Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics tickets seen in demand despite high prices

MILAN – Fans from around the world had the opportunity to secure their places at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics on April 8 when general ticket sales resumed, with demand seen as high despite the cost involved. 

The Olympics will run from Feb 6 to 22, with the Paralympics to follow in March. The Games will be co-hosted by Milan and the Alpine town of Cortina d’Ampezzo.

The lowest ticket price will be €30 (S$44.30), while 57 per cent of tickets will be sold at prices of up to €100, the organisers said. For the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, over 50 per cent of tickets were sold for €50 or less.

Prices climb to €1,400 – for the men’s ice hockey final – the most expensive sporting event of the Games – and up to €1,200 for the figure skating gala. 

In Paris, the most expensive tickets, which were for the men’s basketball final and some athletics sessions, including the one featuring the men’s 100 metres, were priced at €980.

Rising ticket prices for major events are a common complaint among sports fans.

The closing ceremony, to be held in the city of Verona, will be the most expensive event of the Winter Games, with prices ranging from €950 to €2,900. Tickets for the opening ceremony in Milan will range from €260 to €2,026. 

However, the cost has not dampened enthusiasm so far.

The success of the first phase of sales in early February, when limited numbers of tickets were available, led the organisers to add a second sales window in late February.

“Purchasing tickets was a smooth and easy process,” Ed Schneider Jr, who lives in New York state and bought tickets in the early window, told Reuters.

“However, the prices I encountered for the figure skating and short-track tickets, the preliminary rounds, are extremely high.”

In these two sales windows, 613,000 tickets were sold, the organisers said, just over 40 per cent of total capacity.

“In addition to the large number of tickets sold in Italy, significant demand has come from Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France,” they added.

For the Paralympic Winter Games, whose general ticket sales started on March 6, 90 per cent of tickets are priced at up to €35. At Paris’ Paralympic Games, around 50 per cent of tickets were sold at €25 or less.

In other news, Italy’s newly-crowned overall World Cup ski champion Federica Brignone said the double leg fracture she suffered just 11 months out from a home Winter Olympics was a “new challenge” she would take on “as always”.

“I’m going to have to face a new challenge, which I will rise to,” the 34-year-old said after undergoing surgery last week.

Brignone has been relatively unscathed in a blessed career, but while competing in her last race of the winter at the Italian championships, she suffered a heavy fall in the Alpe Lusia ski area in Val di Fassa in north-eastern Italy.

After several wild somersaults with both skis flying off, she was helped to the sidelines and carried down the mountain on a sledge before being taken to hospital by helicopter.

After the double fracture was diagnosed, she was then transferred to a Milan clinic for an operation, during which surgeons noticed she was also suffering from a left knee anterior cruciate ligament tear.

Brignone said of her crash: “The conditions on the slopes were perfect. I felt good, and if I could go back, I would do the same thing, but... trying not to fall.

“As usual, I never do things by halves and here I did them in a negative way. Thank you to all those who wrote to me, I am lucky to have a lot of friends who keep me company and make me laugh.”

The length of Brignone’s recovery time is unknown. The Italian ski federation said she had already started a phase of “assisted rehabilitation”. REUTERS, AFP