VERONA, Italy — The Milan Cortina Olympics ended Sunday as the dual flames in co-host cities Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo have been extinguished throughout a closing ceremony inside the traditional Verona Enviornment, roughly mid-distance between the far-flung mountain, valley and metropolis venues that made these essentially the most spread-out Winter Video games ever.
In declaring the 2026 Video games over, Worldwide Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry instructed native organizers that they “delivered a brand new type of winter Video games and also you set a brand new, very excessive normal for the longer term.”
The subsequent Winter Video games can be held in neighboring France, which obtained the Olympic flag within the official handover earlier within the ceremony. Following the identical spread-out mannequin, the 2030 Winter Video games will stage occasions within the Alps and Good, on the Mediterranean Sea, whereas speedskating can be held both in Italy or the Netherlands.
A complete of 116 medal occasions have been held in eight Olympic sports activities throughout 16 disciplines, together with the debut of ski mountaineering this yr, over the course of 17 days of competitors. With the ultimate occasions wrapping up simply hours earlier than the ceremony, the 50-kilometer mass begin males’s and ladies’s cross-country medals have been awarded by Coventry contained in the Enviornment.
Host Italy gained its highest Winter Olympic tally ever with 30 medals — 10 gold, six silver and 14 bronze, crushing the earlier file of 20 set on the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994.
“Your excellent efficiency united Italians in every single place and performed a elementary function within the success of the video games,” Giovanni Malagò, the president of the Milan Cortina Basis, instructed the Italian athletes sitting behind him carrying headbands emblazoned with ”Italia.”
The closing ceremony paid tribute to Italian dance and music — from lyric opera to Italian pop of the twentieth century to the DJ beat of Gabry Ponte, who acquired the 1,500 athletes on their toes and dancing whereas colour confetti exploded on stage. Italian Achille Lauro delivered the final phrase with the music “Incoscienti Giovani,” or reckless younger folks, simply earlier than athletes who so aptly harnessed their youthful power for these Video games filed out.
The 2½-hour ceremony opened with a whimsical tribute to Italian lyric opera, with the stage director rousing not solely the closing ceremony solid, together with Achille Lauro, but additionally long-dormant opera characters tucked away in crates throughout the amphitheater’s tunnels.
On stage, Madama Butterfly in a vibrant pink and inexperienced costume and Aida in golden tiers have been unpacked from mirrored crates whereas seventeenth century musicians performed the joyous “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” from “La Traviata,” a nod to the Enviornment’s lengthy historical past because the venue for a summer time opera competition.
The opera characters, led by the jester Rigoletto, spilled out into the piazza exterior, mixing with the bemused athletes who have been flag-bearers for his or her international locations, a few of whom pulled out their telephones to movie.
In a later sequence, internationally acclaimed ballet dancer Roberto Bolle made his first-ever aerial efficiency inside a blazing ring meant to characterize the solar. He was lowered to the stage that mimicked the Venetian lagoon, replete with gondolas, the place he danced to a haunting music by Italian singer Joan Thiele.
In a key second, the Olympic flame encased in a Venetian glass vessel was carried into the Enviornment by Italian gold medalists from the 1994 Lillehammer Video games. The Olympic rings illuminated in white appeared excessive on the stone stairs behind the stage, flanked by nationwide flags, when one raised the flame within the middle of the stage.
This was the primary Olympics for Coventry, a two-time Olympic champion in swimming, who watched a lot of the ceremony alongside Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Some 12,000 spectators joined the athletes and officers for the closing ceremony, which was rather more intimate affair than the opening ceremony starring Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli inside Milan’s San Siro soccer stadium, attended by greater than 60,000 folks.
The Milan Cortina Video games spanned an space of twenty-two,000 sq. kilometers (8,500 sq. miles), from ice sports activities in Milan to biathlon in Anterselva on the Austrian border, snowboarding and males’s downhill in Valtellina on the Swiss border, cross-country snowboarding within the Val di Fiemme north of Verona and ladies’s downhill, curling and sliding sports activities in co-host Cortina d’Ampezzo.
The closing ceremony concluded with the Olympic flames extinguished on the unprecedented two caldrons in Milan and Cortina, seen in Verona by way of video hyperlink. A lightweight present substituted fireworks, which aren’t allowed in Verona, to guard animals from being disturbed.
The Milan Cortina Paralympics’ opening ceremony may also happen within the Verona Enviornment, on March 6, and people Video games will run till March 15.
