Milan, Cortina Olympic cauldrons are extinguished and the Winter Games – National
The Milan Cortina Olympics came to an end on Sunday as the two flames from the partner cities of Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo were extinguished as part of the closing ceremony inside the ancient Verona Arena, almost halfway between the distant mountains, valleys and cityscapes that have made this the most widespread winter games ever.
In announcing that the 2026 Games were over, International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry told local organizers to “deliver a new kind of winter sports and set a new, very high standard for the future.”
There have been 116 medal events held across eight Olympic sports in 16 disciplines, including the start of ski mountaineering this year, over 17 days of competition.
The closing ceremony honored Italian dance and music – from lyric opera to 20th century Italian pop to the beats of DJ Gabry Ponte, who got 1,500 athletes on their feet with a classy dance number while colored confetti exploded on stage.
Earlier, the 2026 Winter Olympians applied on the field waving small country flags to hot Italian music from the 20th century as the crowd sang, sitting on the stone field in areas marked by the green, red and white lights of the Italian flag.
The Canadian Olympic Committee said about 90 of Canada’s 207 athletes in Milan Cortina marched in the closing ceremony, with sprinter Valérie Maltais and sprinter Steven Dubois carrying the Canadian flag into the stadium.
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The 2 1/2-hour event opened with a salute to the Italian musical opera, during which the stage director woke up not only the actors of the closing ceremony, including the Italian singer Achille Lauro, but also the long-sleeping opera actors placed in crates inside the tunnels of the theater.
On stage, Madama Butterfly in a pink and light green dress and Aida in a gold tie were released from mirrored crates while 17th-century singers played the delightful “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” from La Traviata, a nod to the Arena’s long history as a summer opera festival venue.
The opera cast, led by the jester Rigoletto, spilled outside, meeting stunned athletes carrying their country’s flag, some of whom took out their phones to take pictures.
In a momentous moment, the Olympic flame encased in a Venetian glass vessel was brought into the Arena by Italy’s gold medalists from the 1994 Lillehammer Games. The white-lit Olympic rings were visible from the top of the stone steps behind the stage, flanked by national flags, with one holding a flame in the middle of the stage.
This was the first Olympics for Coventry, a two-time Olympic swimming champion, who watched most of the event along with Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni.
Around 12,000 spectators joined the athletes and officials for the closing ceremony, which was a more intimate affair than the opening ceremony featuring Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli inside Milan’s San Siro stadium, which was attended by more than 60,000 people.
Key moments included the Olympic flag being handed over to the next host nation for the Winter Games, France.
The Milan Cortina Games covered an area of 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles), from ice sports in Milan to biathlon in Anterselva on the Austrian border, snowboarding and men’s downhill in Valtellina on the Swiss border, skiing in Val di Fiemme north of Verona and women’s curling and women’s cooling and and copying cosmetres d’Ampezzo.
It is a model that will remain in future Games, to avoid the cost of building new structures. The 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps will host events in the Alps and Nice, on the Mediterranean Sea, while speedskating will be held abroad at a location to be decided.
The closing ceremony ended with the Olympic flame being extinguished in two never-before-seen processions in Milan and Cortina, watched from Verona via video link. The light show included fireworks, which are not allowed in Verona, to protect the animals from being disturbed.
The opening ceremony of the Milan Cortina Paralympics will take place again at the Verona Arena, on March 6, and the games will continue until March 15.
© 2026 The Canadian Press
