MILAN — One month after the excitement, international camera crews, and cheering crowds departed from the slopes and stadiums of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the financial and logistical reality is settling in. While sports fans have packed away their flags, local communities and fiscal watchdogs are only just beginning to process the immense administrative and infrastructural bills.
The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), alongside a dedicated coalition of 20 Italian civic organizations, has spent the past three years examining the complex financial mechanisms behind the Games. Their efforts culminated in the creation of the first-ever transparency portal in Olympic history—a landmark achievement that nonetheless exposed deep-seated structural barriers. These hurdles, civic leaders argue, must be dismantled by future host cities if they hope to maximize public trust and accurately track the long-term legacies of global sports mega-events.
Mega-events consistently place public spending under extreme pressure. Massive financial sums, highly compressed timelines, an intense global spotlight, and unyielding countdown clocks leave very little room for the public to ask difficult questions before major decisions are finalized. Historically, this dynamic creates a notoriously complex, opaque, and risk-prone environment where grand promises rarely match reality. Past examples loom large: Brazil’s World Cup and the sweeping Odebrecht corruption scandal, the infamous "corruption Olympics" of Sochi in 2014, and the abandoned, decaying venues of the 2004 Athens Games. The financial hangover of the 1976 Montreal Olympics was so severe that it ultimately bankrupted the city, with the final bill reaching over 13 times initial estimates.
Because public spending consistently moves much faster than the regulatory scrutiny meant to check it, instances where a host nation gets transparency even partially right demand rigorous attention. In Italy, a coalition of civic actors stepped in to build a better framework, setting a precedent that the organizers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the 2030 World Cup in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, and every subsequent mega-event would be wise to study closely.
A Rocky Start and a Better Way Forward
The initiative that evolved into the Open Olympics campaign—coordinated by the prominent anti-mafia network Libera—began with local civil society organizations simply trying to secure a seat at the table. When Italy successfully won the bid to host the 2026 Winter Games in 2019, local communities and grassroots groups attempted to engage through formal channels to shape the environmental and social footprint of the event. Operating independently, however, these groups found it nearly impossible to gain a meaningful hearing.
Decisions regarding the Games were rapidly centralized and pushed through via governmental decrees, resulting in public consultation inputs being systematically ignored or dismissed, as recalled by Elisa Orlando of Libera.
Rather than abandoning their efforts, national associations and local groups formed an expansive, unprecedented alliance and began working openly in the public sphere. Rather than relying on closed-door meetings, they built a compelling public case for institutional change. Coordinated by Libera, the coalition brought together an extraordinarily diverse array of voices, including anti-mafia campaigners, WWF Italia, Legambiente, Italia Nostra, the Italian Alpine Club, Mountain Wilderness Italia, CIPRA Italia, numerous valley-level committees, and South Tyrolean environmental groups. This broad coalition successfully set a collaborative, rigorous tone for everything that followed.
Initially, these groups attempted to piece together the event’s projects and spending using fragmented public records. A pivotal figure in this early groundwork was Luigi Casanova, a former forest ranger, writer, and environmentalist who had already spent years monitoring local and central government documents across the regions slated for Olympic development. His extensive head start allowed the coalition to gain critical insight into planned Olympic infrastructure long before any official government transparency platform existed.
Proto-Monitoring to Show the Value of Public Records
The campaign adopted the term "proto-monitoring" to describe this initial phase. By demonstrating what could realistically be gleaned from existing public records, the coalition provided officials with a practical blueprint for what an effective transparency hub should look like, identifying critical missing data points and demonstrating how openness could improve the overall coordination of the Games. As outlined in their first public report, the core objective was ensuring the protection of the public common good—a framing that successfully positioned the civic network as a constructive partner in good governance.
The coalition’s primary demand was precise and targeted: a centralized, open-data portal providing accessible information covering costs, timelines, regulatory procedures, contractors, subcontractors, funding sources, decision-making processes, and environmental assessments. The alliance even calculated that establishing such a portal would cost roughly 0.01% of the total infrastructure budget.
This constructive engagement ultimately yielded results. In October 2024, SIMICO, the state-owned company charged with delivering Olympic infrastructure, launched the first open data transparency portal for public works in Olympic history. The platform published project-by-project data regarding bid values, timelines, and contractors, with scheduled updates on a 45-day cycle—a level of transparency advocates had previously hoped for, but failed to secure, ahead of the Paris 2024 Summer Games.
Turning Data into Better Decisions
The true value of transparency portals lies not in disclosure for its own sake, but in their capacity to catch operational problems early, identify bottlenecks, and flag regulatory oversight gaps. The coalition’s three subsequent monitoring reports demonstrated this utility in practice.
Leonardo Ferrante, another leading voice within the coalition, highlighted a striking statistic: only 13% of the total infrastructure budget was allocated to projects strictly essential for executing the Games. The vast majority of the funds were directed toward long-term road and rail projects marketed as regional legacy investments, equating to roughly €6.60 of legacy spending for every euro spent on genuinely Games-critical infrastructure.
Significantly, the greatest risks of budget overruns, poor procurement, and strained project management materialized within these very legacy projects. The coalition tracked a total project cost increase of approximately €157 million, of which more than €133 million was tied directly to legacy works, compared to just €23 million for core Olympic event projects.
Project timelines faced similar pressures. Throughout 2025, completion dates slipped for 73% of infrastructure projects, with some timelines pushed back by more than three years. By the final data update prior to the opening ceremony, only 40 works had been completed, valued at €783 million—roughly 22% of the estimated €3.55 billion total infrastructure expenditure. The remaining €2.8 billion remains slated for future expenditure, with construction spending projected to stretch into 2033.
Furthermore, the transparency portal revealed that the vast majority of infrastructure projects—some 64% by the time of the third report—had been greenlit without formal environmental impact assessments. This exemption occurred largely because extraordinary commissioner powers, granted to accelerate procurement, allowed environmental checks to be bypassed on grounds of urgency. This procedural shortcut raised valid concerns regarding the long-term ecological impact of the works, particularly within the sensitive, UNESCO-listed Dolomites.
Academic research frequently shows that emergency procurement practices can normalize long after the initial crisis has passed, creating a precedent that warrants careful observation. Additionally, per-project carbon footprints were never published, leaving the aggregate environmental cost of the Games unquantified, though the Milano Cortina Foundation estimated its direct event emissions at slightly over one million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, excluding infrastructure.
What Stayed Opaque
Despite the historic launch of the SIMICO portal, structural data gaps remained evident. While SIMICO published detailed project information, data from national, regional, and municipal agencies was largely absent. Freedom of Information (FOI) requests yielded a response from Lombardy, but an initial refusal followed by an indefinite postponement from the City of Milan. Furthermore, Lombardy’s independent regional platform listed 44 infrastructure projects that were entirely omitted from the SIMICO portal.
The coalition’s 2025 analysis identified that the national portal was missing five projects from the official master 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. Although some omissions were subsequently addressed, the findings underscored the fragmented nature of public information and the necessity of unifying all related works into a single, comprehensive repository.
SIMICO’s portal data also required technical refinements. While tender values were reported, actual expenditures were omitted, and the portal failed to clarify the sources covering budget overruns. Although the platform listed 516 subcontractors alongside 101 main contractors, it did not disclose the financial value of individual subcontracts—a critical metric for anti-mafia investigators monitoring criminal infiltration risks within supply chains. Requests from the Open Contracting Partnership to adopt the Open Contracting Data Standard and publish tender identification codes linking projects to national anti-corruption authority records were ultimately declined.
Similarly, the Milano Cortina Foundation, responsible for staging the athletic events, declared a €1.7 billion "Lifetime Budget" but declined to publish it. Because government decrees classified the foundation as a private body—a legal designation currently facing scrutiny before Italy’s Constitutional Court—voluntary disclosure requests hit a brick wall, mirroring similar challenges encountered during the Paris 2024 preparations.
Local Knowledge and Civic Impact
The deep expertise demonstrated by the Open Olympics coalition underscores the practical value of integrating ground-level knowledge into official planning. As Elisa Orlando noted, coalition members possess precise, real-world understandings of local topography, terrain, and environmental constraints. Early involvement of civil society helps ensure that sports venues, highways, and transport infrastructure serve genuine community needs rather than transforming into costly white elephants, while also ensuring local authorities retain the capacity to maintain facilities after international broadcast crews depart.
Publishing regular monitoring reports yielded tangible institutional responses. Following the release of the coalition’s second report, major Italian labor unions forged new agreements to safeguard construction site labor rights, and anti-mafia authorities strengthened law enforcement oversight over contractors and subcontractors. Public questioning from Milan City Council’s joint Olympic and Anti-Mafia commissions further helped pry open certain subcontracting details. International allies also contributed, working to refine missing data fields that eventually enabled better tracking of corruption risks and performance metrics.
Raising the Bar for the Next Host
The primary lesson emerging from Milano Cortina is that transparency functions best when established as a foundational principle from the outset, rather than implemented reactively under public pressure after problems arise. The Open Olympics coalition is actively sharing these insights with organizers of the 2030 French Alps Games, supporting French civil society organizations in advocating for complete transparency during decision-making phases from day one.
The campaign’s work continues past the closing ceremony. Organizers have committed to monitoring infrastructure development until the final project reaches completion in 2033. In May, coalition representatives shared their findings with the European Parliament during a public hearing on the hidden costs of mega-events. They are also pressing for clarity regarding the escalating costs of the Arena Santa Giulia, where public and private funding demands rose significantly.
Reflecting on the campaign, Leonardo Ferrante described attending a European institutional hearing with his shoes still caked in mud from inspecting the Cortina construction site—a fitting symbol of grassroots monitoring ensuring local realities are represented where official decisions are made.
Ultimately, the experience of Milano Cortina demonstrates that sports mega-events can be managed with greater accountability, provided future hosts abandon reactive catch-up strategies in favor of transparency from the starting block. Embedding procurement transparency and integrity commitments as enforceable conditions within host contracts—rather than treating them as aspirational goals—could fundamentally transform the governance of global sports.
