History
Cortina 1956 to 2026: The Olympics Return After 70 Years
From Guido Caroli's stumble to Sofia Goggia's cauldron
February 5, 20264 min read
Follow Along
Relay news and campaign updates by email.
On January 26, 1956, the VII Olympic Winter Games opened in Cortina d'Ampezzo, a small town in the Italian Dolomites. On January 26, 2026, exactly seventy years later, the Olympic flame walked back into town. The organizers only had to get the calendar right, and they did.
1956: The Games That Put Winter Sport on Television
Cortina 1956 drew athletes from 32 nations, and the town of a few thousand people hosted the whole thing alone, with no partner city down the valley. These were also the first Olympic Games of any kind held in Italy, four years before Rome hosted the Summer Games of 1960.
They were the first Winter Games broadcast live on television. Alpine skiing and figure skating reached living rooms across Europe in real time, and the star of that first broadcast era was Austria's Toni Sailer, who swept all three alpine skiing events and became famous far beyond the mountains.
The 1956 flame was also not lit in Olympia. It was kindled at the Capitoline in Rome, one of the city's seven hills, then sent on a five-day journey north to Cortina, passing through Venice on the way. The 2026 relay followed almost the same route: Rome, Venice, Cortina.
The Stumble
Speed skater Guido Caroli entered the Ice Stadium for the 1956 opening ceremony on skates, torch in hand, gliding a lap before the packed stands. Then he hit a television cable, the same technology that was making these Games historic, and went down.
The flame stayed lit. Caroli got up, finished his lap, and lit the cauldron. Seventy years later, people remember that fall more fondly than most flawless lightings. He went down with the fire in his hand and got up with it still burning, in front of the first live television audience in Winter Olympic history.
January 26, 2026: Seventy Years to the Day
Stage 50 of the Milano Cortina 2026 torch relay spent the day climbing through the Belluno valleys toward the Dolomites before entering Cortina itself.
The route ran past the Cortina Sliding Centre, rebuilt for 2026 on the site of the track named for Eugenio Monti, the great Cortina bobsledder. In town, 66 torchbearers shared the honor, with the final 15 carrying the flame through the city streets to its arrival at Largo delle Poste, where the crowd was waiting.
Some of Cortina's oldest residents saw both arrivals, 1956 and 2026, in the same streets.
A Cauldron of Its Own in Piazza Dibona
On February 6, 2026, while the opening ceremony played out at San Siro in Milan, Olympic downhill champion Sofia Goggia lit a cauldron in Cortina's Piazza Angelo Dibona at the same time as its twin in Milan: the first simultaneous double lighting in Olympic history. No host town had done that before.
Cortina hosted the women's alpine skiing in 2026, and Goggia lit that cauldron in the town where she would race, days before racing there. She joins a long line of women who carried the Olympic flame.
Los Angeles hosted in 1932 and 1984, and in 2028 the flame comes back after 44 years to a city that has changed a great deal. I want to carry it for one stretch of road, somewhere near my home in Santa Monica. If someone you know belongs in that relay, nominate them.