2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony (International Olympic Committee, Banijay Live's Balich Wonder Studio, Olympic Broadcasting Services, NBC-TV, aired February 6, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 6) my husband Charles and I watched the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics from Milan and Cortina, Italy. The Olympics themselves are being held in both those cities, which are 200 miles apart from each other, and the opening ceremonies spanned over four Italian towns: Milan, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo. The whole event lasted three hours and 39 minutes, though typically for American TV we only got three hours of it, less commercials. The coverage on NBC featured one of the most annoying parts of how the Olympics are presented in the U.S.: the insufferable jingoism. An international event that is supposed to use sports as a way of bringing the various people of the world together gets turned into a bizarre display of chauvinist patriotism. It didn’t help that rapper Snoop Dogg, one of the most repulsive media presences on earth, was on hand to hang out with the U.S. team and cheer them on while the rest of the world’s athletes awaited their turns in the procession of teams that marked the opening ceremony. I was also amused by some of the spellings of the names of the countries, which were in Italian, and the teams themselves marched alphabetically in order of the Italian versions of their names. Thus Saudi Arabia appeared under the “A’s” because their name in Italian is Arabia Saudica.

One thing that I noticed was that the Czech Republic, which split off from Slovakia in the so-called “Velvet Revolution” of the early 1990’s, is now just called “Czechia,” and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s a sign of the times that “republics” are “out” now and dictatorships are “in.” I was a bit startled that the parade jumped from Austria to “Cechia,” as it’s spelled in Italian, without any “B” countries. It seems that Belarus, a major ally of Russia in its war against Ukraine, was covered by the same ban the International Olympic Committee (IOC) imposed on Russia: its athletes are allowed to compete as individuals but not as representatives of a country. There was also a bit of “let them eat cake” in the sheer extravagance and outrageousness of the ceremony, which was directed by Marco Balich and produced by his company, Banijay Live’s Balich Wonder Studio. Balich, Lida Castelli, and Paolo Fantin designed the cauldrons – plural; there were two, one in Milan and one in Cortina. From the moment the Olympic torch bearers arrived I said to myself, “Thank you, Leni Riefenstahl,” since it was she who, tasked with making the documentary Olympia about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, cooked up this whole notion of having a relay run from Greece (the site of the original Olympic Games in antiquity as well as their revival for 1896 in Athens) to wherever they’re being held now, with a torch being carried en route and used to light a cauldron at the final destination, so she’d have a spectacular opening sequence for her film. (I remember one year before the 2016 Summer Olympics that NBC ran a promo for their coverage announcing that they’d mounted a camera on a catapult to follow the sprinters as they raced. They made it seem like their own idea, but sorry, guys, that was another Riefenstahl innovation from 80 years earlier.)

Most of the performance took place inside the San Siro soccer stadium in Milan. It began with a troupe of surprisingly androgynous dancers supposedly re-enacting the story of Cupid and Psyche, though I doubt I could have told you that if the sportscasters hadn’t said that. Then there were three bobble-headed dancers supposedly representing three of Italy’s greatest composers, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, to the strains of a disco-ized version of Rossini’s William Tell overture. (Charles once told me a joke he’d heard that the definition of an “intellectual” was someone who could hear the ending of the William Tell overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.) Three giant paint tubes, each emitting a long ribbon of cloth in its designated color (red, blue, yellow – I joked to Charles,” Shouldn’t I say ‘magenta, cyan, yellow’?” Charles joked back, “It’s not a printer”), descended from the rafters and hung in an uncertain position over the action. After that they had two rings descend from the stadium’s rafters, each carrying an acrobatic artist, one male, one female. As the two came down they joined hands in the middle and lowered themselves on a cable to the stadium floor to illustrate the event’s theme, “Armonia” (“Harmony”). Then three more rings emerged and formed the famous Olympic symbol. After that there was an appearance by Mariah Carey, whom I generally like but was miked so badly it was hard to tell just what she was singing, or in what language. First she sang “Volare,” an international hit for Italian singer Domenico Modugno in 1962, though she prefaced it with a verse I’d never heard before because Modugno hadn’t performed it. Then she sang one of her English-language hits, “Nothing Is Impossible.” There were more interminable dance numbers, including one that paid tribute to Chamonix, France, where the first Winter Olympics were held in 1924. The gimmick here was that the dancers would first perform in 1920’s style, then in 1970’s style, then in the style of today – though both the choreography and the music were too tacky to illustrate that.

There was also a strange number featuring an unseen violinist named Giovanni Andrea Zanon playing the 1716 “Berthier” Stradivarius violin while more dancers cavorted and an Italian actor read a poem by The Leopard author Giacomo Leopardi. Then came the procession of the athletes from various countries, following which a surprisingly strong tenor voice sang the aria “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s last opera, Turandot. For a moment I thought I was hearing Luciano Pavarotti reincarnated, but it turned out to be Andrea Bocelli delivering one of the strongest performances I’ve ever heard from him. My husband Charles took strong exception to the choice of music: he pointed out that “Nessun dorma” is an aria sung by a prince who’s about to force himself sexually on a princess who’s had all her previous potential mates killed because, centuries before, one of her ancestors was abducted and raped by one of his. Charles said he would have preferred “Ritorna vincitor!” from Verdi’s Aïda, though that too would have been problematical: it's sung by the soprano lead, Ethiopian princess Aïda, who realizes she’s been so caught up in the crowd’s enthusiasm she’s openly rooting for the Egyptian general (who’s also her boyfriend) to conquer, occupy, and lay waste to her country. Then there was a performance by South African-born actress Charlize Theron and Ghali, an Italian spoken-word artist who was described as a rapper even though his act has little or nothing in common with the “rap” I’ve come to know and despise in the U.S. The idea was to illustrate the commonality of the world’s peoples and offer a prayer for world peace. There was also a weird sketch by Italian actress Brenda Lodigliani, who pretended her microphone was not working and illustrated Italian hand gestures. The ceremony ended with the hoisting of the Olympic flag in both Milan and Cortina and mezzo-soprano Cecelia Bartoli singing the Olympic hymn backed by Chinese pianist Lang Lang (who, though he wasn’t nearly as flamboyantly dressed, reminded me a lot of Liberace in his willingness to turn up in various locations and play quasi-classical schlock) and the children’s choir of Milan’s famous opera house, La Scala.

The show came to a sudden ending at 11 p.m. our time when NBC’s local affiliate abruptly cut to their regular news show. This was billed as the longest Olympic ceremony in history, though I remember an even longer one at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, which climaxed with a stunning performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by k. d. lang, who I think sang it better than anyone besides Cohen himself (sorry, Jeff Buckley fans). The most spectacular Winter Olympics opening ceremony I can remember was the one at Lillehammer, Norway in 1994, featuring a dance by supposedly evil spirts from Norwegian mythology called vettas. Their closing ceremony featured “good vettas” to counteract the malign influence of the evil vettas from the opening. I enjoyed the sheer over-the-topness of the whole kitschy spectacle, even though compared to k. d. lang, Mariah Carey was a definite step down in the pop-vocal department.