This year’s Winter Olympics will feature a new sport for the first time in decades
Milano Cortina 2026 is kicking off with a stacked event program, as the Olympics leans into more niche snow sports.
Strap on your snow boots and start practicing your curling stance: the Winter Olympic Games are officially here, with the opening ceremony taking place in Milan on Friday night.
Marking the third time that Italy has hosted the Winter Games, Milano Cortina 2026 will see some 2,900 athletes (and Snoop Dogg, for some reason) representing more than 90 countries compete from February 6 through 22. This year’s events will take place at venue “clusters” spanning nearly 22,000 square kilometers, making it the most spread-out Games in Olympic history.
For anyone who plans on catching the action, there’s more skiing, skating, and sliding to see than ever before, with a record 116 medal events taking place in 2026 — seven more than took place in Beijing in 2022.
Among those events is one entirely new sport, the first that’s been introduced at the Winter Olympics since the return of skeleton in 2002.
On February 19, two ski mountaineering, or “skimo” — a sport based on the traditional pre-chairlift practice of climbing up a mountain, hiking, and then skiing back down — Olympic contests will take place. But, as noted by The Economist more than a decade ago, the Games have been leaning into hosting new events for some time now, particularly for “cool” sports that appeal to younger viewers.
For example, the number of freestyle skiing and snowboarding events has more than tripled since 2002 to a total of 26, while alpine and cross-country skiing have stayed steady at 10 and 12 events, respectively.
That’s snow business, baby
Organizers might be hoping that novel events will raise this year’s viewing figures above the 713 billion combined minutes watched at the 2022 Beijing Games, which was already up 18% from PyeongChang in 2018.
But while 56% of Americans said they’ll watch at least a few events at this year’s Games, per a recent YouGov poll, their favorite sport overall was century-old Olympic mainstay figure skating — though ski jumping and snowboarding were close behind.
