What’s Going On With The Olympic Hockey Arena?

It is 64 days until the first hockey game of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and the main hockey arena is still under construction. A test event, to determine whether the ice is good enough to play on, has already been pushed back. While providing plentiful entertainment for the region's Umarell, the construction delay is proving stressful for everyone else, given that, as a top organizer said last week, "there is no Plan B." Now comes the news that even if construction is completed, the ice surface—usually significantly larger for international play than in the NHL—will be smaller than NHL rinks.

The league's relationship with the Olympics has been fraught for a while, but 2026 will see NHLers compete in the Games for the first time since Sochi. So it sounded perhaps like a squeaky wheel seeking some grease when Gary Bettman complained way back in 2023 that construction hadn't yet begun on the 16,000-seat Santagiulia Arena, in Milan's outskirts, which will host half the men's and women's tournaments and most of the marquee games. But Bettman was right to be concerned. When league officials toured the site this past August, they saw a complex still under heavy construction. Ground hadn't been broken on a planned practice facility. They hadn't yet even laid down roads leading to the arena. That's Italian excellence in action; historically, most Olympic venues are opened and tested a full year in advance of the Games.