The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games' opening ceremony will kick off in northern Italy on Friday night local time, with Australians watching the snowy coverage in the early hours of the morning Saturday, and in the aftermath of a heatwave.
In the national team's second-largest showing ever, 53 athletes will be representing Australia across 14 sports, with a record 62.3 per cent proportion of women.
Some of Australia's most promising athletes this year could be its youngest, as a world number one-ranked teenager leads the country's medal hopes.
The Games will run from 6 to 22 February, with 2,900 athletes representing 93 countries.
Events will be held across three northern Italian regions: Lombardy, Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, and Veneto, making it the most widespread Winter Olympics in history. The poster cities — Milan and Cortina — are separated by more than 400km of mountains.
Here's what to know before the Games begin.
Which sports are on the program?
There are 16 sports at these games, including figure skating, bobsleigh and ice hockey, with ski mountaineering (also known as 'skimo') making its debut.
The 53 Australians will compete in 12 sports, only missing out on ice hockey and speed skating, curling and Nordic Combined:
- Alpine skiing
- Biathlon
- Bobsleigh
- Cross country skiing
- Figure skating
- Freeski (cross, halfpipe, slopestyle, big air)
- Luge
- Mogul skiing
- Short track speed skating
- Skeleton
- Ski mountaineering
- Snowboard (cross, halfpipe, slopestyle, big air)
The Australians to watch
Thirty Australian athletes will make their Olympic debut at these games, each eyeing a place on the podium.
One of the debutants is 16-year-old Indra Brown from Melbourne, who will compete in the freeski halfpipe competition. Currently ranked number one in the world, she's the youngest member of the Winter Olympics team.
She won the Calgary Halfpipe World Cup event earlier this year, making her also the youngest Australian to win a World Cup medal in any winter sport at 15 years old. A short time later, she won silver in the X Games.
"I came into this season just wanting to land some of my runs and just be proud of how I was skiing and I've definitely been doing that," Brown said from her training camp in Austria.
"I just want to go in there and do my best and be really proud of what I've done because this is my first Olympics and I'm only 16. I think if I can just go and be stoked with what I've done, that's a medal in itself."
Teenagers Ally Hickman, Amelie Haskell and Abbey Wilson are also competing in snowboarding disciplines as 18-year-old Daisy Thomas makes her big air ski Winter Olympics debut.
Having competed at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 at just 16, Canberra-born Valentino Guseli will compete in the snowboard halfpipe in Milan and Cortina. He has won several medals in halfpipe events, making him a strong contender.
Snowboard cross star and three-time Olympian Adam Lambert — from Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains region of NSW — comes into these games as world number one following a win at the Snowboard World Cup round in China last month.
Olympic medallists Jakara Anthony, Scotty James, Jarryd Hughes, Matthew Graham and Tess Coady will be aiming for more glory.
Anthony, a freestyle skier from Cairns, is the only gold medallist in the team, taking out the top spot in Beijing in 2022. The 27-year-old comes into Milan and Cortina as world number one and will be aiming for back-to-back gold.
Fellow freestyle skier Graham holds a silver medal from the PyeongChang Games in 2018, and Milan will likely be his last chance at winning gold. It'll be the 31-year-old's fourth Winter Games. A broken collarbone suffered just seven weeks out from Beijing in 2022 impacted his medal chances, and he finished 29th.
Snowboarder James will be seeking to add a gold to his silver and bronze collection this Winter Games — a big goal considering no Australian has won three winter Olympic medals. A four-time world champion, this will be his fifth Olympics.
Snowboard cross athlete Hughes also has a silver medal from PyeongChang in 2018. It'll be the 30-year-old's fourth Games, which he enters having recovered from a broken foot he suffered in April.
Snowboarder Coady, 25, took home bronze in slopestyle at Beijing in 2022, becoming Australia's youngest Winter Olympics medallist. The Australian Olympic Committee website describes her as an "exciting prospect in slopestyle and big air, with consistent results on the World Cup circuit".
How has Australia fared in previous Winter Olympics?
Australia first competed at the fourth edition of the Winter Olympics — in Germany in 1936 — and has competed in every Winter Games since, bar the St Moritz Games in 1948.
But it took until the Games in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994 for the team to win its first medal, when the men's 5000 short track speed skating team picked up bronze.
Since then, Australia has won 19 medals at the Winter Olympics — six gold, seven silver and six bronze.
The first gold, and most famous medal win, came when speed skater Steven Bradbury capitalised on a crash involving the race leaders to skate over the line untouched, claiming victory in the 1,000m short track event at Salt Lake City in 2002.
How to watch the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games from Australia
You can watch the Games on the Nine Network, its streaming service Nine Now or on Stan Sport.
The opening ceremony will be on Friday 6 February at 8pm (local time) — so 6am Saturday, AEDT.
The closing ceremony will be held on Sunday 22 February (Saturday 23 February AEDT).
You can view the full schedule of the Games' events here.
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