By the end of this century, a mere eight of the 21 cities that have 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.
The challenges confronting Milano Cortina 2026 organizers—manufacturing artificial snow, linking remote venues, erecting new infrastructure—are set to become standard operating procedure for future hosts.
International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry, responding to a petition demanding the IOC bar fossil fuel sponsors from winter sports, stated the governing body is “having conversations in order to be better” on climate action.
A New Weather Institute report calculates that sponsors Eni, Stellantis, and ITA Airways will inflate the Milano Cortina 2026 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.
“Instead of waiting for the climate to push us into a corner where we have to make rushed decisions,” Coventry said after her election last year, she advocates for proactive dialogue.
But what constitutes a “sustainable” Winter Olympics? Martin Müller, a professor of geography and sustainability at the University of Lausanne, found that “just constructing the baseline was difficult” for his research assessing Olympic sustainability from 1992 to 2020.
“Even for newer events, some very basic data is hard to find,” Müller notes. “This tells us about the need to improve transparency for these multi-billion-dollar undertakings.”
The IOC launched the Olympic Games Impact initiative in 2000, establishing 126 economic, environmental, and sociocultural indicators. The program mandated host cities partner with independent researchers. It was scrapped in 2017 after hosts complained about its rigor.
That move means organizers can now make any sustainability claim they choose. Müller and his colleagues conclude every recent Olympic Games proclaims itself sustainable, but the rhetoric rarely matches reality.
To set a factual baseline, Müller’s team is building a database to measure mega sports event sustainability from 1990 to 2024. They define a sustainable 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.”
Scrutiny of Olympic economic viability reveals a broken model. Müller argues each edition “could not exist without external subsidies” because they are “loss-making ventures that lack financial sustainability.”
University of Oxford researchers Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg found every Olympic Games since 1960 has blown past its budget. The average cost overrun hits 159%—195% for Summer Games and 132% for Winter Games.
Milano Cortina 2026 spending has already surged past $1.7 billion, overshooting the original $1.3 billion estimate. An extra $3.5 billion in public funds has been funneled into infrastructure upgrades.
Organizers typically budget a 10% to 15% contingency. Budzier and Flyvbjerg contend hosts display an “optimism bias,” assuming low future inflation—an assumption history consistently disproves.
The financial scale of hosting is so vast that money tracking breaks down, both accidentally and deliberately. A Sochi 2014 investor admitted, “we were in such a hurry in the end that we didn’t count the money.” At Nagano 1998, financial records were intentionally destroyed.
The path to a greener, more financially sound Games may run through the IOC’s revenue structure. Between 2017 and 2020/21, 91% of the IOC’s $7.6 billion revenue came from TV broadcasting and sponsorship rights.
Even with zero spectators at Tokyo 2020 due to the pandemic, 91% of the IOC’s $5.7 billion revenue from 2013 to 2016 derived from broadcasting and marketing.
Of the estimated 930,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from Milano Cortina 2026, 410,000 tonnes will stem from spectator travel. Müller believes the IOC can prioritize the environment “more easily than other sectors” because it wouldn’t need to alter its core business model.
“The tourism part is high carbon,” Müller explains. “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.”
He proposes a geographical contingency scale for ticket pricing, making globe-trotting to attend more expensive. Most fans watch on screens anyway, and ticket demand stays high regardless of local sales.
Müller’s team also suggests spreading each Winter Olympics across multiple locations to cut long-haul travel. This approach would favor hosts that can use or adapt existing venues instead of constructing new ones.
Prospective hosts have already “declared a desire to reduce the size” of the Games to improve feasibility.
If the IOC sticks to its current course, Müller and fellow researchers 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 says. “The sports and athletes at their centre.”
As reliable winter conditions vanish, the long-overdue reckoning over whose interests come first—corporate sponsors, host cities, or the planet—becomes impossible to ignore.
