In every marginally successful Olympics opening ceremony, there is a moment when you realize you’ve stopped chuckling at the self-serious interpretive dance of it all and wholeheartedly bought in. For me, in Friday’s painfully long, inevitably uneven, excessively dance-obsessed but also somehow lovable Milan Cortina 2026 event, that moment came early. (I’m glad it didn’t happen after the three-hour mark, because by then I could barely keep my eyes open.) A figure appeared in an evening gown, trailed by a phalanx of paparazzi—a witty, concise tribute to La Dolce Vita, the classic of Italian cinema whose pesky photographer character, Paparazzo, inspired the term. A master of spectacle, craftsmanship, and glamour (not to mention a devotee of generous runtimes), the film’s director, Federico Fellini, might well have been a guiding influence on this ceremony whose celebration of the art and culture of Italy felt defiantly analog.
Helmed by veteran producer Marco Balich and aired live in the U.S. on NBC and Peacock (both of which are rerunning Friday night), the extravaganza mostly played out before a crowd of some 80,000 spectators at Milan’s San Siro Stadium, with satellite gatherings in other locations hosting various events. The multiple locations—and, for the first time in Olympic history, dual cauldrons, in Milan and the mountain town of Cortina—could be a bit disorienting, especially with the Parade of Nations splitting up delegations of athletes. But it all pretty much made sense in service of the ceremony’s stated theme: armonia, or harmony. What could be more symbolic of a world uniting in divisive times than literally splicing together a handful of geographically separate events for a global audience to consume as a more or less cohesive whole?
As we’ve come to expect from opening ceremonies, the…
