One month after the World Cup excitement, the glitz, cameras, and fans have departed, but the bills are only just arriving. Mega-events put the entire system of public spending under maximum pressure: enormous sums, compressed timelines, a global spotlight, and a countdown clock that leaves little room for the public to ask hard questions before it is too late. It is a notoriously complex, opaque, and risk-prone domain. The promises are always grand, but history rarely bears them out. Think of Brazil’s World Cup and the Odebrecht scandal, Sochi’s "corruption Olympics," and the abandoned venues of Athens. Montreal was even bankrupted by hosting its 1976 Olympics, with the final bill coming to over 13 times the initial estimates.
The spending moves a lot faster than the scrutiny meant to check it. So when a major global sporting event actually gets transparency even partly right, it is worth paying close attention. A coalition of 20 Italian civic organizations spent three years prying open the books on the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games. In the process, they won the first transparency portal in Olympic history—and ran into structural barriers that future hosts will need to dismantle to maximize trust and track their long-term legacy.
The Open Contracting Partnership has been glad to play a supporting role to this exceptional coalition of civic actors working to build better practices and a sustainable legacy for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. Their story starts with 20 civil society organizations working together to show how citizens and civil society can 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 after them would do well to study.
A Rocky Start and a Better Way Forward
What is now widely known as the Open Olympics campaign, coordinated by the anti-mafia network Libera, began with civil society simply trying to get a seat at the table. When Italy won the right to host the 2026 Winter Games in 2019, local communities and organizations tried to get involved in shaping the event’s environmental and social footprint through the usual formal channels. Working independently of one another, they quickly found it remarkably difficult to get a hearing from authorities.
Elisa Orlando of Libera recalls of those early conversations that decisions were being centralized and pushed through rapidly via governmental decrees, meaning all inputs from public consultation were systematically ignored or dismissed. Rather than treating that as the end of the road, national associations and local groups formed an alliance and worked in the open, building a public case for change instead of pursuing private meetings behind closed doors. 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 breadth of voice set the tone for everything that followed.
They initially tried to build a picture of the event’s projects and spending themselves, piecing together whatever fragments of public information already existed. Someone instrumental in that early groundwork was Luigi Casanova. A former forest ranger, writer, and environmentalist, he had already spent years following local and central government documents in the areas where the Games would be built. His head start meant the coalition could gain a partial insight into Olympic infrastructure well before any official platform existed.
"Proto-Monitoring" to Show the Value of Public Records
The campaign’s own name for this initial phase was "proto-monitoring." By showing what could already be gleaned from public records, the coalition was able to hand officials a practical concept for what a good transparency hub should contain, what was missing, and, importantly, how it would help improve the organization and coordination of the Games themselves. As their first public report put it, the goal was to ensure the protection of the common good, a framing that positioned the network as a constructive partner in good governance.
Their key request of the authorities was deliberately specific: a single portal of open, accessible data covering costs, timelines, procedures, contractors and subcontractors, funding sources, decision-making processes, and environmental assessments. The coalition cost this solution at around 0.01% of the budget allocated to the works themselves.
Their engagement and constructive framing eventually paid off. In October 2024, SIMICO, the state company responsible for Olympic infrastructure, launched the first open data transparency portal for works in the history of the Games. It published project-by-project data on bid values, timelines, contractors, and more, with updates expected on a regular 45-day cycle.
Turning Data into Better Decisions
The real potential of a portal like this is not disclosure for its own sake, but rather the chance to catch problems early enough to fix them, to identify bottlenecks and their drivers, and to flag gaps in oversight. That is exactly what the coalition’s three monitoring reports achieved.
Leonardo Ferrante, another leading voice in the coalition, points to a simple but telling number: only 13% of the total budget for infrastructure was allocated to projects strictly essential to the execution of the Games. The rest went mostly to long-term road and rail projects marketed as legacy investments—amounting to roughly €6.60 of legacy spending for every euro of genuinely Games-critical work.
It was on those legacy projects that the biggest risks of overspend, poor procurement, or project management appeared. The coalition noted that of a roughly €157 million increase in total project costs that they tracked, more than €133 million landed on legacy works, compared to just €23 million on Olympic event works. Project timelines told a similar story. Over the course of 2025, completion dates slipped for 73% of projects, some by more than three years. By the final data update before the opening ceremony, only 40 works had been completed, worth €783 million, or around 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 end until 2033.
The portal also showed that most infrastructure projects were greenlit without formal environmental impact assessments, reaching some 64% of projects by the third report. This was largely because the extraordinary commissioner powers intended to accelerate procurement allowed environmental checks to be bypassed on grounds of urgency. That raises real questions about the long-term sustainability impact of the works, which was a core promise of the Games. Academic research shows that emergency procurement practices can become normalized well beyond the emergency itself. Per-project carbon footprints were never published either, leaving the aggregate environmental cost of the Games unknown. The Milano Cortina Foundation estimated the event’s direct emissions were slightly over one million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, but that figure excludes infrastructure development.
What Stayed Opaque
Future hosts should focus heavily on addressing these structural data gaps. The key organizer, SIMICO, was able to publish detailed project information, but data from national, regional, and municipal agencies was largely missing. Freedom of information requests received a reply from Lombardy, but an initial refusal followed by an indefinite postponement from the City of Milan. Lombardy’s own regional platform, when the coalition found it, listed 44 infrastructure projects that SIMICO’s portal omitted entirely.
The campaign’s 2025 analysis found the portal was also missing five projects from the official plan, along with 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 added subsequently. SIMICO’s portal data also needed improvements. Tender values were reported rather than actual expenditure, and the portal did not disclose who was covering cost increases. It named 516 subcontractors against 101 main contractors, but failed to disclose the value of each subcontract, a crucial detail for anti-mafia campaigners monitoring the risks of criminal infiltration in supply chains.
The Milano Cortina Foundation, responsible for staging the event, declared a €1.7 billion lifetime budget but never published it. Its classification by government decree as a private body meant voluntary disclosure requests went nowhere. Furthermore, a late surge in spending created 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 at the end of January 2026, that figure had risen to almost €448 million, with details of what it funded published only weeks before the Games began.
Local Knowledge and Raising the Bar
The depth and breadth of a group like the Open Olympics coalition benefits official planners by bringing ground-level knowledge of the terrain being built on. As Orlando notes, coalition members possess precise, real-world understanding of the territory, its topography, and its environmental constraints. Involving civil society early ensures that sports venues, highways, and other infrastructure serve an actual purpose and meet future local needs rather than becoming costly white elephants.
Publishing regular monitoring reports produced tangible results. Following the second report, new agreements were signed with major Italian unions to protect labor rights on construction sites, and collaboration with anti-mafia authorities strengthened oversight of contractors and subcontractors. International supporters also contributed by identifying missing data fields on the transparency portal that would have allowed advanced monitoring of corruption risks and performance metrics.
The clearest lesson from Milano Cortina is that transparency works best as a core principle from the very beginning, rather than as a reactive measure once problems surface. That is the pitch the Open Olympics coalition is now taking to the organizers of the 2030 French Alps Games, supporting French civil society organizations to start where Italy eventually arrived rather than spending years fighting for basic access.
The campaign has not stopped with the closing ceremony. It has committed to continuing its oversight until the last project is completed on current schedules in 2033. The experience of Milano Cortina shows that sports mega-events can be done differently. The next generation of hosts should not be left struggling to catch up at the finish line; they should be setting the pace right from the starting block.
