By the end of this century, just eight of the 21 cities that have ever hosted the Winter Olympics will remain cold enough to reliably stage the Games. That stark projection underscores the climate crisis bearing down on elite winter sports.
Challenges like manufacturing artificial snow, linking remote venues, and constructing new infrastructure—already omnipresent at Milano Cortina 2026—are set to define future editions.
International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry, responding to a petition demanding the IOC bar fossil fuel sponsors from winter sports, stated the body is “having conversations in order to be better” on climate action. She urged proactive dialogue “instead of waiting for the climate to push us into a corner where we have to make rushed decisions.”
A New Weather Institute report quantifies the problem: sponsors Eni, Stellantis, and ITA Airways at Milano Cortina 2026 will inflate the Games’ carbon footprint by 40%. That additional emissions load is enough to melt 3.2 square kilometers of snow cover and 20 million tonnes of glacier ice.
But what does a “sustainable” Winter Olympics even look like? Martin Müller, a professor of geography and sustainability at the University of Lausanne, found that “just constructing the baseline was difficult” for research evaluating Olympic sustainability from 1992 to 2020. “Even for newer events, some very basic data is hard to find, which tells us about the need to improve transparency for these multi-billion-dollar undertakings.”
The IOC launched the Olympic Games Impact initiative in 2000, featuring 126 economic, environmental, and sociocultural indicators. It required host cities to partner with independent researchers. Hosts complained about its rigor, and the program was abandoned in 2017.
That move left organisers free to make whatever sustainability claims they please. Müller and his colleagues concluded that every Olympic Games now claims to be sustainable, but rhetoric consistently fails to match reality.
To establish a factual baseline, Müller’s team is building a database to measure mega sports event sustainability from 1990 to 2024. They define a sustainable sports event as one that “minimises its ecological impact and promotes social wellbeing by ensuring its economic viability and implementing accountable governance in a long-term perspective.”
Economic viability demands sharper scrutiny. Müller argues each edition of the Games “could not exist without external subsidies” because they are “loss-making ventures that lack financial sustainability.”
Data backs that claim. University of Oxford researchers Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg found every Olympic Games since 1960 has blown past its budget forecasts. The average cost overrun hits 159%—195% for Summer Games and 132% for Winter Games.
Spending for Milano Cortina 2026 has already surged past $1.7 billion, overshooting the original $1.3 billion estimate. An extra $3.5 billion in public investment has been funneled into infrastructure upgrades.
Organisers typically budget a 10% to 15% contingency for overruns. Budzier and Flyvbjerg suggest hosts suffer from “optimism bias,” assuming low future inflation—a position history consistently disproves.
The financial scale is so vast that organisers have literally lost track of the money. At Sochi 2014, an investor admitted, “we were in such a hurry in the end that we didn’t count the money.” Financial records were deliberately destroyed after Nagano 1998.
The path to a sustainable Games may lie within the IOC’s own revenue structure. Between 2017 and 2020/21, 91% of the IOC’s $7.6 billion revenue came from television broadcasting and sponsorship rights. Even with zero spectators at Tokyo 2020, 91% of the IOC’s $5.7 billion revenue from 2013 to 2016 flowed from broadcasting and marketing.
Of the estimated 930,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent produced by Milano Cortina 2026, some 410,000 tonnes will stem from spectator travel. Müller believes the IOC can prioritise the environment “more easily than other sectors” because it wouldn’t need to overhaul its business model.
“The tourism part is high carbon, so the question is, how do you reduce the high carbon tourism part while keeping the media part? It doesn’t create many carbon emissions to actually create these images,” Müller says.
He proposes a geographical contingency scale for ticket allocation, making it more expensive to fly round the world to attend. Most fans watch on screens anyway, and ticket demand stays high whether tickets are sold locally or not.
Müller’s team also suggests spreading each Winter Olympics across multiple locations to slash long-distance travel. This approach would favor hosts that can use or adapt existing venues instead of building from scratch.
Prospective hosts have already “declared a desire to reduce the size” of the Olympics to make them more feasible to stage.
If the IOC sticks to business as usual, Müller and his colleagues warn the Games will “enter a period of rapid decline.” Potential hosts may stop bidding due to excessive costs, while residents rebel against overtourism.
“In the end, this leads us back to rethinking what these events are about,” Müller states, “the sports and athletes at their centre.”
As reliable conditions for winter sport vanish, the long-overdue reckoning over whose interests come first becomes harder than ever to avoid.
