Milan Cortina’s Spread-Out Games Signal a New Era for Global Sports
At their core, the Olympics are a global television spectacle: imagined, staged and marketed for the audience watching behind screens. With that comes substantial cost and risk for host cities. By staging the Olympics across an entire region, it spreads the financial burden across several cities.
The spread-out Games are also somewhat less disruptive to host cities. Milan gets top billing in Italy’s hosting title, but it is possible to wander the city with few hints that the largest sporting event in the world is in town. The hockey, figure skating and speedskating venues in Milan are scattered on the fringes of the city, while central tourist attractions such as the Duomo and the Navigli have bearable levels of foot traffic. It is possible to wander the upscale Brera neighborhood and seesciure, or elegant, impeccably dressed women shopping and strolling cobblestone streets undisturbed.
On the other hand, Milan is lacking the magic and spirit of the Olympics, the heady energy of the world coming together to compete and party. A midday visit to Winter House—the Team USA hospitality suite for executives, athletes and their families—found the venue nearly empty. (Watch parties begin in the evening, one executive toldSportico.)
Reports of revelry and winter spirit in the mountains travels by text and word of mouth from Cortina, some seven hours away by car, but the distance and lack of transport infrastructure makes a central feature of the in-person Winter Olympic experience—Alpine skiing in the morning, figure skating in the afternoon—largely impossible. That’s a demerit for journalists covering the Games, many of whom typically venture from sport to sport and venue to venue to report on the event’s full scope. Instead, they must make a choice: stick to one cluster, and one group of sports, or spend hours away from WiFi driving through mountain passes, in addition to hundreds of dollars a night on lodging in more than one location.
Winter Olympics, in particular, need to make use of various mountain and ice facilities, so it is common to have venues in different cities. The 2022 Beijing Games were headquartered in China’s capital, with biathlon as much as three hours away in Zhangjiakou. The 2018 PyeongChang Games spread venues across Seoul’s northeastern coast. But each of those editions operated with central hubs in the host city, with transit set up to ferry athletes, officials, and supplies across the region. In northern Italy, such infrastructure is lacking.
Those like Thimm of CAA, who do make the journey between clusters, are largely on their own. Even Kirsty Coventry, the recently electedIOC president who is overseeing her first Games as its leader, said she had to take a cramped car with other colleagues from Cortina to Milano.
“It wasn’t the most comfortable, but it was fine,” Coventry told reporters on Friday. “We’re learning so much, and I think there’s going to be so much data that we’re going to be able to bring in and understand” from the spread-out Milan Cortina event, she said. “It comes with different complexities, but so far the feedback that we’re getting has been very positive.”
The impact has trickled down to the athletes, as well. In some cases, stars have expressed dismay that they have fewer opportunities to cavort with icons from other sports. U.S. figure skater Amber Glenn left acomment on a TikTok made by Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu, saying “I’m so sad that we’re at separate villages, I wanted to meet you.”
The IOC is aware that having six different athlete villages can be a bit of a bummer for the sports stars, especially for the men’s Alpine skiers in Bormio, who would have to navigate tricky Alpine roads to reach the nearest cluster of athletes.
“We had one athlete saying, ‘well in Bormio, we are just among ourselves, and if you want to be with the other athletes you have to go through the Foscagno Pass, which is an hour,’” Christophe Dubi, executive director of the Olympic Games, said. Dubi said the complaint was “the only one” he was aware of among athletes regarding the spread-out games.
Athletes and executives aren’t the only stakeholders affected by the diffuse locations. Jonathan Finnoff, chief medical officer of Team USA, toldSportico that the distinct venues and villages have “absolutely made us much, much more intentional on our staffing as well as our supply planning.”
“We don’t have a large pool of staff all in one centralized location, or maybe two locations,” Finnoff said. As a result, each of the six medical operations teams at the six villages “has to function independently. You’ve got what you’ve got. We haven’t had any problems with it, but it does make the logistics of it more challenging,” he said.
To be sure, not every future global sporting event will be adopting the same standard. Salt Lake City, the Winter Olympic hosts eight years from now, is expected to be tightly centralized across Utah’s capital, with all venues being within a one-hour drive of the city. It’s description as a “compact Games” on the host website is exhibited as one of Utah 2034’s strengths.
Thimm, the CAA agent, said he’d had preliminary conversations with his snowboarding client James about continuing for the Olympic gold that continues to elude him; the Australian, who repeated as silver medalist in halfpipe on Friday, already has sights on France 2030.
“By the way,” Thimm said, “Salt Lake four years later is the one I’m really looking forward to.”
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