How the Olympics designed its two-city opening ceremony
For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snow—and hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled.
But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separated by hundreds of miles?
The solution was to put on the show simultaneously in both places.
When the opening ceremony is televised around the world on February 6, its pomp, performances, and athlete parades will be broadcast from both Milan and Cortina, with segments from each location woven together into one show. Creative director and executive producer Marco Balich, a veteran of 16 Olympic ceremonies, says the decision to include both locations became a kind of guiding concept for the ceremony itself.
Cortina, he says, is “pure mountains,” while Milan is the opposite, “a total industrial, design- and fashion-driven city.”
“The narrative that we figured was going to be interesting was the relationship between a location in a city and a mountain, creating a metaphor between man and nature,” he says.
The dichotomy led to the theme of the show, Armonia, or Harmony. “The message that we humbly propose to the world would be to take the metaphor of man and nature and underline that we need to create dialogue between those two elements,” Balich says.
Balich and his firm Balich Wonder Studio used this concept to guide the design of everything from the rainbow of costumes dancers will wear to the spiraling stage for the Milan segment of the ceremony.
Balich, who is Italian, also worked on the last Olympics held in Italy, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and he says that opening ceremony played heavily on Italian history. This year’s version is much more driven by the impact of Italy on the world, and will include references to Italian inventors, Italian design, and Italian fashion. A special segment of the show will honor the late fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Elements of the ceremony will also feature the mountain areas Valtellina and Val di Fiemme, where other outdoor events will take place. All athletes competing in this year’s Olympics will be able to participate in the ceremony.
Despite the technical challenges of filming the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in multiple locations, Balich says the overall production is intended to be very analog and very human. “The images that I remember of the Olympics are always human driven, whether it was Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron in Atlanta or the drumming in Beijing 2008,” he says.