The 196 Italians for Milano Cortina 2026 have been made official: absolute record of participation. The sixteen-year-old D’Antonio and the 45-year-old Fischnaller are symbols of an expedition between youth and experience
The countdown has begun. There will be 196 Italian athletes representing Italy at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, an absolute record that surpasses the 184 of Turin 2006. The delegation includes 103 men and 93 women, distributed across sixteen disciplines including ice and snow. Numbers that testify to the growth of the Italian movement e the ambitions of a team called to shine in front of the home crowd.
The 87 ice sports athletes selected last week were joined today by 109 snow sports athletes, fifty-six men and fifty-three women. Among them stand out names that tell stories of different generations, united by passion and national pride.
Three decades on track
Giada D’Antonio, born in 2009will be the first Neapolitan in the history of Olympic alpine skiing. At the gate in Cortina she will be sixteen years old, like Janica Kostelic in Nagano 1998 or Traudi Hecher in Squaw Valley 1960, where she won a bronze. Together with her Anna Trocker, another promising young seventeen year old. It’s a nice message to the world of sport: it’s the sign of a generational change already underway that gives freshness, youth, novelty.
At the other extreme there is Roland Fischnaller, South Tyrolean snowboarder who at the age of forty-five will participate in his seventh Olympicsabsolute Italian record in winter sports. But it’s not the only legend, there are certainly old school bastions. Four athletes from the expedition were also present in Turin 2006: Arianna Fontana (short track), Joel Retornaz (curling), Alessandro Pittin (Nordic combined) and Fischnaller himself. Long-lived, extraordinary careers that span different eras of Italian sport.
The difficult choices of the Fisi
In alpine skiing, the federation has made clear but painful choices. The giant, for example, sees theabsence of Filippo della Vitewhile in slalom he was called up a bit by surprise (although deservedly) Tommaso Saccardiborn in 2001, strong on the results in the European Cup but not yet on points in the World Cup. Among the veterans there will be the forty-one years of Christof Innerhofer e the thirty-five of Federica Brignoneflag bearer and leader of the entire team.
Olympic selections are always painful, and not just for Italy: France will give up a champion like Alexis Pinturaultwhile Switzerland will do without the ace Ramon Zenhaeusern (two medals in Beijing 2022). Meanwhile, in Crans-Montana the female and male delegations will compete with mourning on their arms to remember the victims of the terrible New Year’s Eve massacre.
The road towards Milan Cortina is traced. The blue squad, characterized by a good balance between youth and experience, dreams big, ready to enthuse the home fans and make all Italians proud.
