MILAN — Federica Brignone has skied in five Winter Olympics, but her experience this year has been unique. For starters, she won her first gold medals. She also had an easier commute.
“I had never arrived at an Olympics with my car,” Brignone, who was born in Milan and lives in Northern Italy, told reporters before the Games. “Usually it was always hotels, all shuttles, everything already organized.”
Familiar comforts may be one of many factors driving the resurgent Olympics performance of Brignone and the rest of her Italian teammates. With a few events remaining this weekend, Italy has won 26 medals and nine golds at this year’s Winter Games, both records for the country. After ranking 10th in the medal table four years ago in Beijing, Italy sits in third so far this year, behind Norway and the United States.
The host boost is a trend that holds across both the Summer and Winter Olympics in recent decades. Since World War II, 18 of 19 Winter Olympics hosts—and 17 of 19 in the summer—have improved their medal counts from the previous Games, with a median increase of 60% and a median gold medal increase of more than 75%. Ironically, the lone exception was Italy in 2006, when it won two fewer medals in Turin than it did in 2002.
Host nations typically have a long run-up of preparation—Italy was awarded the 2026 Games seven years ago—meaning the country can dedicate time, money and infrastructure to its Olympic pursuits. While some countries allocate part of their Olympic budgets or resources to high-performance training, the Italian national team told Sportico that the $6.1 billion (€5.2 billion) Milan Cortina budget did not directly increase the country’s funding for its athlete development.
“The medals are the result of hard work,” a spokesperson for the Italian national Olympic committee (CONI) said in an email. “We have not given the athletes any additional funding. We have assisted them in their preparation and with their staffing needs.”
By contrast, the U.K. government dedicated additional funds to Team Great Britain in the run-up to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. In March 2006, it announced a $522 million (£300 million) allocation for athlete preparation. One month later, it announced an additional $114 million (£65.3 million), with about $102 million (£58.8 million) earmarked for Summer Olympic athletes and about $12 million (£6.5 million) for Summer Paralympic athletes.
From a medal perspective, the return on investment was a jackpot. Great Britain won 29 golds in 2012, up from 19 in 2008 and still the nation’s biggest haul ever.
Technical and scientific support for the Italian athletes this year came via the country’s Olympic training centers (Centri di Preparazione Olimpica) and the Institute of Sports Medicine and Science (l’Istituto di Medicina e Scienza dello Sport), the CONI spokesperson said. The result of that push, he added, has shown in other avenues. Italy finished atop the gold medal count at the 2024 Winter Youth Olympics in South Korea, beating out France, Germany and the event hosts. Italy wasn’t in the top 10 for the 2012, 2016 or 2020 iterations of that event.
Italian standouts during these Olympics include Brignone, who Corriere dello Sport hailed as “The Queen”; speedskater Francesca Lollobrigida, who won two gold medals; and the nation’s first-everbiathlon gold medalist Lisa Vittozzi. Italy also secured a surprise bronze medal in the team figure skating event. Pairs skater Sara Conti said afterward that the local support helped her team.
“A competition is a competition,” she told reporters, “but when you feel the public behind you, that makes things much easier.”
There are a few structural factors that benefit Olympic hosts. For one, organizing committees can push to add new sports or new disciplines, and often do so in ways that boost their medal hauls. The lineup for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, for example, includes newcomers flag football, lacrosse, baseball and softball, all sports where the U.S. teams will likely be medal favorites.
The Winter Olympics introduces new events more gradually than the Summer Games, but several host countries have capitalized on new medal opportunities. For instance, the United States won both gold medals in skeleton when the discipline was resurrected (after a half-century hiatus) in Salt Lake City in 2002, and Russia won gold in men’s parallel slalom in that snowboarding event’s first iteration in 2014.
These Winter Games featured one new sport—ski mountaineering, or skimo—which features a number of prominent Italians. The hosts failed to medal in the men’s and women’s sprint on Thursday, but have another shot in Saturday’s mixed relay. Another new medal event, women’s doubles luge, produced an Italian gold. The host nation also auto-qualifies in many Olympic sports and receives additional slots in others, though those rarely result in medals. The Italian men’s hockey team, which didn’t have to qualify for the tournament, was winless in four games and was outscored 22-4.
Lastly, there are also more medals available by absence. Due to sanctions from the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Russian contingent has fewer than two dozen athletes at the 2026 Winter Games, competing as “individual neutral athletes,” and they’ve won one medal. By contrast, Russia initially claimed 33 medals, more than the U.S. or Canada, when it hosted the Olympics in 2014. Four of those medals were stripped for doping at those Sochi Games, bringing the final count to 29. Its athletes won 17 and 32 medals in the 2018 and 2022 Winter Games, when they faced separate restrictions due to doping violations.
The increased medal haul doesn’t mean the local Olympics have been blemish-free for Italy. The spread-out nature of the Games has diluted the overall Olympic energy in Milan. Offensive and gaffe-riddled commentary during the Opening Ceremony prompted the resignation of Paolo Petrecca, the sports head of RAI, the Italian state broadcaster.
