Milano Cortina 2026: BBC Sport on carving up the Winter Olympics with the perfect time zone for the greatest snowy coverage yet
BBC Sport’s studio for the Winter Olympics is currently being built in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Alps, in the Nations Village
The official opening ceremony of Milano Cortina, the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, is just weeks away on 6 February in San Siro, Milan. BBC Sport is on the piste and gearing up for two frantic weeks of snow, ice and powder that will culminate in the closing ceremony taking place in Verona on 22 February, hopefully after Team GB takes a few medals.
Linear decline v streaming growth
This Winter Olympics has a number of factors going for it, which means it could be the best Olympics in decades for BBC Sport. Ron Chakraborty, BBC Sport’s head of major events and general sport, explains: “So the challenge we’ve set ourselves is can Milano Cortina do for the Winter Olympics what Paris did for the Summer Olympics? We had a couple of Games which weren’t in the ideal time zone, with Rio and Tokyo. Paris then came back [to the European time zone], and if you look at those streaming numbers, we were doubling our viewing numbers on iPlayer and the website, and we’ve got a great opportunity to do that again.”
“Suddenly we’ve got the reward, if you like, for all that hard work; we’ve got the first one in our time zone really since 2006 in Turin, so this has got huge potential”
The Summer Games TV audience reach for BBC Sport has seen a decline from Paris back to Tokyo, at 36.1 million for Paris 2024 down from 36.4 million for Tokyo 2020. However, the streaming figures for Paris were 218 million, almost double the 106.9 million for Tokyo. Meanwhile for the Winter Olympics, similar trends can be seen with Beijing 2022 achieving a 26 million TV reach and a 31.4 million streaming reach, versus PyeongChang 2018 hitting the higher figure of 33.2 million on linear TV, versus 22.2 million on streaming.
Speaking to SVG Europe, Chakraborty adds on the figure trends shown by both recent Winter and Summer Games: “I think the one thing we might be able to do is buck the trend of the linear reach going down with every event. I think it could go back up again [for Milano Cortina], because we had 3.5 million viewers as the peak audience for the last Winters, which was for the men’s curling final, and it was at 9.30am so suddenly we’ve got a European time zone. Those sorts of events are going to be in peak time instead for Milano Cortina, so I think there’s a really great opportunity to increase our audiences, which we haven’t seen for about 20-odd years.”
The view from the BBC Sport studio in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Alps, taken recently during construction
Perfect time zone v fewer events
The scheduling for the BBC is perfect to attract viewers. Says Chakraborty excitedly: “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The amount of times we won great medals overnight in previous Games; the women won the curling gold last time in the middle of the night, but now suddenly everything is during the daytime. It’s great!”
The scheduling is a dream for Chakraborty: “It’s just absolutely fantastic, it’s a 100% live and I think – and because there’s not as much sport [in the Winter Olympics as compared to a Summer Games] – it’s not as if you’ve missed stuff. It’s only about seven medals a day, as opposed to 20-plus medals a day in a Summer Games, so there’s a very good chance, whether it’s biathlon, whether it’s speed skating, that it will have been on BBC One or Two throughout the day, so you can either whiz back on iPlayer on the live coverage, or take advantage of our catchup either on the website or on iPlayer.”
On the agreement that BBC Sport has with the major European rights holder, Warner Bros. Discovery, Chakraborty says: “The rights deal we have with Discovery where we can only show two things live, we are subject to going forwards. We’ve traditionally found, because it’s been in place for two Winter Olympics now, that it’s less of an issue during the Winters because quite simply, there’s fewer sports. There were 32 sports in Paris, there will be 37 in LA, but there’s usually eight sports and 16 disciplines in the Winters.
“Given that the GB involvement in the Winters is a lot less, it means that the third or fourth or fifth best thing is usually something that doesn’t involve GB athletes; it may be ice hockey or Nordic skiing or non-GB curling, which there isn’t quite the same kind of demand for, or level of viewer complaint saying “we’re missing out on Great Britain in a hockey match, or Great Britain playing tennis or badminton in Paris,” let’s say.”
Compared to the previous Winter Olympics coverage split between BBC One and BBC Two, Milano Cortina will be 39% on BBC One and 61% on BBC Two, whereas in Sochi 2014 the split was 5% and 95% across BBCC One and Two, and for Turin 2006 it was 1% on the main channel and 99% on BBC Two. Chakraborty has not included the last two Winter Games in his stats as he says they are, “a little bit more bloated towards BBC One because they’re overnight, so those midnight till 6am’s were all on BBC One, so as a result, the BBC One numbers were [abnormally] high”.
He adds on the almost 40% split onto BBC One for this Winter Games: “I think it speaks a lot about the value of live sport, and it’s showing that BBC One is really happy and very keen to take on a lot more of the Winter Olympics than they ever have before during daytime hours.”
No highlights show v lots of live
Because of the perfect timing of all the events for UK viewers, BBC Sport has decided that it will not do a highlights show as it is able to show everything live or on BBC iPlayer.
Presenter Hazel Irvine will be on BBC One from 8am or 9am to 1pm, when the action switches to Jeanette Kwakye on BBC Two from 1pm to 2pm. It is back to BBC One from 2pm to 5.15pm, then over to BBC Two with Clare Balding from 5.15pm to 10pm. Meanwhile, on BBC iPlayer from 8am to 11pm every day, viewers will be able to catch up with every sport on Olympics Extra.
Chakraborty explains the scheduling: “The mixed curling is shorter, so it starts at 9am. The main team events start at 8am, so we’re on from there and we go till 10pm and we don’t do a highlight show; we took a view with the way the broadcast landscape is. The highlight show wouldn’t have been on the air till gone 11pm, it’s usually quite resource-heavy, and we just think what we’re going to do instead is package up the sports for iPlayer instead; that way if you want to see the snowboard slopestyle from earlier in the day, we’ll have either a 10 or a 20 minute edit of that. You want to see the ice hockey goals, we’ll have it on there. So we will plug that at the end of the 10pm show and everything should be there for you to see.”
The Nations Village, in its central location in Cortina, will enable BBC Sport’s talent to get out and about to meet fans and soak up the atmosphere for the broadcast
Fans v national pride
In addition to being in the perfect time zone for European audiences, this Winter Olympics is the first to occur since COVID restrictions were lifted, which means there will be fans on site, which will really add to the atmosphere and excitement in the coverage.
Chakraborty says that for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the ‘bubbles’ that crew had to stay in, as well as the lack of fans, made it difficult.
“Honestly, it just felt like we did the same Winter Olympics twice with no fans in the stands,” he says. “It was the same time difference [as for the Winter Games held in PyeongChang in 2018]. We had even less success on medals; we only had the two curling medals right at the end of the game, so it was tough going in a number of ways. Obviously, it was tough for us even working back here in Salford for it.”
He adds on Milano Cortina: “Suddenly we’ve got the reward, if you like, for all that hard work; we’ve got the first one in our time zone really since 2006 in Turin, so this has got huge potential. But at the same time we realised when looking at this that it’s not the Summer Games; the fact that on average Great Britain won 65 medals at each of the last three Summer Games, but won an average of four in the last three Winter Games.”
That means there will not be as many great TV moments where the nation can cheer their medal winners, but the TV scheduling is set to counter that and bring in audiences. Notes Chakraborty: “There isn’t going to be all those ‘bringing the nation together’ moments, but we are quietly optimistic that this could be a really good one. We’ve got a number of really realistic medal shouts, and when they’re all competing, so many of them are in primetime UK. Traditionally, sliding and curling are our most successful sports; I think 14 of our last 17 medals have come in those,” he continues.
Traditional v freestyle
There are several medal hopefuls in the GB team, which will be 50-strong, versus 327 in Paris 2024. Chakraborty enthuses on those that will be competing in Cortina: “In the skeleton we’ve got the two guys that finished gold and silver in the World Championships, Matt Weston who won the test event in Cortina a couple of weeks ago, so he looks great, and Marcus Wyatt.
“In the curling, those guys have got the same kind of fairytale story that the women had last time; they’ve won everything. They’ve won the World Championships twice. They’ve finished silver in Beijing four years ago. This is the one thing they haven’t won, so it’d be brilliant if they won it, and that curling final is on Saturday night, the final night of the Games. And obviously there’s mixed curling as well.
“Then across over in Livigno, in the Valdisotto cluster, we’ve got Kirsty Muir, Charlotte Bankes, and Mia Brookes, all young, either freestyle skiers or snowboarders. Mia Brookes is only 18; she led the World Cup in snowboarding slopestyle last year. And not forgetting that in Milan we’ve got our little ice dancers, Lewis and Lila [Lewis Fear and Lila Gibson] who got bronze in the World Championships. It’s been 32 years since Torvill and Dean won their last medal, so that could be another great night as well.
“So it’s a really great mixture of – dare I say – the traditional sports, but also the new freestyle sports as well. So we are quietly optimistic. It could be really special Games in terms of Great Britain success,” he concludes.