Winter Olympics takeaways: How the Milan Cortina Games will be remembered — and what’s next

LIVIGNO, Italy — For about three seconds before an aerials athlete leaves the start gate, you hear something unusual for the Olympic Games.

Complete silence.

No music, no cheering, not even any chatter in the crowd.

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And then, as the skier starts down the ramp, gathering momentum for a 50-foot vertical launch, it pierces through the void and hits you straight in the eardrums.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

As ubiquitous as the drone coverage of the Milan Cortina Games was for people watching at home, rest assured they were a prominent part of the experience for those of us watching live as well. There were even times where you saw these little flying machines come out of nowhere and thought, “Jeez, aren’t they getting a little too close to the athletes?”

Fortunately, the Olympics have come and gone without any drone-related incidents.

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But as we look back and assess the Milan Cortina Games for what we’ll remember, there are three major themes likely to endure.

And one clear winner.

1. A watershed moment

In many ways, the revolutionary way drones were used at these Olympics to follow athletes through their runs, jumps and tricks — giving viewers an entirely new perspective on what it’s like to ski down a hill at 80 miles per hour or bobsled through hairpin turns — could open the door for significant changes in the way sports are shown on television going forward.

“It was amazing,” Steve Milton, CBS Sports’ lead director for golf and college football broadcasts, told Yahoo Sports in a phone interview this week from Los Angeles, where he was getting ready for the PGA Tour’s Genesis Invitational. “I thought it was a real watershed moment for the technology. The angles, the vistas, inside, outside, following an athlete — it’s nothing we’ve been used to, and I see it getting bolder.”

Milton has been a pioneer in this space, pushing for more drone usage over the last several years. CBS has employed more and more of them to provide unique views in football and particularly in golf, a sport custom-made for aerial shots. They’re a big part of why CBS’ golf coverage has improved significantly in the past couple years with a far more modern, sleek presentation and the ability to show shots in ways viewers haven’t seen before.

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“We’re always trying to push the envelope,” Milton said. “For the most part, golf is better covered from the air because you can see the perspective of the player, what’s left for the second shot, what’s in the way, how far away, and even as a spectator you don’t get that perspective. We’ve had blimps for 40 years, but there’s not a lot of movement in the blimp and it’s a two-dimensional look straight down whereas a drone racing around gives you a nice 3D perspective of what the players [face].”

It says something that even for a big drone proponent, their deployment at the Olympics broke new ground. And don’t be surprised if some of the techniques used here — shots that truly make the viewer feel like they’re part of the action — get imported to American sports television.

And the reason is simple: As long as drone cameras have been around, one of the biggest obstacles to expanded usage has been what leagues will allow. That’s obviously evolved a bit over time as the drones have gotten smaller, more reliable and quieter, alleviating concerns about them interfering with a competition. And there are certainly some limiting logistical issues like local ordinances that require waivers to fly drones or the location of a nearby airport.

But every sport from the NFL to NASCAR wants their product to be presented in the most appealing way possible, and there’s no doubt they’ve taken notice, too. That could be where these Olympics will leave a lasting legacy: Now that the standard has been set for a new level of viewing experience, it’s hard to go backward.

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“Any successful use of them will make fans ask for them in more places,” Fox Sports vice president of media relations Erik Arneson said. “I think more and more leagues are open to exploring it. A few years ago, a drone crashed on a ski course and that made people hesitate a bit, but they’ve shown to be [reliable]. These aren’t hobbyists flying them. The pilots are pros so I think it’ll gradually get into some areas where it isn’t yet.”

Of course, some of the ways the drones were used in the Olympic Games are unique to these sports. And sometimes, the footage is so good it can give you motion sickness if you look at it too long. But if there’s anything from these Olympics that’s going to resonate for years to come, it’s likely to be its impact on sports television.

“We had some learning curves in the beginning, but now it’s in the fabric,” Milton said. “You kind of look different without the drones.”

2. A new model for the Winter Games

Outside of perhaps war or putting someone in outer space, there may be no greater human logistical challenge than organizing an Olympics. From housing and feeding athletes to apportioning hotel rooms to the massive transportation network required to get fans, volunteers and media members where they need to go, it is always hard to pull off and rarely goes without some snags over the course of two-plus weeks.

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Because of those challenges and how much it taxes the infrastructure of a host city, it appears the IOC is committed to changing the model of the Winter Olympics to look more like Milan Cortina in the future.

Which means an Olympics that is divided into disparate clusters without much connection to one another.

In Northern Italy, there were really four different Olympics going on at once. To get from a speedskating event in Milan to, say, a snowboarding event in Livigno, was going to require a four-hour-plus drive or an even longer series of trains and buses. A drive between Livigno and the Cortina cluster — where they held curling, women’s alpine skiing, sliding, cross-country and ski jumping — would be five or six hours through the Alps depending on conditions. And even to get between Livigno — host of the extreme sports — and Bormio —men’s Alpine and ski mountaineering — was a 90-minute crawl through a couple mountain passes despite being just 22 miles apart.

There’s never been an Olympics that scattered and disconnected.

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But this is more or less what it’s going to look like going forward. In 2030, the so-called  “French Alps” Olympics look to be just as spread out if not moreso with a footprint of clusters across the lower third of France all the way down to Nice. Though the accessibility of Park City will make the return of the Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City more compact in 2034, the likely winner for the 2038 bid is a proposal by Switzerland to spread things out across the whole country.

Why?

The answer is cost and sustainability. It is difficult and expensive to build infrastructure for an event as big as the Olympics in small mountain towns and ski resorts. It’s why the IOC struggled to get traditional winter countries in Europe to even bid for awhile because asking citizens to absorb the cost was a huge political loser for those governments. (The 2022 Games was decided between Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, because everybody else dropped out.)

So, in essence, the IOC has calculated — and rightly so — that the only way you’ll get Olympics in Europe anymore is to lessen the burden on the locals by putting a few events here and a few events there. It makes sense — even if athletes and fans lose some connection to the feeling of being at a traditional Olympics. After all, for most of the world, it’s just one big TV show.

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“We want to maximize our Olympic experience as much as possible, which means getting to all of these different events and watching teams win as many medals as we can,” said U.S. aerials skier Kaila Kuhn. “I think most of us would agree we wish we could go see more events like skating or cross-country. But we’re with a lot of our buddies here, with a lot of our fellow freestyle skiers and we were super stoked to be here.”

Despite the inconveniences, the long bus rides and the inability to hop around easily from curling to hockey to halfpipe, the model worked. And it’s here to stay.

“We have had and I’ve had the opportunity to go to all venues and [Olympic] Villages across these Games and the athletes are extremely happy, and they’re happy because the experiences that the [Milan Cortina] team and my team delivered to them have been the same,” IOC president Kirsty Coventry said. “It’s part of the evaluation process after the Games where we look at it and say what worked and what didn’t work. These Games have been truly successful in a new way of doing things and a sustainable way of doing things in a way I think many people thought couldn’t be done well. It’s been done extremely well and surprised everyone’s expectations.”

3. Domestic disputes

Thanks to our way-too-online and overheated social media culture, I’m afraid we are never going to have another Olympics without Americans being at each other’s throats.

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While consuming the Olympics through the social media lens wasn’t great in 2024, it’s never been more toxic than during the two weeks of these Games, where every comment from an American athlete — even some that were pretty milquetoast — was put through the wringer until it became pellet food to satiate people’s hunger for outrage.

Here’s the reality: Every single athlete wearing the Team USA uniform was proud and honored to be here representing their country. But we also live in a country of 340 million people, and that pride in the American flag does not manifest itself the exact same way for everybody. We are a big, complicated place, and we disagree on a lot.

That’s OK.

In the immortal words of Kevin Durant after Team USA’s semifinal game in Paris two years ago: “A lot of bulls*** happens in our country. But a lot of great things happen, too.”

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Here’s another reality: For better or worse, what happens in America is a big deal in the rest of the world. And in tense times domestically like these, it’s going to be an inevitable topic at worldwide sporting events. American athletes are always going to be asked about it — more often by the international press than the American media.

If they don’t want to speak up, fine. If they do, that’s fine, too — regardless of what their opinion is. Again, we’re a big country — too big to be represented by one kind of person, one kind of thought, one kind of patriotism.

But the entire Hunter Hess experience, and those (including politicians) saying he should be sent home or didn’t deserve to wear the uniform, smacked of the kind of thought police state we should not want the Olympics to devolve into.

At the same time, expecting Team USA athletes to ignore the complexities of whatever is going on at the moment and perform a brand of paint-by-numbers patriotism that caters to either side of the political divide is unfair. It does nobody any good. It’s exhausting. And if we get to a point where a citizen of what’s supposed to be the freest and most individualistic country on Earth is afraid to be authentic lest they find their lives ruined by a social media mob, even for a few weeks, God help us.

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In the past, I have advocated for the U.S. government to fund its Olympic effort through at least some public dollars like other countries do to alleviate the financial strain on college sports. This Olympics has changed my mind because it is now easy to see what it could lead to: Politicians using their leverage to impose ideological purity tests in order to represent Team USA.

No thanks.

There should be only one goal here: Winning medals. That’s why the U.S. has always been so good at the Olympics. We compete hard, we award spots on merit and we let the chips fall where they may.

If we can’t root for Olympians we disagree with, if we descend into insults and threats because an athlete has a different worldview or expresses their patriotism differently than the way you would, it will only deepen our culture of tearing each other apart.

And if that’s the case, what’s the point of the Olympics at all?