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As the first Olympic Games to be officially co-hosted by two cities, Milan-Cortina 2026 was always going to be unique.
These were not the first Winter Olympics to take place in two distinct locations – far from it. Indeed, due to reasons of climate, topography, and venue availability, the designed host city acts as a hub for nearby resorts and facilities.
Recently, this has been a major city capable of providing the necessary urban infrastructure and global recognition designed to attract and support tens of thousands of visitors. Whistler played host to the skiing and sliding events at Vancouver 2010, while Beijing had little winter sports heritage to speak of when it hosted in 2022.
What makes Milan-Cortina different is scale. The Lombardian capital of Milan and winter sports haven of Cortina D’Ampezzo are more than 400 kilometres apart, while events also took place at other venues and resorts in Northern Italy. The geographical footprint of the event was 22,000 square kilometres – equivalent to 7.5 per cent of the country’s total landmass.
This necessitated multiple Olympic villages, an opening ceremony spread out across four sites, and even two Olympic cauldrons.
Tech operations at Milan-Cortina have been highly distributed due to geographical distance of venues (Image credit: TCL)
A unique Olympics
Logistically, Milan-Cortina was like nothing that has gone before, and this manifested itself in a technological operation that also had to take into account changing expectations, new innovations and an unprecedented threat landscape – all whilst delivering one of the most high-profile sporting events on Earth.
Indeed, building a distributed technological environment would have been borderline impossible when IT was defined by physical elements such as servers, switches or firewalls and almost all maintenance had to be carried out on-site.
Now, the ubiquity of cloud-based infrastructure and applications, software-defined networking (SDN) and fibre and 5G connectivity means virtually any piece of equipment can be managed remotely. Upgrades and capabilities can also be scaled from afar, while virtually any site or device is subject to the same policies and security provisions.
The Technology Operations Centre (TOC) is at the heart of any Olympic tech operation. It is usually located in an unremarkable, usually secret, location deep in an office block or industrial estate. The facility is home to representatives from official technology partners and supports virtually every single element of the Games, from accreditation, scheduling and athlete support, through to official websites and mobile apps, results and cybersecurity.
At Milan-Cortina 2026, the TOC also helped Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) global media partners deliver more than 6,500 hours of coverage.
Necessary decentralisation
These Games were notable for two reasons. The first is that Milan-Cortina 2026 was the first to be covered by an eight-year deal between the IOC and Deloitte, which replaced French IT firm Atos as lead technology integrator. In addition to managing equipment and resources from multiple tech vendors at the TOC, Deloitte also built, implemented, operated and secured key infrastructure and applications.
A second crucial distinction was that the TOC wasn’t limited to a single location. Given the need to support so many venues over such a wide area and to make operations more efficient, Deloitte and the IOC enlisted the support of remote technology operations centres (RTOC) located outside of Italy.
While remote support was used during Paris 2024, Milan-Cortina marked the first time RTOCs were embedded as an intrinsic part of the technology delivery. They complemented the local capabilities of the TOC and enabled continuous operation, allowing IT departments to work around the clock by making use of staff across multiple time zones.
“The sun never sets on the Olympics,” the Deloitte team told IOC president Kirsty Coventry when she visited the TOC in the lead-up to the Games.
This shift in approach has had an obvious impact on agility and efficiency, but also has bigger picture implications.
With the IOC seeking to make the Olympic Games more manageable, more financially responsible and more sustainable, decentralised games like Milan-Cortina 2026 could become the norm. This is especially true for the Winter Olympics, where an already small list of candidates that could feasibly host becomes ever smaller thanks to the twin pressures of budget and environment.
Indeed, speed skating events at the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps will be held in Italy or the Netherlands and the 2038 Games are set to be hosted by the entire of Switzerland. Beyond that, future editions of either the winter or summer Games could take place over multiple countries or even continents.
Decentralised technology operations will therefore help support a more decentralised Olympics, and the network provides the foundation – extending the IT environment to virtually anywhere with an accredited device.
Network foundation
The network, already crucial for any modern technology deployment, assumes an even greater importance in a distributed model. HPE inherited the mission to build, manage and secure the network through its 2025 acquisition of Juniper Networks and supported virtually every mission critical application and piece of infrastructure, including WiFi connectivity, ticketing and retail systems, broadcast connections, venue management systems, and scoring and operational software.
During the Games, its network connected more than 40 competition and non-competition venues, supporting over 3,000 athletes and more than 11,000 media and broadcast staff, as well as 18,000 volunteers and thousands of operations team members. In total, the network supported more than one million connections. Without it, there is effectively no Winter Olympics.
And this operation would have been impossible using legacy hardware, such as physical switches and firewalls. Thanks to SDN, cloud, and artificial intelligence, HPE was able to embed security into the design of the network itself, automate key process, and scale to venues with vast differences in geography and pre-existing infrastructure.
“The Games are built on unrepeatable athletic moments that occur live in the venue, and broadcast remotely to the world,” Giuseppe Civale, director of ICT infrastructure and venue technologies for Milan-Cortina 2026, said ahead of the Games.
“Our network needs the highest grade of performance and stability – from the data centre down to each access point.
“Trust has to be inherent along with scalability and security.”
Cloud-powered viewership gains
The IOC may have been slow to embrace cloud technologies, but they are now firmly part of the Olympic tech stack, aiding the distributed approach and enabling AI workloads. Alibaba Cloud’s systems were essential in coordinating transportation and energy management, as well as AI-powered judging, innovative replay systems, and even an intelligent assistant for stakeholders.
Olympic Broadcasting Service’s (OBS) Live Cloud Platform was instrumental in delivering content from 442 live video feeds to more than 42 broadcasters around the world, helping reduce the physical footprint of the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC) by 25 per cent from Beijing 2022.
The quality, breadth and efficiency of the tech operation allowed both the IOC and its broadcast partners to build on the explosion of interest in the Olympics sparked by Paris 2024.
NBC averaged 23.5 million viewers on linear and digital platforms and generated 4.28 billion impressions on social media – a 437 per cent increase on Beijing. In Europe, WBD’s streaming viewership rose by 234 per cent and earned more than four billion social views. This growth was witnessed across the continent among public service broadcasters (PSBs), while two in three Italians tuned into Rai’s coverage.
Meanwhile, the IOC saw 110 million users engage with its website and app, while more than ten billion engagements were recorded by its social channels.
The future of the Olympics
Technology was visible everywhere at Milan-Cortina, whether it was Omega’s timing kit at the finish line of the biathlon, Samsung’s vast sponsorship activations in the centre of Milan, or TCL monitors powering ‘Athlete moments’ after competition.
But developments behind the scenes have been just as important as the IOC seeks to futureproof the Games and adapt them for modern audiences.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Olympic movement was facing an existential crisis as it sought to remain relevant to modern audiences amid a series of politically charged Games in challenging locations or amid a global pandemic.
Yet after two hugely successful editions in Paris and now Milan-Cortina, the Olympics is in rude health thanks to resurgent public interest, buoyant viewing figures, and unprecedented social engagement.
If the future of the Games is more sustainable, more efficient, and more distributed, then the advances made in Italy will deliver an operational legacy as well as a sporting one.
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