Cortina d'Ampezzo ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics, on Monday. Milan Cortina has not captured the average Italian’s imagination because of a lack of marketing.Issei Kato/Reuters
The Milan Cortina Olympics have not triggered an outburst of nationalism and pride among Italians. It couldn’t be otherwise. It’s a cliché to say that only World Cup or European football (soccer to Canadians and Americans) unites Italians. But like all clichés, the observation is somewhat true.
In Rome, where I live, I have been unable to find a single Italian who has anything beyond tepid interest in the Games, whose opening ceremonies are on Friday at Milan’s San Siro Stadium. “In Northern Italy, the Olympics are followed, not so much here,” said my local barista, Michael Forciniti. “We are not united by the Olympics, at least not in this part of Italy. The only sport we truly care about is football.”
True, but not entirely. Italian tennis hotshot Jannik Sinner, the world’s No. 1 until he was dethroned last month by Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz in the Australian Open, is a national hero. His buzz factor at the moment is greater than that of the most celebrated Italian football stars, among them Nicolò Barella and Alessandro Bastoni, both of Inter Milan.
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Italy certainly has some Alpine podium contenders in Milan Cortina. They include Federica “the Tiger” Brignone, the three-time Olympic medal-winning skier; Sofia Goggia, the most successful woman skier in Italian Alpine history; and Arianna Fontana, the short-track speed-skating phenom, with 11 Olympic medals, two of them gold.
Household names? Close but not quite, certainly not on the level of Sinner, Barella or Bastoni.
To be sure, Northern Italians could babble endlessly about Brignone, Goggia and Fontana; not anyone else in the country. In Sicily? Forget it. Sicilians don’t even consider themselves true Italians and winter sports on the parched, near-tropical island, are non-existent (though a few crazies are fond of “fire and ice” skiing on Mount Etna, Europe’s highest active volcano, during lava flows).
Milan Cortina has not captured the average Italian’s imagination for another reason: There is no marketing magic.
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The Games, in my view, are having trouble conjuring up a marketing story to go with the competitions. We all know that any Olympics is more than just sports. It’s also about city and regional development, tourism, infrastructure, bragging rights and urban preening (and avoiding going bankrupt with cost overruns).
Take the Turin Olympics of 2006, the last time Italy hosted the Winter Games. Turin, located northwest Italy, on the edge of the Alps, was, in the 1860s, the first capital of Italy. In later decades, it flourished as an industrial town and is the birthplace of Fiat. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was home to Europe’s largest car factory. Turin became wealthy and culturally rich.
By the early part of this century, Turin was dying. Fiat was near bankrupt and deindustrialization was killing off tens of thousands of jobs. Along came the Olympics and the city reinvented itself, as Barcelona did when it won the 1992 Summer Olympics. Turin effectively billed itself as a small version of Paris, an elegant city ready to embrace new ideas and new businesses to emerge from its rut. It worked.
Milan Cortina has no such magic. Milan is one of the world’s premier fashion cities and a rising financial centre (thanks in part to Brexit). It is wealthy, buzzy, creative, international and fit for purpose. It needed no marketing puffery to put it on the map; it was already there.
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Nor did Cortina. It was the host town for the 1956 Winter Games and would become Italy’s Alpine, star-studded, ski-and-party capital; Sophia Loren was a regular guest and one of the James Bond films was shot there. It would have thrived even if it did not find itself in the international spotlight once again.
Oddly, “Milan Cortina” is somewhat of a misnomer. Most of the competitions are outside of Milan, in the Alpine areas, of which only Cortina, in the Dolomite mountains, made the Olympic logo cut. Bormio and Livigno, some 300km to the west, near the Swiss frontier deep in the Italian Alps, are equally important Olympic sites but few foreigners know about them (Bormio hosts the men’s Alpine skiing; Livigno, the freestyle skiing ).
If the Italian Olympic organizers wanted a fresher marketing approach – one that would make international journalists and visitors want to discover little-known Bormio and Livigno instead of over-hyped Cortina – they would have left Cortina out of the headline logo. Even Italians might have paid more attention to the Games if they were called “Milan Bormio” or “Milan Livigno.”
The Olympics are just starting to get broad, page-one coverage in the Italian media, but not in the way the Olympic organizers had wanted.
Last week, the discovery that Donald Trump’s ICE agents would make an appearance at the Olympics led the news pretty much everywhere in Italy (turns out they will be confined to diplomatic security roles in Milan, not sent to rough up immigrants on the streets). On Monday, the main Olympic story was a doping case involving an Italian biathlon competitor.
The news flow will turn positive as Italian athletes nail Olympic medals. The question: Will the average Italian care?