Milan Cortina’s Painfully Long Olympics Opening Ceremony Was a Defiantly Analog Celebration of Humanity

I just watched the opening ceremony for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, and it was… ambitious, to say the least. Produced by the experienced Marco Balich, it was broadcast live on NBC and Peacock, and it wasn’t a traditional, single-location affair. The main event unfolded at Milan’s San Siro Stadium with around 80,000 people watching, but there were also events happening in other places, even a second cauldron lit in Cortina! Honestly, jumping between locations and seeing the Parade of Nations split up was a little confusing at first. But it all seemed to tie into the ceremony’s central idea – armonia, which means harmony. And in today’s world, the idea of literally connecting events from different places to create one unified experience felt pretty powerful and symbolic.







