Milano-Cortina’s breathtaking vistas come with brutal distances.
Thomas Maloney Westgard’s ears must have been burning. As the Irish cross-country veteran settled into the athlete village in Predazzo—lunch finished, a small Italian coffee warming his hands—an Irish broadcast crew meant to interview him was learning, the hard way, why these Winter Olympics have been billed among the most geographically challenging in history.
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What looks like 540 kilometers on a map between Milan and Cortina can feel much longer when it climbs into the sky. On a steep mountain pass in the Dolomites, a rental car without snow chains or proper winter tires turned a routine drive into a slow-motion standoff with gravity. Wheels spun uselessly; snow spat from the treads; the car shuddered and slid inch by resolute inch. Inside, heaters hummed and optimism thinned. Outside, the mountains held their line.
The crew’s destination—Predazzo, a tidy, timbered town buzzing with Olympic energy—remained stubbornly “32 minutes away,” the dashboard insisted. The road, shimmering with packed snow and sludgy ruts, suggested otherwise. It became a textbook lesson in how these Games, spread across multiple alpine clusters rather than a single host city, ask anyone chasing them—athletes, journalists, fans—to battle distance, weather and topography as much as a schedule.
There was, thankfully, a driver equal to the day. Heather Boyle, the Olympic Council of Ireland’s communications chief, traded media briefs for mountain instincts. With the cool economy of someone who knows when to trust momentum and when to steal back control, she inched the car along a crawlspace of grip, cutting firm, short tracks, then straddling them to build a staircase up the slope. “Over and back, over and back,” urged RTÉ cameraman Stuart Halligan, a mantra against the elements. It worked. Slowly, improbably, the Dolomites yielded.
By the time the crew reached Maloney Westgard—a Norwegian-born athlete with Galway roots—and their coffee thawed the fingers that had gripped armrests, the story had become less about a delayed interview than about what these Olympics actually feel like on the ground. The setting is spectacular. The logistics are exacting. Sometimes a bobble hat and a set of steady hands matter more than the fanciest accreditation badge.
Organizers argue that the sprawl is a feature, not a flaw. The International Olympic Committee has been pushing hosts to reuse existing venues, knit events to local sporting ecosystems, and curb the runaway costs and carbon footprints associated with spectacle. Milano-Cortina’s promise—every venue powered with 100% renewable energy, alpine competitions staged where alpine culture already lives—represents a visible shift from the tabula rasa builds of past decades. The environmental calculus is cleaner. The traveler’s calculus is not.
In Cortina, the sense of return is palpable. The town first staged the Winter Games in 1956, when it was the snow-dusted salon of the international set. Liz Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and Ernest Hemingway drifted through its cafés and along its elegant streets, and Cortina wore the nickname “the Living Room of the Famous” with ease. Seventy years on, the boom is back. Restaurants clink long after dark. Shopfronts gleam. Sidewalks shuffle with fans swapping pins, directions and snow reports.
Predazzo hums too. On the main street, a café worker named Valentina Galvan, who moved from Argentina, smiled at the curve of early days—busy now, busier soon. “It’s a big deal,” she said. “It’s a big deal for me that I choose this place to be this time of the year. And for the people, for the locals, it’s just like a party to have all these people from all around the world here.” Business, she added, is building by the hour. “Yeah, it’s busy. It’s gonna be busier. Next week, because now it’s chill as they are just arriving, but they are starting to come in.” The only variable left? Tips. She laughed: “I hope so.”
That mingling of lift and labor—of community buzz met by the practical grind of getting from A to B—defines these Games. Sustainability, after all, is not just an accounting trick. It is a lived experience: choosing not to supercharge new highways to a single mega-park, and instead letting existing mountain towns, rinks and runs absorb the crowds. It means threading TV trucks and team buses through valleys already shaped by winter, not razing a shortcut to make the world feel smaller. The upsides are tangible: less construction, more continuity, a sporting map that matches real geography. The trade-offs are tangible too: longer drives, stricter local rules, the humbling need for snow chains.
For athletes, those trade-offs carry a certain symmetry. Cross-country skiers like Maloney Westgard train to manage effort across uneven terrain, to embrace variables that punish the careless and reward the prepared. For visitors, the same lesson applies. Bring the chains. Respect the mountain. Add time. Expect to earn every view.
And yet, in the end, that is also part of the charm. When the car finally rolled into Predazzo and the crew stepped into the warmth of the village, the scene on the other side of the glass felt earned: athletes drifting through the canteen, soft snow feathering down, espresso steam and chatter rising. The day’s small victory—averted spinouts, inch-by-inch ascents—folded neatly into the larger one of being right where winter sport lives, not in a purpose-built bubble but in a place with history and neighbors and regulars who know which corner shop sells the best biscotti.
By night, Cortina’s streets sparkled with the kind of bustle the town hasn’t seen since its midcentury heyday. By morning, the slopes filled, the cafés refueled and another round of road-weary arrivals joined the party Valentina had promised. The Games rolled on, little local economies humming, big ambitions tethered—wisely or wearily, depending on your route—to mountain reality.
Not all heroes wear capes. In the Dolomites, some carry a press lanyard, an Irish hoodie and a knack for finding traction where there shouldn’t be any. Everyone’s Olympic experience is unique. In these mountains, the lucky ones will get to keep the snow chains optional.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
