Milan — One month after the excitement, cameras, and fans departed from the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games, the bills are only just arriving. While global sports spectacles often leave behind a haze of corporate glitz and empty stadiums, the financial and structural reality of hosting these massive undertakings is under unprecedented scrutiny. A coalition of 20 Italian civic organizations spent three years fighting to open the books on the 2026 Winter Games, ultimately winning what is believed to be the first transparency portal in Olympic history. Yet, their grueling journey also exposed deep structural barriers that future hosts will need to dismantle to maximize public trust and accurately track their long-term legacies.
Mega-events put public spending systems under maximum pressure. They involve enormous sums of money, compressed timelines, intense global spotlights, and a relentless countdown clock that leaves little room for the public to ask difficult questions before it is simply too late. It is a notoriously complex, opaque, and risk-prone domain where grand promises are rarely matched by historical outcomes. Past examples are cautionary tales of immense financial and social strain. Brazil’s World Cup was marred by the sprawling Odebrecht corruption scandal; Sochi’s 2014 event earned the moniker of the "corruption Olympics"; and Athens left behind a trail of abandoned, crumbling venues. Montreal was famously bankrupted by hosting its 1976 Olympics, with the final bill climbing to over 13 times the original estimates.
Because public spending consistently moves much faster than the institutional scrutiny meant to check it, instances where an organizing committee manages to get transparency even partly right deserve close attention. In Italy, a diverse coalition of civic actors stepped forward to build better practices and secure a more accountable legacy for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. Their story highlights how everyday citizens and civil society groups can successfully push public institutions to open up and monitor infrastructure spending at a major sports tournament—serving as a vital model for the organizers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the 2030 World Cup in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, and every mega-event that follows.
A Rocky Start, and a Better Way Forward
What is now widely known as the Open Olympics campaign, coordinated by the prominent anti-mafia network Libera, began with civil society simply trying to secure a seat at the table. When Italy initially won the rights to host the 2026 Winter Games back in 2019, local communities and advocacy groups attempted to engage through formal 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.
Elisa Orlando of Libera recalls those early conversations, noting that decisions were rapidly centralized and pushed through via governmental decrees, causing public consultation inputs to be systematically ignored or dismissed. Rather than treating this exclusion as the end of the road, national associations and local groups decided to form a broad alliance. Instead of pursuing closed-door private meetings, they worked in the open to build a compelling public case for change.
Coordinated by Libera, the coalition is an unusual alliance spanning 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. This extraordinary breadth of voices set the tone for everything that followed. Lacking official data, the coalition began piecing together a comprehensive picture of the event’s projects and spending using whatever fragments of public information were already available.
A central figure in this early groundwork was Luigi Casanova, a former forest ranger, writer, and environmentalist who had already spent years tracking local and central government documents across the regions designated for Olympic construction. His head start allowed the coalition to gain valuable insights into Olympic infrastructure long before any official transparency platform existed.
"Proto-Monitoring" to Show the Value of Public Records
The campaign referred to this initial phase as "proto-monitoring." By demonstrating what could already be gleaned from disparate public records, the coalition handed officials a practical, ready-made blueprint for what a proper transparency hub should contain, what vital information was missing, and how an open platform would ultimately improve the organization and coordination of the Games themselves. As outlined in their first public report, the core goal was ensuring the protection of the common good, positioning the network as a constructive partner in good governance rather than a simple adversary.
The coalition’s primary request was deliberately specific: a single, centralized portal of open, accessible data covering costs, timelines, administrative procedures, contractors, subcontractors, funding sources, decision-making processes, and environmental assessments. They estimated the cost of such a portal at a mere 0.01% of the total budget allocated for the works.
This constructive framing eventually paid off. In October 2024, SIMICO, the state-owned company responsible for 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 regarding bid values, timelines, and contractors, with updates scheduled on a 45-day cycle. While organizations like the Open Contracting Trust had hoped to see a similar mechanism established for Paris 2024, it had not materialized there.
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 fix them, identify operational bottlenecks, and flag gaps in oversight. The coalition utilized the newly won data to publish three rigorous monitoring reports.
Leonardo Ferrante, another leading voice within the coalition, pointed to a striking statistic revealed by the portal: only 13% of the total infrastructure budget was allocated to projects strictly essential for the execution of the Games. The vast majority of the funds went toward long-term road and rail projects marketed as legacy investments—amounting to roughly 6.60 euros of legacy spending for every euro spent on genuinely Games-critical work.
It was precisely within these legacy projects that the highest risks of overspending, poor procurement, and difficult project management emerged. The coalition noted that of the roughly 157 million euros in total project cost increases they tracked, more than 133 million euros landed on legacy works, compared to just 23 million euros on direct Olympic event works.
Project timelines told a similarly troubled story. Throughout 2025, completion dates slipped for 73% of infrastructure projects, with some delays stretching past three years. By the final data update ahead of the opening ceremony, only 40 works had been completed, valued at 783 million euros—roughly 22% of the total estimated infrastructure expenditure of 3.55 billion euros. The remaining 2.8 billion euros is still slated to be spent, with construction schedules extending out to 2033.
While these delays and cost shifts are not inherently scandalous, better sequencing and clearer communication regarding how legacy spending fits into the broader master plan would have helped the public and organizers stay aligned on expectations. Furthermore, the portal revealed that the majority of infrastructure projects—some 64% by the third report—were greenlit without formal environmental impact assessments. This exemption occurred largely because extraordinary commissioner powers, intended to accelerate procurement, allowed environmental checks to be bypassed under the justification of urgency.
This dynamic raises serious questions regarding the long-term sustainability impact of the construction work, particularly within the sensitive, UNESCO-listed Dolomites. Academic research frequently demonstrates that emergency procurement practices can easily become normalized well beyond the original crisis, presenting another risk factor for future hosts. Additionally, per-project carbon footprints were never published, leaving the aggregate environmental cost of the Games unknown. The Milano Cortina Foundation estimated the event’s direct emissions at slightly over one million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, but that figure excludes infrastructure development.
What Stayed Opaque
For future Olympic hosts, the most critical area of focus must be structural data gaps. While SIMICO successfully published detailed project information, data originating from national, regional, and municipal agencies remained largely missing. Freedom of Information requests yielded a reply from Lombardy, but an initial refusal followed by an indefinite postponement from the City of Milan. When the coalition discovered Lombardy’s regional platform independently, it listed 44 infrastructure projects that were entirely absent from SIMICO’s portal.
The campaign’s 2025 analysis also found the portal missing five projects from the official plan, alongside ancillary projects tied to the Games but delivered through local or private channels, such as the Milan Olympic village, two ski links from Cortina, and the Val di Riga railway line. Although some of these were later added, the coalition’s third Open Olympics report highlighted the fragmented nature of the information and the ongoing need to unify all regional and national works into a single, comprehensive space.
SIMICO’s portal data also required further refinement. Tender values were reported, but actual expenditures were omitted, and the portal did not disclose who was covering project cost overruns. While it named 516 subcontractors alongside 101 main contractors, it failed to publish the specific financial value of each subcontract—a critical piece of information for anti-mafia investigators tracking the risks of criminal infiltration in supply chains. Furthermore, requests to include tender identification codes that would connect projects to the national anti-corruption authority’s data using the Open Contracting Data Standard were 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 the underlying details. Because it was classified as a private body by government decree—a decision subsequently brought before Italy’s Constitutional Court—voluntary disclosure requests hit a brick wall, echoing similar transparency barriers faced during the Paris 2024 Summer Games.
A late surge in spending further strained civic monitoring capabilities. The extraordinary commissioner for the Paralympics was allocated 328 million euros against an original Paralympic estimate of 71.5 million euros. By the time the quarterly report was updated at the end of January 2026, that figure had climbed to nearly 448 million euros, with granular details regarding how the funds were spent published only weeks before the Games began.
Local Knowledge as an Asset
The depth and breadth of the Open Olympics coalition offered official planners a distinct advantage, injecting vital ground-level knowledge regarding local topography and environmental constraints. As Elisa Orlando noted, coalition members possess precise, real-world understanding of the territory, ensuring that sports venues, highways, and connecting infrastructure serve an actual purpose for the future needs of the region rather than turning into costly white elephants. It remains equally vital that local authorities retain the capacity to maintain these assets long after the broadcast trucks have departed.
Publishing regular monitoring reports consistently yielded tangible results. Following the release of the second report, new agreements were established with major Italian labor unions to protect construction site rights, alongside enhanced anti-mafia law enforcement oversight of contractors and subcontractors. Certain subcontracting data was eventually opened up, aided by public questioning from the Milan City Council’s joint Olympic and Anti-Mafia commissions.
International supporters also contributed, with organizations like the Open Contracting Partnership identifying missing data fields that would have allowed advanced monitoring of corruption risks. Some of those vital fields were subsequently integrated into the portal.
Raising the Bar for the Next Host
The clearest takeaway from Milano Cortina is that transparency functions best when treated as a foundational principle from the very beginning, rather than as a reactive measure adopted only after problems surface. The Open Olympics coalition is now bringing this message directly to the organizers of the 2030 French Alps Games, actively supporting French civil society groups so they can start where Italy ultimately finished, rather than spending years fighting for basic access.
As Leonardo Ferrante emphasized, while transparency in Italy was achieved more or less at the end of the process, the ongoing work in France focuses on advocating for complete openness during the earliest decision-making phases. Opening up the entire contracting process from day one through user-centered design, open data, and systematic public engagement can fundamentally alter the dynamics of mega-event hosting.
The campaign’s work did not stop with the closing ceremony. The coalition has committed to monitoring the region until the final infrastructure project is completed—a timeline that currently extends to 2033. Representatives have shared their lessons with the European Parliament during public hearings on the hidden costs of major events, standing alongside French civic groups. They continue to track rising costs associated with venues like the Arena Santa Giulia, where public funds contributed significantly to rising budgets, and are pressing forward with lingering Freedom of Information requests.
Reflecting on the campaign, Ferrante described sitting inside a European institution with his shoes still caked in mud from monitoring the Cortina construction site—ensuring that a grounded, local perspective reached the rooms where high-level decisions were being made. It stands as an apt description of the true purpose of civic monitoring.
Ultimately, the experience of the Milano Cortina Games and the Open Olympics campaign demonstrates that sports mega-events can be managed differently, even amid steep challenges. The next generation of hosts should avoid struggling to catch up at the finish line, aiming instead to set the pace right from the starting block. Ensuring these transparency commitments become an enforceable condition of the host city contract—rather than a mere aspiration—could ultimately serve as a true gamechanger for global sport.
