Olympic Flame Goes Out in Verona as Milano-Cortina 2026 Closes, and a New Winter Model Takes Shape

VERONA, Italy — Under the weathered stone arches of a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater, the Olympic flame flickered, dimmed and finally went out to the sound of a piano.

As Italian pianist Gloria Campaner played Ludovico Einaudi’s “Experience” on Sunday night, cameras cut between the cauldron in Verona’s Arena and twin flames in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, extinguished in sync on giant screens. Moments earlier, International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry had stood at midfield and offered a verdict on these Winter Games.

“Thank you, Italy, for these magical Games,” she said. “You delivered a new kind of Winter Games and you set a very high standard for the future.”

With that, the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics — the most geographically dispersed in history and the first to feature ski mountaineering as a medal sport — came to a close.

A dispersed Games, built on existing venues

The Games ran from Feb. 6 to 22 across a swath of northern Italy, from ice rinks in Milan to ski runs in Bormio, Livigno and Cortina. They were the first Winter Games presided over by Coventry, a former Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe, and they tested an Olympic model built on reusing existing venues and leaning heavily on the country’s cultural landmarks.

Organizers and the IOC staged 116 medal events across eight sports and 16 disciplines. While the total athlete quota remained capped, the program continued shifting toward gender balance and events with youth appeal.

Medal table highlights and breakout performances

The Games also rewrote portions of the medal table:

• Norway again topped the standings with 41 medals, including 18 golds.
• The United States finished with 33 medals and won men’s ice hockey gold for the first time since 1980.
• The Netherlands stacked up 20 medals in speed skating and short track.
• Host nation Italy posted its best Winter Olympics ever with 30 medals, including 10 gold.

China left Italy with 15 medals, matching its Beijing 2022 total and marking its best Winter Games performance outside its own borders.

Other milestones suggested a slowly broadening base. Georgia won its first Winter Olympic medal with silver in pairs figure skating. Spain, better known for football and summer sport, emerged as a late-breaking winter story through a new discipline.

Ski mountaineering debuts — and Spain makes history

In the final days, ski mountaineering — “skimo” in the sport’s shorthand — made its Olympic debut at the Stelvio Ski Centre in Bormio with three events and delivered Spain’s first Winter Olympic gold medal in 54 years.

On Feb. 19, Spain’s Oriol Cardona Coll won the men’s sprint in 2:34.03, charging through a short, steep course that required athletes to climb on skins, shoulder skis for boot-pack sections and then navigate a fast descent back into the stadium.

It was Spain’s first Winter Olympic gold since alpine skier Francisco Fernández Ochoa won the slalom at Sapporo 1972. Cardona’s gold, and a later bronze in the mixed relay, ensured that all three of Spain’s medals in Milano-Cortina came in the new discipline.

“This is a historic day for our sport and for my country,” Cardona said in a post-race broadcast interview. “We’ve been working many years for this opportunity.”

The women’s sprint, held the same morning, crowned the first Olympic ski mountaineering champion: Switzerland’s Marianne Fatton, who took gold in 2:59.77 ahead of France’s Emily Harrop and Spain’s Ana Alonso. Two days later, Harrop and teammate Thibault Anselmet anchored France to gold in the mixed relay, with Fatton and Jon Kistler winning silver for Switzerland and Alonso and Cardona earning bronze for Spain.

The sport’s small Olympic quota — 36 athletes (18 women, 18 men) from 13 countries plus one neutral athlete — produced compact, television-friendly races on existing alpine terrain, often within view of spectators.

IOC calculus — and a European-heavy skimo podium

For the IOC, those choices were part of the calculation. Ski mountaineering had been trialed at the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Olympics using similar formats. When the IOC executive board backed its inclusion for Milano-Cortina in 2021, it cited the sport’s deep Alpine roots, its compatibility with existing mountain infrastructure and equal gender quotas, including a mixed-gender event.

The Olympic skimo medal table reflected the discipline’s European core:

• France led with one gold, one silver and one bronze.
• Switzerland earned one gold and one silver.
• Spain finished with one gold and two bronze.

A Russian athlete competing as an Individual Neutral Athlete, Nikita Filippov, won silver in the men’s sprint under restrictions that barred Russian and Belarusian competitors from using national symbols while the Russian Olympic Committee remains suspended.

Closing ceremony in an ancient arena

Coventry, in her closing speech, cast the Games’ geographic dispersion as a strength rather than an inconvenience.

“You showed how existing venues and different regions can come together to host the world,” she said.

The closing ceremony tried to bridge the distances literally and symbolically. Verona, roughly between Milan and Cortina, became a neutral ground and a stage. The Arena — normally home to summer opera — was rebranded the Verona Olympic Arena for the Games.

Italian trumpeter Paolo Fresu, backed by the choir and orchestra of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, performed the Italian national anthem and later the Olympic Hymn. A sequence of acrobatic performances, projections and pop acts moved the show from high culture to a club-like finale, capped by a DJ set from Major Lazer billed as an “explosion of energy” inside the ancient stone bowl.

The formal protocol followed the familiar script: the Italian flag, the Greek flag and anthem, and then the Olympic flag. The mayors of Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo handed the flag to the presidents of the French regions Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, representing the French Alps, host of the 2030 Winter Games. France’s national anthem, sung by soprano Marine Chagnon, completed the handover.

A volunteer’s moment, and an organizing legacy

One of the most personal moments belonged to Mario Gargiulo, 89, a retired hotel worker introduced as the oldest of the Games’ roughly 18,000 volunteers. Gargiulo attended the 1956 Cortina Winter Olympics as a 20-year-old spectator and later settled in Verona. He was among the first to sign up when Italy won the bid to host again.

“I never thought I would see the flame come back to Cortina in my lifetime,” he told Italian broadcasters earlier in the week. On Sunday night he stood on the arena floor in a blue volunteer jacket as athletes flooded in behind him for the traditional closing parade.

For Italy, the record haul and largely trouble-free organization amounted to a dual legacy: results on the field of play and a proof of concept for a more dispersed, venue-light Winter Olympics — a model likely to influence the French Alps in 2030 and beyond.

As fireworks arced above Verona’s arena and the last notes of the ceremony faded, athletes in team jackets and beanies turned the floor into a dance party, waving phones and flags. Nearby, the first generation of Olympic ski mountaineers posed for photos with their medals before heading back to the mountains that produced them, leaving an ancient stadium to fall silent again until the next summer season — and leaving the Winter Games to ponder what the next new sport on skins, wheels or snow might be.