The 2026 Winter Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies: What You Need to Know

Organizers also plan to use the opening ceremony as a time to highlight Italian historical figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus. There will also be a tribute to fashion designer Giorgio Armani. “We will highlight Italian talent, and what we do best: create beauty and excite,” Iascone says.

What to Expect at the Closing Ceremony

The Winter Games will close on February 22 with a ceremony at the Arena di Verona. The oldest sports stadium in the world, Verona Arena was chosen to create a legacy for the Milano Cortina Olympics.

The organizing committee emphasized the centrality of the Verona Arena in the Milano Cortina Olympic bid. This year’s Games will also mark the first time the closing ceremony will take place in a different venue than the opening ceremony.

The final ceremony will continue the narrative started with the opening one, celebrating Italy and its excellence. “We want to show,” Iascone says, “once again how Italy knows how to transform aesthetics and talent into poetry.”

Titled “Beauty in Motion,” the closing ceremony is meant to evoke the “Italian spirit,” organizers say, not only of the athletes and the places where the Games will take place, but also that of the Verona Arena itself, which despite being centuries old still manages to host major events of international scope.

Great attention will be paid to the technological structure of the stage, which will show Verona Arena “as you have never seen it,” says Alfredo Accatino, president of Filmmaster and creative director of the closing ceremony.

More than 800 people, including musicians, dancers, technicians, and volunteers will be involved in the closing ceremony, which will end with the traditional handover ahead of the 2030 Winter Olympics, which will be held in the French Alps.

The Design of the Olympic Torch

As per tradition, in addition to the athletes and venues, the Olympic torch will be at the center of this year’s Winter Games, symbolically carrying the fire from Greece, where it all began, around the world.

For the 2026 Winter Games, the torch was designed to have minimal visual impact. It’s sleek and metallic and has a narrow body slightly curved at the top, a shape intended to draw attention to the flame itself

The Olympic flame’s journey began November 25 with the traditional lighting in Olympia, Greece. From there it went to Athens and then on to Italy in early December. In total, the flame’s journey will encompass 63 days, 60 stops, nearly 7,500 miles, touching all 110 Italian provinces.

On January 26, the torch relay arrived in Cortina, exactly 70 years since the opening ceremony of the 1956 Games in Italy. On February 6, the flame will arrive at San Siro stadium for the opening ceremony.

The Olympic Flame’s 10,000-Plus Torchbearers

In total, there will be more than 10,000 torchbearers who will accompany the Olympic flame around Italy. The bulk of them will be volunteers, but among them there will also be many prominent Italian Olympic and Paralympic athletes, as well as champions from previous summer and winter Games, along with a few celebrities, like Jackie Chan and Heated Rivalry stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Italia. It has been translated from Italian.