The walk to the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, which is hosting men’s and women’s competitions at the 2026 Olympic Games, is a muddy one. The winding 25-minute trek from a nearby (sort of) city subway stop won’t get your boots wet on a dry day. But all the puddled dirt surrounding the beleaguered new facility, which will welcome NHL players back into the Olympic fold after an absence of a dozen years—not to mention the fencing, weeds, and all the construction equipment and debris—serve as a reminder that the complex isn’t quite ready to stand as a showcase. The place, located on the southeastern fringes of the city limits, isn’t a pretty sight.
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But it appears ready to host a hockey tournament. While last-minute venue construction is as much of an Olympic tradition as the kiss and cry or village shenanigans, the Santagiulia hockey arena sparked serious consternation, for good reason: as recently as mid-December, the place looked like a potential disaster. NHL officials voiced concern. But a visit to the facility on the afternoon of Feb. 3, two days before the start of the first game—an Italy vs. France women’s showdown— showed a clean sheet of ice, seats in the building, and concession stands ready to roll.
The Olympics, at the very least, will almost certainly have a hockey tournament.
(Note the hedging).
Around-the-clock construction over the past few days and months got the job done. “The biggest challenge in any Games is that it’s an immovable deadline,” says Veronika Muhlhofer, event general manager for the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena. “Because any other project, you’re like, ‘O.K., well, maybe we could push it a bit.’ Whereas in the Games you never can. So that always adds a little stress factor.”
Muhlhofer notes while the media typically overhypes the doomsday outcome of Olympic construction, it was fair game for Milano Santagiulia. “If you looked at it two, three months ago, they were still building it,” says Muhlhofer. “Legitimately, people were nervous and stressed if it could get done.”
Test events for Olympic venues are typically held a year in advance; Milano Santagiulia got one less than a month before the Games. The arena hosted a series of Italian league games. The Olympic men’s hockey tournament starts on Feb. 11: officials from the NHL and its players’ associates, who were on hand for the test event, declared themselves satisfied with the conditions. In a joint statement, they called it a “good trial run,” despite the small hole in the ice that had to be fixed during one contest.
In the bowels of the arena on Tuesday, two workers were painting a hallway. Exposed electrical wires jutted out of a stairwell wall—and from a ceiling. A ladder stood in another area: trash bags were piled up in the luxury suite area. Not ideal optics for this close to face-off.
The ice, however, looked smooth. And perhaps most importantly, two Zamboni machines moved, at the typical snail’s pace, across the surface.
The Zambonis are in the house. Let the Olympic Games begin.