The opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics took place on Friday at the San Siro stadium in Milan and, for the first time, simultaneously in three other venues in Italy. The competitions will take place for two weeks, France is aiming for a top five in the medal table.

Published on: 02/06/2026 - 11:07 p.m. Modified on: 02/07/2026 - 07:37

Here we go! Italy launched the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics on Friday February 6 with an opening ceremony held simultaneously at four sites, from the legendary San Siro stadium to the Alpine villages of Cortina, Predazzo and Livigno, to celebrate the "harmony" of these scattered Games.

At 8 p.m. local time (GMT+1), in the middle of the Milanese enclosure bathed in still mild air, several dozen artists took over a spiral extended by four branches symbolically opening towards the secondary stages, nestled in the snow several hundred kilometers from the Lombard capital.

The first scenes in the show paid homage to Italian beauty and the myth of Cupid and Psyche, then to the great composers Verdi, Puccini and Rossini.

And where Lady Gaga lit up the start of the 2024 Olympics ceremony in Paris, by performing Zizi Jeanmaire, this time it was the American diva Mariah Carey who launched the festivities by singing in Italian on the famous refrain “Volare”.

A few hours before the opening of the Games, Pope Leo

In the San Siro stadium in Milan, a legendary venue for Italian football with 75,000 seats, the ceremony wanted, according to its organizers, to deliver a message of "peace" while exalting "fantasy" and Italian culture.

However, some stands at the San Siro stadium were very sparse at the start of the show led by Marco Balich, who was already at the helm of the opening ceremony of the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin. The latter had promised a more consensual ceremony than that of Paris-2024, "to transmit good messages, not messages that divide".

For the first time, the parade of athletes took place simultaneously in four locations to allow as many of them as possible to participate, a particularly acute challenge for these Games, the most dispersed in winter Olympic history.

At the end of the ceremony, the former Italian ski star Alberto Tomba was the last bearer of the flame. He and Deborah Compagnoni, Italian alpine skier, three-time Olympic champion and three-time world champion, then lit the cauldron under the Arch of Peace in Milan, in Piazza Dibona in Cortina d'Ampezzo.

With AFP

Keywords associated with the article

The content you are trying to access does not exist or is no longer available.