Milan, February 2026 — One month after the World Cup fervor has faded, the glitz, cameras, and cheering fans have departed from northern Italy, leaving behind a reality familiar to every host of a major global sporting spectacle: the bills are only just arriving.
Mega-events put the entire system of public spending under maximum pressure. They are defined by enormous sums, compressed timelines, a glaring global spotlight, and a relentless countdown clock that leaves little room for the public to ask hard questions before it is far too late. It is a notoriously complex, opaque, and risk-prone domain. The promises made by organizers are invariably grand, but history rarely bears them out. Think of Brazil’s World Cup and the sprawling Odebrecht corruption scandal, Sochi’s infamous "corruption Olympics," or the abandoned, crumbling venues of Athens. Montreal was even driven to bankruptcy by hosting its 1976 Olympics, with the final bill climbing to over 13 times the original estimates.
Public spending on these projects invariably moves much faster than the scrutiny meant to check it. So when an Olympic host nation manages to get transparency even partly right, it is worth paying attention.
A coalition of 20 Italian civic organizations spent three years prying open the books on the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. In doing so, they won the first transparency portal in Olympic history—and simultaneously ran into structural barriers that future hosts will need to dismantle to maximize public trust and accurately track their long-term legacy.
The Open Contractings Partnership (OCP) has been glad to play a supporting role to this extraordinary coalition of civic actors working to build better practices and a lasting, accountable legacy for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games. Their story starts with twenty civil society organizations working in tandem to show how citizens and civic watchdogs can successfully support institutions to open up and monitor infrastructure spending at a major sports tournament. It is a model that the organizers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the 2030 World Cup in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, and every mega-event following them would do well to study closely.
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 won the right to host the 2026 Winter Games back in 2019, local communities and grassroots organizations tried to get involved in shaping the event’s environmental and social footprint through traditional formal channels. Working independently of one another, however, they quickly found it remarkably difficult to get a hearing.
"Decisions were being centralized and were sped up through governmental decrees," recalls Elisa Orlando of Libera of those early, frustrating conversations. "So all those inputs from the public consultation were systematically ignored or dismissed."
Rather than treating that administrative wall as the end of the road, national associations and local groups formed an unprecedented alliance. They decided to work entirely in the open, building a public case for institutional change instead of pursuing closed-door private meetings. Coordinated by Libera, it formed an unusual coalition 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. That striking breadth of voice set the tone for everything that followed.
Initially, they tried to build a comprehensive picture of the event’s projects and spending entirely on their own, piecing together whatever fragments of public information already existed. One figure instrumental in this early groundwork was Luigi Casanova. A former forest ranger, writer, and environmentalist, Casanova had already spent years meticulously following local and central government documents in the very areas where the Olympic venues and infrastructure would be built. His invaluable head start meant the coalition could gain a partial, crucial insight into Olympic infrastructure well before any official governmental transparency platform existed.
Proto-Monitoring to Show the Value of Public Records
The campaign’s own term for this foundational phase was "proto-monitoring." By demonstrating what could already be gleaned from disparate public records, the coalition was able to hand officials a practical, ready-made concept for what a proper transparency hub should contain, what vital details were missing, and, crucially, how openness would help improve the actual organization and coordination of the Games themselves. As their first public report explicitly stated, the overarching goal was "to ensure the protection of the common good"—a framing that positioned the network as a constructive partner in good governance rather than a purely adversarial force.
Their key request of 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 costed the proposal out, estimating it at around 0.01% of the total budget allocated for the works themselves.
Their persistent engagement and constructive framing ultimately paid off. In October 2024, SIMICO, the state-owned company responsible for delivering Olympic infrastructure, launched the first open data transparency portal for works in the history of the modern Olympic Games. It published project-by-project data on bid values, timelines, and contractors, with updates scheduled on a 45-day cycle.
Turning Data Into Better Decisions
The real potential of an open data portal is never disclosure simply for its own sake. Rather, it offers a vital chance to catch problems early enough to fix them, to identify administrative bottlenecks and their primary drivers, and to flag glaring gaps in oversight before they result in scandals. That is precisely what the coalition’s subsequent three monitoring reports achieved.
Leonardo Ferrante, another leading voice within the coalition, points to a simple yet telling statistic: only 13% of the total budget for infrastructure was allocated to projects strictly essential to the execution of the Games. The rest went primarily to long-term road and rail projects marketed as legacy investments, averaging roughly €6.60 of legacy spending for every single euro of genuinely Games-critical work.
It was precisely on those long-term legacy projects that the biggest risks of overspending, poor procurement, and flawed project management appeared. The coalition noted that of a roughly €157 million increase in total project costs that they successfully tracked, more than €133 million landed squarely on legacy works, compared to just €23 million on Olympic event-specific works.
Project timelines told a remarkably similar story of delay. Over the course of 2025, scheduled completion dates slipped for 73% of infrastructure projects, with some pushed back by more than three years. By the time of the final data update published right before the opening ceremony, only 40 works had been completed, valued at €783 million—roughly 22% of the total estimated infrastructure expenditure of €3.55 billion. The remaining €2.8 billion is still scheduled to be spent, with the final construction spending not expected to wrap up until 2033.
None of this inherently constitutes a scandal, but better sequencing and clearer public communication about how long-term legacy spending fits into the overarching master plan would have helped both the public and the organizers stay aligned on what to expect and when.
The transparency portal also revealed that a majority of infrastructure projects were greenlit without undergoing formal environmental impact assessments—some 64% of projects by the time of the third monitoring report. This occurred largely because the "extraordinary commissioner" powers intended to accelerate procurement allowed standard environmental checks to be bypassed on grounds of urgency.
That reality raises genuine questions about the long-term sustainability impact of the construction works, which was touted as a core promise of the Games. Academic research consistently finds that emergency procurement practices can easily become normalized well beyond the emergency itself, posing another risk to watch in a region that encompasses the UNESCO-listed Dolomites. Furthermore, per-project carbon footprints were never published, meaning the aggregate environmental cost of the Games remains unknown. The Milano Cortina Foundation estimates the event’s direct emissions were slightly over one million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, but that figure excludes infrastructure development.
What Stayed Opaque
Future Olympic hosts should focus heavily on resolving these structural data gaps. While the key infrastructure organizer, SIMICO, managed to publish detailed project information, data 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 investigated further, Lombardy’s own regional platform listed 44 infrastructure projects that SIMICO’s portal had entirely omitted.
The campaign’s 2025 analysis found the portal was also missing five major projects from the official plan, alongside ancillary projects tied to the Games but delivered locally or privately, such as the Milan Olympic village, two ski links from Cortina, and the Val di Riga railway line. Some of these were eventually added later.
SIMICO’s portal data also needed significant improvements. Tender values were routinely reported, but actual expenditures were not, and the portal failed to disclose who was ultimately covering cost overruns. It named subcontractors—516 of them, compared to 101 main contractors—but omitted the specific financial value of each subcontract. For anti-mafia campaigners in Italy, this missing detail is critical, as subcontracts represent a primary vector for the risk of criminal infiltration into supply chains. Requests for interoperability, such as publishing tender identification codes that would connect projects to the national anti-corruption authority’s data using the Open Contracting Data Standard, were ultimately declined.
Similarly, the Milano Cortina Foundation, which was responsible for staging the event itself, declared a €1.7 billion lifetime budget but never published the underlying details. Its classification by government decree as a private body—a legal decision that faced challenges before Italy’s Constitutional Court—meant voluntary disclosure requests went nowhere. A late surge in spending also opened up unexpected gaps in civic monitoring: the extraordinary commissioner for the Paralympics was allocated €328 million against an original Paralympic estimate of €71.5 million. By the time the first quarterly report was updated in late January 2026, that figure had climbed to nearly €448 million, with the specific details of what it funded published only weeks before the Games officially began.
Local Knowledge as an Asset
The depth and breadth of a coalition like Open Olympics ultimately benefits official planners by bringing invaluable ground-level knowledge of the terrain being built upon. As Orlando notes, the coalition’s members are highly competent and possess a precise, real-world understanding of the local territory, its topography, and its environmental constraints. Involving civil society early can ensure that a sports venue, a highway, or connecting roads serve an actual purpose and meet the future needs of the local community, rather than transforming into costly white elephants. It also matters that local authorities retain the capacity to maintain the infrastructure long after the international broadcast trucks have packed up and left.
Publishing regular monitoring reports produced tangible results. Following the release of the second report, new agreements were struck with major Italian labor unions to protect construction workers’ rights on sites, alongside pacts with anti-mafia authorities to strengthen law enforcement oversight of contractors and subcontractors. Some subcontracting data was successfully opened up, aided by public questioning from the Milan City Council’s joint Olympic and Anti-Mafia commissions. International supporters also joined the effort, helping identify missing data fields on the transparency portal that would allow for advanced monitoring of corruption risks and performance metrics.
Raising the Bar for the Next Host
The clearest, most enduring lesson from Milano Cortina is that transparency works best as a foundational principle from the very beginning, rather than as a reactive response to public pressure once problems have already surfaced. That is the core message the Open Olympics coalition is now taking directly to the organizers of the 2030 French Alps Games, supporting French civil society organizations so they can start where Italy eventually arrived, rather than spending years fighting just to get to the starting line.
"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 said. Opening up the entire contracting process from the start through user-centered design, open data, and systematic engagement could fundamentally change the dynamics of hosting mega-events.
The campaign has not stopped with the closing ceremony. It has committed to pressing forward until the final infrastructure project is completed, which under current schedules means 2033. In May, the team shared their hard-won lessons with the European Parliament at a public hearing on the hidden costs of big events, with French civic groups present in the room. They are also continuing to follow up on rising costs associated with the Arena Santa Giulia, where price tags climbed from €180 million to over €300 million—of which €51 million came from public funds. A Freedom of Information request filed in September 2025 finally received a response in July 2026, though it still lacked the granular data requested.
Asked what he was most proud 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 perspective made its way into the rooms where major decisions are made. It is as good a description as any of what civic monitoring is truly for.
The experience of Milano Cortina and the Open Olympics campaign demonstrates that, despite all their inherent structural challenges, sports mega-events can be managed differently. The next generation of host nations should not have to struggle to catch up at the finish line; they should be setting the pace right from the starting block.
