One month after the global spotlight shifted away from the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the fanfares, television cameras, and cheering crowds have long since departed, leaving behind the sobering reality of the financial ledgers. Mega-events put complex systems of public spending under maximum pressure, combining enormous financial sums, compressed delivery timelines, a massive global audience, and a relentless countdown clock that leaves little room for the public to ask difficult questions before it is too late.
Historically, this has created a notoriously opaque and risk-prone domain where grand promises frequently collide with harsh financial and social realities. Past spectacles have seen extraordinary overspending and systemic issues, ranging from Brazil’s costly World Cup infrastructure and the Odebrecht corruption scandals to the infamous "corruption Olympics" of Sochi in 2014, the abandoned and decaying venues of Athens following the 2004 Games, and Montreal’s decades-long financial hangover after the 1976 Olympics saw final bills climb to more than 13 times initial estimates. Because the velocity of public spending during these projects almost always outpaces the scrutiny meant to check it, instances where transparency is successfully achieved—even partially—deserve careful attention from future hosts.
A coalition of 20 Italian civic organizations spent three years working tirelessly to pry open the financial books on the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games, ultimately helping to secure the first transparency portal in Olympic history. Their landmark effort, however, also revealed severe structural barriers that future host nations will need to dismantle to maximize public trust and accurately track their long-term legacies.
A Rocky Start and a Better Way Forward
What is now widely known as the "Open Olympics" campaign, coordinated by the prominent Italian anti-mafia network Libera, began with civil society simply attempting to secure a seat at the table. When Italy successfully won the bid to host the 2026 Winter Games back in 2019, local communities and advocacy organizations sought to influence the environmental and social footprint of the event through conventional formal channels. Working independently of one another, however, they quickly discovered that getting institutional authorities to listen was an uphill battle.
Decisions were increasingly centralized and rushed through emergency governmental decrees, meaning well-intentioned inputs from public consultations were systematically ignored or dismissed. Rather than accepting this exclusion as the end of the road, national associations and grassroots groups formed a broad alliance to build a public case for institutional change instead of relying solely on closed-door meetings.
Coordinated by Libera, this unusual coalition spanned anti-mafia campaigners, WWF Italia, Legambiente, Italia Nostra, the Italian Alpine Club, Mountain Wilderness Italia, CIPRA Italia, and a diverse array of valley-level committees and South Tyrolean environmental groups. This impressive breadth of voices set a collaborative and serious tone for everything that followed.
Before any official portal existed, the coalition began piecing together whatever fragments of public information were already accessible. A key figure in this early groundwork was Luigi Casanova, a former forest ranger, writer, and environmentalist who had spent years tracking local and central government documents across the regions designated for Olympic construction. His head start allowed the coalition to gain valuable, albeit partial, insight into planned Olympic infrastructure long before officials offered any centralized data.
Proto-Monitoring to Show the Value of Public Records
The campaign aptly named this exploratory phase "proto-monitoring." By demonstrating what could realistically be gleaned from existing public records, the coalition handed government officials a practical blueprint for what an effective transparency hub should contain, highlighting missing data fields and illustrating how open information could actually improve the organization and coordination of the Games. As outlined in their first public report, the central goal was "to ensure the protection of the common good," a constructive framing that positioned the network as an essential partner in good governance.
Their primary request to the authorities was deliberately specific: a single, unified portal providing open and accessible data covering costs, timelines, procurement procedures, contractors, subcontractors, funding sources, decision-making processes, and environmental assessments. The coalition even estimated that setting up such a portal would cost roughly 0.01 percent of the total budget allocated for the works themselves.
This persistent engagement eventually paid off. In October 2024, SIMICO, the state-owned company responsible for delivering Olympic infrastructure, launched the first open data transparency portal for public works in the history of the Olympic Games. The platform published project-by-project data detailing bid values, timelines, and contractors, with scheduled updates every 45 days—a milestone that transparency advocates had previously hoped to see realized during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, without success.
Turning Data Into Better Decisions
The true value of a transparency portal lies not in disclosure for its own sake, but in providing an opportunity to catch problems early enough to rectify them, identify operational bottlenecks, and flag oversight gaps. The coalition utilized this data to publish three comprehensive monitoring reports that shed light on critical aspects of the preparations.
Leonardo Ferrante, a leading voice within the coalition, highlighted a striking metric: only 13 percent of the total infrastructure budget was allocated to projects strictly essential for the execution of the Games. The remaining vast majority went toward long-term road and rail projects marketed as regional legacy investments, equating to roughly €6.60 of legacy spending for every single euro of genuinely Games-critical work.
These legacy projects carried the highest risks of overspending, poor procurement, and difficult project management. The coalition noted that out of a roughly €157 million increase in total project costs tracked by their researchers, more than €133 million was tied to legacy works, compared to just €23 million for direct Olympic event infrastructure.
Project timelines reflected similar strains. Over the course of 2025, projected completion dates slipped for 73 percent of projects, with some delayed by more than three years. By the final data update prior to the opening ceremony, only 40 projects had been completed, valued at €783 million—roughly 22 percent of the estimated €3.55 billion total infrastructure expenditure. The remaining €2.8 billion was left to be spent, with construction schedules extending out to 2033.
Furthermore, the portal revealed that most infrastructure projects had been greenlit without formal environmental impact assessments, accounting for 64 percent of projects by the time of the third monitoring report. This occurred largely because extraordinary commissioner powers, intended to accelerate procurement, allowed routine environmental checks to be bypassed under the justification of urgency. This raised legitimate concerns regarding the long-term sustainability impact on the UNESCO-listed Dolomites. Academic research has consistently shown that emergency procurement practices can easily become normalized well beyond the emergency itself. Furthermore, per-project carbon footprints were never published, leaving the aggregate environmental cost of the Games unknown.
What Remained Opaque
Despite the historic launch of the SIMICO portal, significant structural data gaps persisted, offering crucial lessons for future hosts. While SIMICO published detailed project information, data from national, regional, and municipal agencies remained largely absent. Freedom of information requests yielded mixed results, with a reply from Lombardy, an initial refusal, and an indefinite postponement from the City of Milan. When the coalition discovered Lombardy’s regional platform, it listed 44 infrastructure projects that were entirely missing from SIMICO’s portal.
The coalition’s 2025 analysis also identified that the portal missed five projects from the official plan, alongside various ancillary projects delivered locally or privately, such as the Milan Olympic village, two ski links from Cortina, and the Val di Riga railway line.
SIMICO’s portal data also required qualitative improvements. While tender values were reported, actual expenditures were omitted, and the platform failed to disclose who absorbed cost overruns. Although 516 subcontractors were named alongside 101 main contractors, the financial value of each subcontract was withheld—a crucial metric for anti-mafia campaigners monitoring supply chain vulnerabilities. Requests to include interoperable tender identification codes that would connect projects to the national anti-corruption authority’s data using the Open Contracting Data Standard were likewise declined.
Meanwhile, the Milano Cortina Foundation, responsible for staging the event, declared a €1.7 billion "Lifetime Budget" but never published its details. Classified by government decree as a private body—a legal decision that faced challenges before Italy’s Constitutional Court—voluntary disclosure requests went unanswered. A late surge in spending also created blind spots, as the extraordinary commissioner for the Paralympics was allocated €328 million against an original estimate of €71.5 million, climbing to nearly €448 million by January 2026, with granular spending details published only weeks before the Games began.
Local Knowledge and Raising the Bar
The deep engagement of the Open Olympics coalition demonstrated the immense value of incorporating local knowledge into official planning. Civil society members possessed a precise, real-world understanding of local topography and environmental constraints, helping ensure that venues and transport links served genuine community needs rather than turning into costly white elephants.
Publishing regular monitoring reports yielded tangible results. Following the release of the second report, new agreements were established with major Italian trade unions to safeguard labor rights on construction sites, and enhanced oversight protocols were agreed upon with anti-mafia authorities. International organizations like the Open Contracting Network also collaborated to identify missing data fields, leading to incremental improvements in corruption risk monitoring.
The clearest takeaway from Milano Cortina is that transparency functions best when established as a foundational principle from the very outset, rather than adopted reactively under public pressure. The Open Olympics coalition has taken this message directly to organizers of the 2030 French Alps Games, supporting French civil society groups to begin their advocacy early.
The campaign has continued its work even after the closing ceremony, committing to monitor the region until the final infrastructure project is completed in 2033. Their experiences show that sports mega-events can indeed be managed differently, provided future hosts abandon late catch-up efforts and set the pace for transparency from the starting block.
