2026 Winter Olympics: Some athletes skip Milan's opening ceremony and march in the mountains

The 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan featured cultural tributes, but many athletes chose mountain festivities over the main event.

Featuring tributes to da Vinci and Dante, Puccini and Pausini, Armani and Fellini, pasta and vino, and other iconic tastes of Italian culture — plus Mariah Carey hitting all the high notes in "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu" aka "Volare" — an unprecedented four-site, dual-cauldron opening ceremony got the Milan Cortina Olympics officially started on Friday (February 6, 2026).

Allowing athletes to participate in the Parade of Nations at the mountain locales for the most spread-out Winter Games in history created what perhaps was an unintended consequence: Zero competitors from any of the first five countries actually showed up at the main hub, Milan's San Siro soccer stadium.

While signs bearing the names of Greece, Albania, Andorra, Saudi Arabia and Argentina were carried into the home of Serie A soccer titans AC Milan and Inter Milan, there were no athletes from those places around: Instead, they were participating at simultaneous festivities held at Cortina d'Ampezzo in the heart of the Dolomites, Livigno in the Alps, and Predazzo in the autonomous province of Trento.

For good measure, the Feb. 22 closing ceremony will be held in yet another locale, Verona, where Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet” was set.

The full collection of competition venues for the next two-plus weeks dot an area of about 8,500 square miles (more than 22,000 square kilometers), roughly the size of the entire state of New Jersey. The multi-city ceremony format Friday allowed up-in-the-mountains sports such as Alpine skiing, bobsled, curling and snowboarding to be represented without requiring folks to make the several-hours-long trek to Milan, the country's financial capital.

Artists perform during the Olympic opening ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, on February 6, 2026 | Photo Credit: AP