One month after the global spotlight faded, the cameras packed up, and the fans departed, the reality of hosting a sports mega-event has set in for Italy. While the athletic triumphs of the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games are now a matter of history, the financial and structural consequences are only just beginning to unfold.
For the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) and a dedicated coalition of 20 Italian civil society organizations, the conclusion of the Games marks both a milestone and a warning. Over a three-year campaign, this alliance achieved what no other civic group had done before in Olympic history: they forced the creation of the first-ever public transparency portal for Olympic infrastructure. Yet, their grueling journey also exposed the deep structural barriers that future hosts must dismantle if they are to manage public trust and track their economic and social legacies responsibly.
Mega-events like the Winter Olympics place immense pressure on public spending systems. They combine enormous financial sums, compressed timelines, intense global attention, and a strict countdown clock that leaves little room for the public to ask hard questions before decisions are set in stone. Historically, this dynamic creates a notoriously complex, opaque, and risk-prone domain where grandiose promises collide with sobering economic realities.
The cautionary tales of past mega-events are well documented. Brazil’s preparations for the World Cup became entangled in the massive Odebrecht corruption scandal. The 2014 Sochi Winter Games earned the moniker of the "corruption Olympics," while Athens still struggles with the abandoned, decaying venues of 2004. Even decades earlier, the 1976 Montreal Olympics effectively bankrupted the host city, leaving behind a final financial bill that soared to over 13 times the original estimates.
Because public spending during these massive undertakings always moves much faster than the institutional scrutiny meant to check it, instances where transparency is even partially achieved demand close examination. The story of the Milano Cortina 2026 campaign offers a vital model that organizers of upcoming global spectacles—such as the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and the 2030 men’s FIFA World Cup hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco—would do well to study and emulate.
A Rocky Start and a Better Way Forward
The initiative, known formally as the Open Olympics campaign and coordinated by the prominent anti-mafia network Libera, began humbly with civil society simply attempting to secure a seat at the table. When Italy was awarded the 2026 Winter Games in 2019, local communities, trade groups, and environmental organizations sought to engage with formal channels to shape the environmental and social footprint of the incoming infrastructure. Working independently, however, they quickly discovered that their voices were being shut out.
As Elisa Orlando of Libera recalled, decisions were rapidly centralized and forced through via government decrees, meaning that public consultation inputs were systematically ignored or dismissed. Rather than accepting this exclusion as the end of the road, national associations and local grassroots groups decided to form a broad coalition and take their case directly to the public rather than relying on closed-door meetings.
Coordinated by Libera, the alliance brought together an unusually diverse range of perspectives, including anti-mafia campaigners, WWF Italia, Legambiente, Italia Nostra, the Italian Alpine Club, Mountain Wilderness Italia, CIPRA Italia, various valley-level committees, and regional South Tyrolean environmental groups. This immense breadth of voice established a serious, credible tone that defined everything that followed.
Lacking official data, the coalition began piecing together a comprehensive picture of the event’s projects and spending using whatever fragmented public records were already available. A pivotal 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 affected regions. His extensive head start allowed the coalition to gain critical insight into planned Olympic infrastructure long before any official transparency platform existed.
Proto-Monitoring to Show the Value of Public Records
The campaign playfully referred to this initial investigative phase as "proto-monitoring." By demonstrating precisely what could be gleaned from existing public records, the coalition was able to hand government officials a practical, ready-made blueprint for what a proper transparency hub should contain, which data points were missing, and how an open platform would ultimately improve the coordination and organization of the Games. Their first public report framed the campaign’s core mission as protecting the public common good, establishing the network not as adversaries, but as constructive partners in good governance.
Their primary demand was specific and pragmatic: a single, centralized portal providing open, accessible data covering costs, timelines, administrative procedures, contractors, subcontractors, funding sources, decision-making processes, and environmental assessments. The coalition calculated that setting up such a portal would cost roughly 0.01% of the total budget allocated for the construction works.
This constructive engagement ultimately yielded historic results. In October 2024, SIMICO, the state-owned company tasked with managing Olympic infrastructure, launched the first open data transparency portal for works in the history of the Olympic Games. The platform published project-by-project data detailing bid values, timelines, and contractors, with commitments to provide updates on a 45-day cycle. It was a breakthrough that international watchdogs had hoped to see years earlier during preparations for the Paris 2024 Summer Games, where similar efforts fell short.
Turning Data Into Better Decisions
The true value of a transparency portal lies not in disclosure for its own sake, but in providing the opportunity to catch administrative problems early enough to fix them, identify bottlenecks, and flag gaps in oversight. The coalition utilized the newly opened data to publish three rigorous monitoring reports that shed light on how public money was actually being spent.
Leonardo Ferrante, another leading voice within the coalition, highlighted a striking statistic revealed by the data: only 13% of the total infrastructure budget was allocated to projects strictly essential to the execution of the Games. The remainder of the funding went predominantly toward long-term road and rail initiatives marketed broadly to the public as regional legacy investments. In fact, for every euro spent on genuinely Games-critical work, approximately 6.60 euros went toward legacy spending.
It was precisely within these legacy infrastructure projects that the highest risks of budget overruns, poor procurement practices, and flawed project management materialized. The coalition’s analysis noted that out of a roughly 157 million euro increase in total project costs tracked through the portal, more than 133 million euros landed squarely on legacy works, compared to just 23 million euros on direct Olympic event venues.
Project timelines reflected a similar vulnerability. Over the course of 2025, completion dates slipped for 73% of all projects, with some delays stretching beyond three years. By the time the final data update was published immediately prior to the opening ceremony, only 40 works had been completed, valued at 783 million euros—representing roughly 22% of the estimated total infrastructure expenditure of 3.55 billion euros. The remaining 2.8 billion euros is scheduled to be spent over the coming years, with final construction spending not projected to wrap up until 2033.
While these delays and cost shifts did not necessarily indicate outright corruption, better project sequencing and more transparent communication regarding how legacy spending fit into the overarching plan would have helped the public and organizers maintain shared expectations.
Furthermore, the portal revealed that the vast majority of infrastructure projects—some 64% by the time of the third monitoring report—were greenlit without formal environmental impact assessments. This exemption occurred largely because extraordinary commissioner powers, intended to accelerate procurement timelines, permitted environmental checks to be bypassed on grounds of urgency. This procedural shortcut raised serious questions regarding the long-term environmental sustainability of the works, particularly given that the construction touched the UNESCO-listed Dolomites. Academic research frequently warns that emergency procurement practices run the risk of becoming normalized well beyond the original crisis, creating a lingering governance challenge.
Additionally, per-project carbon footprints were never published, leaving the aggregate environmental cost of the Games officially unknown. While the Milano Cortina Foundation estimated that the event’s direct operational emissions exceeded one million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, this figure notably omitted the heavy infrastructure footprint.
What Stayed Opaque
Despite the historic step forward represented by the SIMICO portal, the experience of the Open Olympics campaign highlighted significant structural data gaps that future hosts must address. While SIMICO published detailed project information, data from various national, regional, and municipal agencies remained largely missing or siloed. Freedom of information requests met with mixed responses: a reply from the Lombardy regional government, an initial refusal, and an indefinite postponement from the City of Milan. When the coalition investigated further, they discovered that Lombardy’s regional platform listed 44 infrastructure projects that were entirely absent from SIMICO’s portal.
The campaign’s 2025 analysis also found that the portal missed five major projects listed in the official government plan, alongside several ancillary projects tied to the Games but delivered locally or privately, such as the Milan Olympic village, ski links from Cortina, and the Val di Riga railway line. Although some of these missing elements were eventually added, the fragmented nature of the information underscored the ongoing need for unified, comprehensive public oversight.
SIMICO’s portal itself required refinement. Tender values were reported, but actual expenditures were omitted, and the portal failed to disclose who was ultimately covering cost overruns. While the portal listed 516 subcontractors alongside 101 main contractors, it omitted the financial value of each subcontract—a critical blind spot for anti-mafia investigators concerned with monitoring potential criminal infiltration within local supply chains. Requests from the OCP to introduce interoperability standards—such as publishing tender identification codes linking projects to national anti-corruption authority data using the Open Contracting Data Standard—were ultimately declined.
Meanwhile, the Milano Cortina Foundation, which was responsible for staging the event itself, declared a 1.7 billion euro "Lifetime Budget" but never published its detailed breakdown. Because government decree classified the foundation as a private body—a legal status currently being reviewed by Italy’s Constitutional Court—voluntary disclosure requests went unanswered. Similar legal classifications had previously blocked transparency efforts during the Paris 2024 Summer Games.
Compounding these challenges, a late surge in spending exposed further gaps in civic oversight. The extraordinary commissioner for the Paralympics was allocated 328 million euros—a massive jump from the original Paralympic estimate of 71.5 million euros—and by the time quarterly reports were updated in late January 2026, that figure had climbed to nearly 448 million euros. Specific details regarding how those funds were spent were only published weeks before the Games began.
Local Knowledge as an Asset
The depth and breadth of a coalition like Open Olympics ultimately demonstrated the immense value of engaging civil society early in the planning process. Organizers benefit immensely from grassroots knowledge of local terrain, topography, and environmental constraints. As Elisa Orlando noted, coalition members possessed a precise, real-world understanding of the regions where construction was taking place, ensuring that sports venues, highways, and connecting infrastructure served an actual long-term purpose for local communities rather than becoming costly white elephants once the broadcast trucks departed.
Publishing regular, evidence-based monitoring reports yielded tangible administrative results. Following the release of the coalition’s second report, new agreements were forged with major Italian labor unions to protect construction site working conditions, alongside enhanced cooperation with anti-mafia authorities to strengthen law enforcement oversight of contractors and subcontractors. Some subcontracting data was eventually opened up, propelled by public questioning from the Milan City Council’s joint Olympic and Anti-Mafia commissions.
International support further amplified these efforts. The Open Contracting Partnership identified missing data fields on the transparency portal that would have allowed advanced monitoring of corruption risks and performance metrics. While the portal initially lacked the integrity red flags the coalition wanted to track, persistent advocacy led to the inclusion of several key improvements.
Raising the Bar for the Next Host
The clearest lesson emerging from the Milano Cortina experience is that transparency functions best when it is treated as a core operational principle from the very beginning, rather than as a reactive measure adopted only after public pressure mounts and problems surface. This is the central message the Open Olympics coalition is now taking directly to the organizers of the 2030 French Alps Games, supporting French civil society groups to start their advocacy where Italy ultimately arrived, rather than repeating years of friction.
As Leonardo Ferrante observed, while Italy achieved meaningful transparency near the end of the process, ongoing discussions with French advocates focus on securing complete openness throughout the earliest decision-making phases. Opening up the entire contracting process from inception through user-centered design, open data standards, and systematic civic engagement could fundamentally transform how mega-events are managed.
The campaign in Italy has not ended with the closing ceremony. The coalition has committed to maintaining its monitoring efforts until every remaining infrastructure project is fully completed, which current schedules project out to 2033. In May, the team shared their insights with the European Parliament during a public hearing examining the hidden costs of major events, with French civic organizations in attendance. They also continue to track rising costs associated with venues like the Arena Santa Giulia, where public and private budgets escalated significantly, and follow up on pending freedom of information requests.
Reflecting on what he is proudest of, Ferrante described sitting in a European institution with his shoes still caked in mud from inspecting construction sites in Cortina, ensuring that ground-level realities are heard where major policy decisions are made. It serves as a defining description of the vital role civic monitoring plays in modern governance.
The experience of Milano Cortina demonstrates that despite formidable administrative and political challenges, sports mega-events can be approached differently. The next generation of Olympic hosts should not be left struggling to catch up at the finish line; they should be setting the pace right from the starting block. Ensuring that transparency and integrity principles are established as enforceable conditions of the host contract—rather than aspirational goals—remains the ultimate game-changer for future global sports administration.
