Italy's Olympics have had some major infrastructure questions. The first five minutes of competition weren't encouraging.
The 2026 Winter Olympics had some major infrastructure questions in the past weeks and months. The first five minutes of competition in Italy didn't provide much reason for confidence in that regard.
While the Opening Ceremony isn't scheduled until Friday, the first event of the Milano Cortina Games was held on Wednesday with a set of mixed doubles curling matches. Roughly five minutes into the action, a partial darkness fell due to a partial outage.
With clocks and scoreboards also down, play was immediately halted. Per The Athletic, the lights stayed out for about five minutes the total delay lasted about five minutes, during which the athletes mostly joked around and played air guitar with their brooms.
The local organizing committee later released a statement alluding to an energy issue, with no further details:
“There was a brief interruption to competition at the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium due to an energy-related issue,” the organizing committee said in a statement provided to The Athletic. “The interruption lasted approximately three minutes. Power was restored immediately, and competition has since resumed and is ongoing as planned.” The committee did not clarify what caused the issue.
Structural issues at the Olympics aren't a surprise to anyone who has been following the preparations in Italy over the past couple months, though the curling arena — the Stadio Olimpico del Ghiaccio — wasn't thought to be an issue. That venue hosted the opening ceremony and figure skating in the 1956 Olympics and previously hosted the 2010 curling world championships.
Instead, it's the hockey and sliding arenas that have become a headache for organizers.
The Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena remains an active construction site in which construction crews were frantically finishing projects on Wednesday, 24 hours before its first game is schedule. The ice surface itself is also three feet shorter than NHL standard, which goes against the agreement between the NHL, NHL Players’ Association, IOC and International Ice Hockey Federation. There was also a hole in the ice during a test event.
Construction of the arena was scheduled to begin in 2022, but an unsuccessful lawsuit filed by an order of Roman-Catholic nuns led to a delay lasting roughly a year.
As for the Cortina Sliding Centre, which will host bobsled, luge and skeleton, its construction led to death threats aimed at Cortina mayor Gianluca Lorenzi over the clearing of a forest and other local concerns. The construction process was also rushed, at high expense.
Category: General Sports
