Milan Cortina sold out for now: ticket presale figures

More like a curling game than a downhill run at 150 kilometres per hour, where the athlete throws a 44-pound 'stone' towards a target and his teammates work the ice with 'brooms' to influence its trajectory. Not exactly a sprinter's performance, in short. With just a handful of days to go before the start, the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina scheduled from 6 to 22 February have not sold out: the overall ticket sales figure, which adds up the tickets sold on the platform to those given to sponsors in partnership agreements for both Olympics and Paralympics, amounts to 1.2 million against an announced target of 1.5 million tickets.

The figure arrives from the Milan Cortina Foundation, which is not lavish with detailed numbers, while the Cio, engaged in the first press conference of the games, nevertheless speaks of an 'impressive' result. According to Sole 24 Ore after a series of verifications carried out with informed sources, tickets purchased by individual users would amount to about 900 thousand, while the remaining 300 thousand would come from sponsorship partnerships.

The most frequently purchased discipline is ice hockey, which is said to be around 350 thousand tickets sold. This is followed by the Biathlon (150,000) and ice skating (around 70,000), while cross-country skiing and curling would each have exceeded 50,000 and ski mountaineering would be under 8,000.

A separate discourse deserves the Opening Ceremony directed by Marco Balich and scheduled at the San Siro Stadium in Milan Friday 6 February: here the ticket sales are said to have exceeded 50 thousand against a capacity of 75 thousand. At the press conference with the president of the IOC, former Zimbabwean swimmer Kristy Coventry, it was said that the venue is not 'sold out' but 'full house', an expression used when the hall is full regardless of whether the tickets have sold out.

One can read in this direction the repeated announcements of 'tickets still available' heard live on the official Eurosport broadcaster during the Australian Open Sinner-Djokovic match and still visible on the digital billboards around Milan, but also special offers such as two-for-one tickets for the under-26s and third-ring tickets discounted from 260 to 26 euro for the Games volunteers. Who - a not insignificant detail - will also have the possibility of 'giving away' the admission ticket. A promotion that, in the final hours leading up to the event, has been extended: by entering a dedicated code, which has reached several registered users of the platform, it is possible to buy a ticket (with prices ranging from 260 to 2,026 euro) and get a second ticket for free, up to a maximum of ten tickets per buyer.