One month after the world-class athletes, television crews, and roaring fans departed, the reality of the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games is settling in as the bills finally arrive. While sports organizations and fans celebrate the athletic triumphs on the snowy slopes and inside state-of-the-art arenas, public spending experts are turning their attention to a different kind of legacy: the procurement, contracts, budgets, and high-stakes decisions that transformed billions in taxpayer money into vital public works.
Mega-events place unprecedented pressure on public spending systems. They are characterized by enormous financial sums, compressed timelines, intense global spotlights, and unrelenting countdown clocks that leave little room for the public to ask difficult questions before it is simply too late. Historically, this environment has proven to be notoriously complex, opaque, and risk-prone. The grand promises made during the bidding phase rarely align with reality.
Global precedents offer sobering warnings. Brazil’s World Cup became entangled in the massive Odebrecht corruption scandal, Sochi’s 2014 Winter Games earned the infamous moniker of the "corruption Olympics," and Athens is still dealing with the financial weight and abandoned venues of 2004. Even more dramatically, Montreal was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by hosting the 1976 Summer Games, leaving a final bill that exceeded initial estimates by more than thirteen times.
Because public spending during these massive undertakings invariably moves much faster than the regulatory scrutiny meant to check it, instances where a host city manages to get transparency even partly right deserve close attention. In the case of Milano Cortina 2026, a coalition of 20 Italian civic organizations spent three years prying open the books on the Winter Games. Their persistence ultimately yielded the first transparency portal in Olympic history—while simultaneously exposing structural barriers that future hosts will need to dismantle to maximize public trust and accurately track their long-term legacies.
A Rocky Start and a Better Way Forward
The initiative, which blossomed into what is widely known as the Open Olympics campaign, began with civil society organizations simply trying to secure a seat at the table. Coordinated primarily by the prominent anti-mafia network Libera, the campaign kicked off soon after Italy won the rights to host the 2026 Winter Games in late 2019. Local communities and grassroots organizations initially attempted to engage through formal, traditional channels to shape the environmental and social footprint of the event. Working independently, however, they quickly discovered that making their voices heard was an uphill battle.
"Decisions were being centralized and were sped up through governmental decrees," Elisa Orlando of Libera recalled of those early conversations. "So all those inputs from the public consultation were systematically ignored or dismissed."
Rather than treating that administrative roadblock as the end of the road, national associations and local groups joined forces. They chose to work out in the open, building a public case for institutional change rather than relying on closed-door meetings. Coordinated by Libera, the coalition developed into an unusually diverse alliance. It spanned anti-mafia campaigners, WWF Italia, Legambiente, Italia Nostra, the Italian Alpine Club, Mountain Wilderness Italia, CIPRA Italia, and a wide array of valley-level committees and South Tyrolean environmental groups. That breadth of representation set a collaborative, serious tone for everything that followed.
Lacking official disclosures, the coalition attempted to piece together a comprehensive picture of the event’s projects and spending using whatever fragments of public information were already available. A pivotal figure in this early groundwork was Luigi Casanova, a former forest ranger, writer, and environmentalist who had already spent years combing through local and central government documents concerning the regions where the Olympic venues were slated to be built. His extensive head start meant the coalition could gain valuable, albeit partial, insights into Olympic infrastructure well before any official governmental transparency platform ever existed.
Proto-Monitoring to Show the Value of Public Records
The campaign colloquially referred to this initial investigative phase as "proto-monitoring." By demonstrating what could already be gleaned from existing public records, the coalition was able to hand government officials a practical, ready-made concept of what a robust transparency hub should contain. They highlighted what information was missing and, crucially, how openness would help improve the overall organization and coordination of the Games. As their first public report explicitly stated, the primary goal was "to ensure the protection of the common good"—a framing that carefully positioned the network as a constructive partner in good governance rather than a mere obstructionist force.
Their core request to the authorities was deliberately specific: a single, centralized portal of open, accessible data covering costs, timelines, administrative procedures, contractors and subcontractors, funding sources, decision-making processes, and environmental assessments. The coalition even cost-estimated their proposal, showing it would amount to roughly 0.01% of the total budget allocated to the infrastructure works themselves.
This constructive engagement and strategic framing ultimately paid off. In October 2024, SIMICO, the state-owned company directly responsible for delivering 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, contractors, and other vital metrics, with updates scheduled on a regular 45-day cycle. It was a significant milestone that international observers, including the Open Contracting Partnership, had similarly hoped to see for Paris 2024, though it did not materialize there.
Turning Data Into Better Decisions
The true potential of a transparency portal lies not in disclosure for its own sake, but in providing an opportunity to catch problems early enough to fix them, identify operational bottlenecks, and flag gaps in administrative oversight. That is precisely what the coalition achieved through its three successive monitoring reports.
Leonardo Ferrante, another leading voice within the coalition, pointed to a striking statistical reality revealed by the data: only 13% of the total infrastructure budget was allocated to projects strictly essential to the execution of the Games. The vast majority of the funds went instead toward long-term road and rail projects marketed broadly as legacy investments. In monetary terms, this meant roughly €6.60 of legacy spending was approved for every single euro of genuinely Games-critical work.
It was precisely within these expansive legacy projects that the greatest risks of budget overruns, poor procurement, and flawed project management materialized. The coalition noted that of a roughly €157 million increase in total project costs that they tracked across the board, more than €133 million landed squarely on legacy works, compared to just €23 million on core Olympic event works.
Project timelines told a remarkably similar story of delay. Over the course of 2025, scheduled completion dates slipped for 73% of the projects, with some pushed back by more than three years. By the time the final data update was released immediately prior to the opening ceremony, only 40 individual works had been completed. Valued at €783 million, these finished projects accounted for roughly 22% of the total estimated infrastructure expenditure of €3.55 billion. The remaining €2.8 billion remained slated for future spending, with construction schedules extending out as far as 2033.
Furthermore, the portal revealed that the vast majority of infrastructure projects had been greenlit without formal environmental impact assessments—accounting for approximately 64% of projects by the time of the coalition’s third report. This regulatory gap occurred largely because extraordinary commissioner powers, intended to accelerate procurement timelines, allowed standard environmental checks to be bypassed on grounds of urgency. This practice raised serious questions regarding the long-term sustainability impact of the construction work, a factor that had been heavily emphasized as a core promise of the Games. Academic research has repeatedly found that emergency procurement practices can easily become normalized well beyond the original emergency response, presenting another risk factor in sensitive regions that encompass the UNESCO-listed Dolomites.
Additionally, per-project carbon footprints were never published, leaving the aggregate environmental cost of the Games entirely unknown. While the Milano Cortina Foundation estimated that the event’s direct operational emissions slightly exceeded one million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, that calculation omitted the heavy footprint of the underlying infrastructure construction.
What Stayed Opaque
Despite the groundbreaking nature of the SIMICO portal, the experience of the Open Olympics campaign highlighted persistent structural data gaps that future host cities must address. While SIMICO published detailed project information, data originating from national, regional, and municipal agencies remained largely missing or difficult to access. Freedom of Information requests yielded a response from the Lombardy region, but resulted in an initial refusal followed by an indefinite postponement from the City of Milan. When the coalition eventually located Lombardy’s own regional platform, it listed 44 infrastructure projects that were entirely absent from the SIMICO portal.
The campaign’s 2025 analysis also discovered that the portal was missing five projects listed in the official government master plan, alongside ancillary projects tied directly to the Games but delivered locally or through private financing, such as the Milan Olympic village, two ski links from Cortina, and the Val di Riga railway line. Although some of these omissions were corrected over time, the third Open Olympics report emphasized the fragmented and siloed nature of the available information and underscored the urgent need to consolidate all Olympic-related works into a single, unified view.
SIMICO’s portal data also required further refinement. While tender values were routinely reported, actual expenditures were omitted, and the portal failed to disclose how and by whom unexpected cost increases were being covered. Although the portal named 516 subcontractors alongside 101 main contractors, it omitted the financial value of each individual subcontract—a critical data point for Italy’s anti-mafia campaigners, who rely on such details to assess the risks of criminal infiltration within supply chains. Requests to implement full data interoperability by publishing tender identification codes that would connect projects directly to the national anti-corruption authority’s data using the Open Contracting Data Standard were ultimately declined.
Meanwhile, the Milano Cortina Foundation, which was directly responsible for staging the athletic events, declared a €1.7 billion "Lifetime Budget" but declined to publish its details. Because government decrees classified the foundation as a private body—a legal designation currently facing review before Italy’s Constitutional Court—voluntary disclosure requests hit a brick wall, mirroring similar transparency blocks encountered during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
Late surges in public spending also created blind spots for civic monitoring. The extraordinary commissioner for the Paralympics was initially allocated €328 million against an original Paralympic estimate of €71.5 million. By the time the quarterly report was updated at the end of January 2026, that figure had climbed to nearly €448 million, with the specific details of what those funds financed published only weeks before the Games officially began.
Local Knowledge and the Path Forward
The depth and breadth of a multi-stakeholder coalition like Open Olympics ultimately proved invaluable to official planners by injecting precise, ground-level knowledge regarding the local terrain, topography, and environmental constraints. As Orlando noted, involving civil society early ensures that sports venues, highways, and connecting infrastructure serve an actual purpose and meet the long-term needs of the territory rather than devolving into costly white elephants that local authorities struggle to maintain once the broadcast trucks leave town.
Publishing regular, rigorous 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 worker rights on construction sites, and enhanced arrangements were made with anti-mafia authorities to strengthen law enforcement oversight over contractors and subcontractors. Certain subcontracting data was eventually opened up, propelled by public questioning from the Milan City Council’s joint Olympic and Anti-Mafia commissions.
International supporters also contributed expertise, with organizations like the Open Contracting Partnership identifying missing data fields that would have allowed for advanced monitoring of corruption risks and performance metrics. While the portal initially lacked these integrity red flags, persistent advocacy successfully prompted the addition of several key fields.
The clearest and most enduring lesson from Milano Cortina is that transparency functions best when established as a core governing principle from the very beginning, rather than deployed reactively under public pressure after problems have already surfaced. Armed with this insight, the Open Olympics coalition is currently sharing its methodology with organizers of the 2030 French Alps Games, actively supporting French civil society organizations so they can begin their advocacy where Italy ultimately arrived, rather than spending years fighting for basic disclosures.
"In Italy, we obtained transparency only more or less at the end of the process, while we are working with the French to advocate for complete transparency also in the decision-making phases," Ferrante noted.
The campaign’s work remains ongoing even past the closing ceremony. Organizers have committed to maintaining their oversight until the final infrastructure project is completed, which, based on current schedule projections, will extend out to 2033. In May, team members shared their insights with the European Parliament during a public hearing addressing the hidden financial costs of large-scale events, joined in the room by French civic groups. They are also actively following up on soaring costs associated with venues like the Arena Santa Giulia, where price tags climbed from €180 million to over €300 million, including €51 million in public funds. A Freedom of Information request submitted regarding the venue in September 2025 finally received a response in July 2026, though it did not include the specific financial data requested.
Reflecting on what he was proudest of, Ferrante described sitting inside a European institution with his shoes still caked in mud from monitoring the Cortina construction site—ensuring that a grounded, real-world perspective successfully reaches the halls of power where critical financial decisions are made.
Ultimately, the experience of Milano Cortina and the Open Olympics campaign demonstrates that sports mega-events can indeed be managed differently. Future generations of host cities should not have to struggle to catch up at the finish line; instead, they should set the pace right from the starting block. By embedding transparency commitments, open contracting data standards, and mandatory civil society engagement directly into host city contracts rather than treating them as optional aspirations, sports governing bodies can finally align their public governance rhetoric with operational reality.
