The late scramble to get the hockey venues ready for the Milan Cortina Olympics may have the NHL concerned and the hockey world talking, but it doesn’t come as a surprise to those who were on the ground the last time NHL players traveled to Italy for the Winter Games.
Twenty years ago in Turin, construction delays went right down to the wire and left no time to stage a proper test event. In fact, organizers even found themselves crudely reconfiguring a section of the lower bowl at Palasport Olimpico in the months before those Games because of a critical miscalculation in design.
“We realized that the big door where the Zamboni is driving in, it’s too small,” Jukka-Pekka Vuorinen, the ice hockey director for the 2006 Olympics, told The Athletic. “So they had to carve the stands off to get it done.”
While Vuorinen doesn’t have insight into the precise details of what’s holding things up in Milan, he sees some high-level parallels to what he experienced in Turin.
Most notable among them is that organizers broke ground on the construction of the new rink too late. That represented a big hurdle on its own, but in Turin he said the issue was compounded by the fact that locals weren’t familiar with building hockey arenas. Plus, it proved difficult just to keep people working on any kind of predictable schedule ahead of the 2006 Games.
“We started in the summer of 2003, so it was less than three years,” Vuorinen said. “It really was a short period because of all the delays. In Italy, you have the labor unions, and we had a couple of strikes as well during the project. You can never trust that ‘OK, this is the schedule — you start now, and you finish then,’ because during the period, there are lots of different things like these strikes. Everything can happen during the build.”
The 14,012-seat Santagiulia Arena in Milan is being built on an even tighter time frame than the main venue in Turin was. Shovels hadn’t been put in the ground as recently as December 2023, prompting NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to call it “a matter of some concern.”
And the level of worry has only grown since. When NHL employees toured the building in late August, it was a complete construction zone. None of the infrastructure had been completed, including roads to the arena. And the practice rink hadn’t even been started. Worse still, it appeared only a minimal amount of work was even happening toward the tail end of the summer.
Progress has been slow since.
The NHL wasn’t encouraged by the update it received during a facilities update call on Friday, according to league sources, and recently sent more staff to Italy to assist with the project on the ground. The list of outstanding issues at Santagiulia is long, according to league sources, and includes the fact that the floor of the building is currently covered in construction materials — preventing the boards from being anchored, which allows ice production to begin.
It’s too late to change the dimensions of the playing surface with the Games just two months away — the International Ice Hockey Federation confirmed Monday that the rink will be 196.85 feet by 85.3 feet, more than three feet shorter than the NHL’s standard 200 feet by 85 feet layout while also being substantially narrower than the international standard of 196.85 feet by 98.4 feet — but the league’s staff is working with organizers to try to reduce the impact of the smaller surface by accounting for the difference in the neutral zone.
Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee continues to insist that the arena will be ready in time for a scheduled Jan. 9-11 test event. That one was put on the calendar after construction delays forced the cancellation of a previously planned December test.
The women’s Olympic tournament is scheduled to begin Feb. 5, with the men starting Feb. 11.
Ideally, test events are held a year before the Olympics so adjustments and improvements to the building can be made afterward. You’d also typically want the arena full of fans to get a true gauge of how well the ice surface holds up with increased heat, while also ensuring the building functions properly at full capacity.
None of that is going to happen in Milan — just as it didn’t two decades ago in Turin.
“We didn’t have real test events,” Vuorinen said. “They were just small ones. I guess that they have the same problems now in Milan.
“Whenever you just bring a couple of teams to play there, it’s not the same as the Olympic Games. In my mind, test events are supposed to be bigger events where you can test everything. Not just a couple of hockey games.”
Vuorinen, the former head of the Finnish Ice Hockey Federation, can identify with the duress organizers are under. He was involved with organizing multiple world championships before getting sent to Turin by the IIHF in 2003 to help get things on track after fears surfaced about the slow pace of construction. Vuorinen described the run-up to those Olympics as “very stressful” because he wasn’t sure if they were going to be able to pull it off.
He navigated a multitude of issues. Just like the upcoming Milan Games, the hockey tournament in Turin was played out of a primary venue constructed from scratch — the initial delay there was caused by the discovery of an undetonated bomb from World War II when digging commenced at the site — and used a temporary secondary arena built inside an exhibition hall.
Each presented its own set of challenges, according to Vuorinen. The ice-making machinery in the secondary rink had to be fully replaced four or five months before the tournament because the space was too small to properly create high-quality ice.
“It was really close to a disaster,” he said.
At the larger Palasport Olimpico, they were still putting the finishing touches on the building right up until the day the Games began. That was after a mad dash to the finish, too, which didn’t even leave enough time to clean up all of the dust created from the construction. Vuorinen remembers workers basically covering all of that up with signs and other advertising boards.
Still, against all odds, the hockey tournaments ultimately went off without a hitch.
“In Torino, people told me that Italians are people that are very proud and when they see in the last moment that if they don’t work now it’s too late, (they get it done),” Vuorinen said. “They started to work day and night, so they did an excellent job. When the first game started in Torino, everything was finished.
“I don’t say that it was done, but it was finished.”
Two months from puck drop, the NHL can only hope that history repeats itself.
