life and alpine small‑town charm. For many visitors, the long travel between the eight cities was inconvenient, but for experts, the distance was precisely the point.

“I think that every activity has an impact,” said Stefano Pogutz, a corporate sustainability professor at SDA Bocconi in Milan. “The point is to have an event that somehow [has] a balance between the positive impacts, in terms of economic impact and societal reward. On the other side, they [manage] to stay within the carrying capacity, in terms of natural carrying capacity of the area where they are organized.”

This new model is directly in contrast with what has been historically known as Olympic “gigantism.”

“There’s this issue in the Olympic Games about host cities having to build a brand new infrastructure for everything,” said Matthew Andrews, a historian from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the intersection between sport and history. “In the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, it was called Olympic gigantism. And the critique there was that the city of Montreal built a brand new arena for everything. And so hosting the Olympics is super expensive.”

This time, rather than creating a new set of venues, planners leaned heavily on pre-existing structures.

“It means that Cortina, which hosted the Games way back in 1956, didn’t have to build a brand new modern ice center and a luge track and all of these things,” Andrews explained. “They’re kind of spreading the cost and using the existing infrastructures.”

According to Pogutz, roughly 85% of the venues and facilities were already in place, which substantially reduces environmental disruption and local routine. He argued that had the games been concentrated in one single alpine town, the pressure and strain would have been far greater.

“Just imagine the amount of people that travel to participate in the event,” Pogutz emphasized. “If it is a very narrow valley on the mountain or a place in the mountains, there is a huge amount of pressure. So, spreading that on a larger territory reduces the overall pressure. I think it’s good in terms of carrying capacity not to have everybody in the same place.”

He also added that hosting everything in a small resort town would have required a complete transformation of the environment and of locals’ daily life.

“It would have been a disaster, because from an environmental standpoint, you should have equipped the area for managing something that has — in history — a huge impact on nature in the very end. And also the people living there, because you change completely the routine for a while.”

Visitors noticed the difference.

“Actually, that’s one of the things that surprised me the most in this experience — how uncrowded it was,” said Susie Smith of Anchorage, Alaska. “Almost anywhere in America, it’s going to be insane. And actually, I was dreading that, but this is so lovely. You can just feel that small town culture of northern Italy and honoring the people and the culture and not over-inundating the community.”

Aside from lowering the environmental consequences, the widespread nature of these Games also spreads economic benefits. Rather than funneling tourism into a single city for a few weeks, spreading out the venues allows the cities to share revenue and burden.

“The world has limited resources,” Pogutz said. “So, if I look, also, at this event from a redistributive standpoint, I would prefer to have something that distribute the wealth and the prosperity on many places, instead of having something that goes in a very specific one.”

Additionally, Pogutz explained, this approach could help transform future tourism patterns, encouraging visitors to explore multiple destinations rather than oversaturating an individual spot.

Organizers are also thinking past the Closing Ceremony. The athlete villages built in Milan are expected to be transformed into student housing after the Games, which addresses a shortage in the city.

“Milano is a city where we have more than 100,000 students at the universities,” Pogutz said. “It would be around 15%, probably, of the population of the city. So we need to have more options.”

2026 Milan Cortina Olympics Jun 2, 2025

NBC 6 South Florida

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