When Cost Overruns Are Not About Cost : Lessons from Milano Cortina 2026

A recent Reuters article discussing the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, details the significant cost overruns and last-minute venue completions that challenged organizers leading into the Games.

Photograph: Olympics.com

According to Games CEO Andrea Varnier, staging costs rose from an initial $1.3 billion to more than $1.7 billion, with billions more in associated infrastructure spending. Several venues were delivered under emergency conditions, including the sliding center in Cortina and the Santagiulia ice hockey arena, both completed at the edge of operational deadlines.

From the outside, these overruns often look like a bidding or budgeting issue. In our experience, they rarely are.

The larger and more complicated the project, the less likely cost escalation is caused by a single vendor, a single contract, or even a handful of underestimated line items. More often, cost overruns happen when the complexity of coordination exceeds the systems designed to manage it.

Photograph: Olympics.com

Mega-events like the Olympics involve hundreds of vendors, overlapping infrastructure timelines, public and private funding streams, regulatory approvals, and multiple layers of delivery responsibility. Each individual component may be priced correctly. Each contract may be negotiated appropriately. Yet when those elements are not unified under a comprehensive planning and integration structure, inefficiencies compound, timelines compress, and contingency budgets disappear.

What drives overages is rarely one miscalculation. It is usually the accumulation of small disconnects between stakeholders, suppliers, construction timelines, venue readiness, operational testing, and financial tracking across the entire ecosystem of the event.

True cost control at scale is not about scrutinizing individual invoices. It is about orchestrating the entire delivery environment.

This is where integrated oversight becomes essential. Managing global event infrastructure requires visibility across every operational layer, from venue design and construction sequencing to vendor coordination, logistics planning, regulatory alignment, and legacy asset planning. When these functions operate independently, projects drift toward reactive decision-making. When they operate within a unified framework, risk is identified earlier, decisions are made faster, and financial outcomes stabilize.

Photograph: Olympic.ca

The Milano Cortina Games will still deliver a world-class event. In fact, as the article notes, several of the venues completed under intense pressure will likely become meaningful long-term assets for their communities. But the process underscores a lesson the global event industry continues to confront: successful delivery is no longer simply about building venues or producing experiences. It is about managing complexity.

As international sporting bodies, governments, and private stakeholders continue investing in temporary and permanent event infrastructure, planning models must evolve beyond traditional construction or production oversight. Future success will depend on integrated, multi-stakeholder planning environments that treat every element of delivery as part of one coordinated system.

In large-scale global events, cost certainty is not achieved through tighter bids. It is achieved through better orchestration.