Goaltending is Key in Olympic Tournament, Says Former Winnipeg Jets Goalie Allain Roy

Allain Roy, President & CEO of RSG Hockey, former Winnipeg Jets goalie and member of the 1994 silver medal Canadian Olympic team, discusses the kickoff of the 2026 Winter Olympics and what to expect from this year's hockey tournament. Featuring tributes to da Vinci and Dante, Puccini and Pausini, Armani and Fellini, pasta and vino, and other iconic tastes of Italian culture — plus Mariah Carey hitting all the high notes in “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu” aka “Volare” — an unprecedented four-site, dual-cauldron opening ceremony got the Milan Cortina Olympics officially started Friday.

It didn’t exactly feel like a Winter Games as the festivities began at the main hub, Milan’s San Siro soccer stadium, where the temperature was a tad below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) and the sky was a crisp, clear azure all afternoon. Not a trace of clouds, let alone snow.

The Olympics returned to a nation that last hosted the sports spectacle 20 years ago. This, though, is the most spread-out Winter Games in history, with competition venues dotting an area of about 8,500 square miles (more than 22,000 square kilometers), roughly the size of the entire state of New Jersey.

Aside from San Siro, which opened a century ago and is home to Serie A soccer titans AC Milan and Inter Milan but is due to be razed and replaced in the next few years, athletes were slated to march in three other places, some carrying their country’s flag: Cortina d’Ampezzo in the heart of the Dolomite mountains; Livigno in the Alps; Predazzo in the autonomous province of Trento.

That allowed up-in-the-mountains sports such as Alpine skiing, bobsled, curling and snowboarding to be represented in the Parade of Nations without requiring folks to make the several-hours-long trek to Milan, the country’s financial capital.

For good measure, the Feb. 22 closing ceremony will be held in yet another locale, Verona, where Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” was set.

Another symbol of how far-flung things are this time: Instead of the usual one cauldron that is lit and burns throughout the Olympics, there will be two, both intended as an homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s geometric studies. One is in Milan, 2½ miles (4 kilometers) from San Siro, and the other is going to be 250 miles (400 kilometers) away in Cortina.

The people given the honor of lighting both following a ceremony expected to last 2 1/2 hours was a closely guarded secret, as is usually the case at any Olympics. At the 2006 Turin Games, it was Italian cross-country skier Stefania Belmondo.

As Italy welcomed the world Friday by showing off its heritage, the show produced by Olympic ceremony veteran Marco Balich began with dancers from the academy of the famed Milan opera house Teatro alla Scala reimagining 18th-century sculptor Antonio Canova’s marble works.

People wearing oversized, mascot-style heads representing opera composers Giacomo Puccini, Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi appeared on the central stage, before giant tubes of paint floated above and dropped silk of red, blue and yellow — the primary colors — before an early parade of various-color-wearing characters arrived in the stadium. They represented music and art, literature and architecture, appreciations for beauty and history and, above all, “La Dolce Vita” (loosely, Italian for “The Good Life” and the name of a 1960 film by Federico Fellini).

There were references to ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the Venice Carnival and the country’s noted traditions in various areas such as cuisine

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