Milan (Italy) (AFP) – As fast as skiers, drones are very present at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympic Games, providing spectacular images for television broadcasts.

First modification: 02/11/2026 - 20:47

These "subjective view" (FPV) drones are playing a leading role for the first time in the media coverage of the Winter Olympic Games (February 6-22), chasing skiers as they slide down a slope or going at the pace of bobsleigh pilots, at more than 140 km/h, down a narrow ice track.

Piloted by a helmet and a controller, they offer a vision of unprecedented precision, which winter sports fans already know from previous ski or snowboard competitions, taking a step further compared to traditional drones.

Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), which supplies the images to television channels, uses them especially at the Cortina d'Ampezzo ice rink. That saves them from having to install cameras on every curve.

The luge, bobsleigh and skeleton competitors are therefore followed by a small drone in the first corners, giving viewers the impression of sitting right behind.

On one side of the track, a former drone racing champion, the Dutchman Ralph Hogenbirk, is in charge of controlling these devices.

without disturbing

Do these drones bother athletes? "No, you don't pay attention to that kind of thing," says German Felix Loch, three-time Olympic luge champion who is competing in his fifth Games.

"They clearly give different images, which are super good. It must be said, what they have done with this is something really good," Loch told SID, the German AFP service.

Alpine skier Emma Aicher, who has two silver medals in these Olympic Games, also believes that drones are not distracting: "For us, the images they give are really good. I don't notice the drone, it's very far away."

Yiannis Exarchos, boss of OBS, indicates that they have worked with the athletes themselves to conceive the system: "We didn't want it to disturb them. We simply wanted it to enhance them," he told reporters in Milan on Wednesday.

Fifteen devices

The use of drones with cameras occurred for the first time at the Sochi 2014 Winter Games in Russia, while the FPV view was first introduced at the Paris 2024 summer event, to offer live images of the mountain bike events.

Fifteen small FPV drones are at the Milan-Cortina Games, according to OBS, which uses them in different sports.

The fall of a drone in 2015, a few centimeters from the Austrian skier Marcel Hirscher during a stage of the World Cup in Madonna di Campiglio, slowed down his arrival.

Since then, technology has progressed a lot, Exarchos points out, and it is now possible to "safely reach speeds comparable to those of certain athletes."

The noise depends on the size of the propellers, which is conditioned by the speed required, according to an expert who works in these Olympic Games and who prefers not to be named by name for reasons of commercial confidentiality.

Each drone is custom-made for the mission and can be tiny: the smallest weighs less than 250 grams.

The cold of the mountains complicates the life of these devices, whose batteries soon run out, according to another pilot, who also requests anonymity for confidentiality.

"You have to change the battery constantly, after each race," he told AFP.

© 2026 AFP

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