A film star, a hometown champion and ten thousand other hands on one flame across Italy
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The Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic flame was lit in Ancient Olympia in late November 2025, arrived in Rome in early December, and then spent 63 days winding through all 20 Italian regions and 110 provinces on its way to the opening ceremony at San Siro. Across roughly 12,000 kilometers, it changed hands 10,001 times.
A few of those hands belonged to people the whole world knows. Most belonged to people you have never heard of.
On December 22, 2025, the seventeenth stage of the relay moved through Campania: Sorrento, Gragnano, Castellammare di Stabia, and finally Pompeii. Waiting there was Jackie Chan, carrying an Olympic flame for the fourth time in his life.
A man who built a career outrunning explosions walked a live flame through a city buried by the most famous eruption in history. He looked up at Vesuvius, out over the excavated streets, and told reporters the only thing he could say was "Wow!"
He shared the stage with former Olympic fencer Sandro Cuomo, swimmer Immacolata Cerasuolo, and Maria Marinella Biacca, a torchbearer from the region. He carried his stretch and handed it on, same as they did.
Arianna Fontana grew up in the Valtellina, the alpine valley in northern Lombardy that produces Italian winter athletes the way Texas produces quarterbacks. On February 1, 2026, the 56th stage brought the flame through her home country, and Fontana took her turn carrying it, alongside Piero Poli, an Olympic rowing gold medalist from 1988.
Five days later she carried the Italian flag into the opening ceremony beside curler Amos Mosaner. Then she raced: gold in the mixed team relay, silver in the 500 meters, silver in the 3,000 meter relay. Those medals pushed her career total to 14, the most of any Italian Olympian ever, and made her the first woman to win a medal at six consecutive Winter Games. She was 15 when the streak started at Turin 2006.
She carried the torch, then the flag, then won three medals, all within a week and all at home. More on the women before her: the women who carried the Olympic flame.
The celebrity roster read like a wall of Italian sport: Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Matteo Berrettini, Jasmine Paolini, Gianmarco Tamberi, Filippo Ganna, Gregorio Paltrinieri. On January 22 the flame reached Venice and rode traditional boats down the Grand Canal, past the Rialto, to a small cauldron waiting in St. Mark's Square.
The relay had 10,001 slots, and the famous filled only a sliver of them. Most went to names that never trended, people nominated by their towns, their clubs and their families. It is the one Olympic event where most of the roster is civilians, and it was designed that way.
Italy ended with alpine skiers. On the night of February 6, Alberto Tomba and Deborah Compagnoni lit the cauldron at Milan's Arco della Pace. In Cortina d'Ampezzo, Sofia Goggia, deep in preparation for her own Olympic downhill, lit the twin cauldron in Piazza Dibona. It was the first time two cauldrons were lit simultaneously in two cities in the history of the Games.
From the lighting in Olympia to Goggia in Cortina, the chain ran 72 days without a break.
In 2028 the relay crosses my country, and it is the first in Olympic history planned to touch all 50 states. I am campaigning for one stretch of it: a piece of Santa Monica pavement I have run a thousand times. I don't belong next to Jackie Chan or Arianna Fontana. Most torchbearers don't, and that is how the relay is meant to work. Read everything we know about the 50-state relay, and if you know someone who should carry it, nominate them. Or nominate me. I'll be training either way.