Just days before the world’s best skiers, skaters, and snowboarders descend on northern Italy, the 2026 Winter Olympics have achieved something remarkable: They’ve managed to disappoint almost everyone without enraging anyone. In an age when every major sporting event seems to provoke either a boycott or accusations of sportswashing, Milan Cortina has slipped through the cracks of our outrage machinery.

Call it the Compromise Olympics.

The numbers tell the story. Five Russian athletes have been approved to compete—not as Russians but as “individual neutral athletes.” They’ll wear no flag, sing no anthem, and won’t march in the opening ceremony. Ukraine has protested that even this is too much, documenting alleged connections between approved athletes and Moscow’s war effort. Russia, meanwhile, treats the whole arrangement as an insult to national pride. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) insists it’s threading the needle perfectly.

Everyone is a little bit angry, which means everyone gets to pretend they’ve won.

This was not how things went down in 1980. When President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he didn’t offer Benn Fields—to take but one example—the chance to compete under a neutral flag. The high jumper, then at the peak of his powers, never had another chance to try for Olympic gold.

Athletes on both sides saw their dreams vaporized for a geopolitical point that, as then-IOC President Thomas Bach—who lost his chance to fence in Moscow for West Germany—noted in 2020, “serves nothing.” The boycott hurt athletes. It hurt the population. Four years later, the Soviets returned the favor in Los Angeles. The Olympics, it seemed, were circling the drain.

But here we are in 2026, and the Games endure. Neutered, perhaps. Diminished, certainly. But surviving nonetheless, on a diet of careful accommodations that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

The host tells its own story of compromise. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government represents the first time since Benito Mussolini that a party with fascist roots has led Italy. Her Brothers of Italy party still sports that tricolor flame on its logo—the one that makes historians’ eyes narrow. There’s a certain irony in a far-right government hosting an event meant to celebrate international brotherhood.

Except Meloni has proved remarkably adept at compromise herself. She backs Ukraine. She works with Brussels. She takes U.S. President Donald Trump’s calls and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s money. The Olympics offer her something even better than legitimacy—they offer her the appearance of normalcy. A successful Games won’t change anyone’s mind about her party’s roots, but they might make those roots seem less relevant.

Which brings us to the climate compromise.

When Cortina last hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956, organizers used zero artificial snow. Instead, the Italian army trucked natural snow down from the Dolomites. This year, Italy will manufacture 2.4 million cubic meters of the stuff. TechnoAlpin’s SnowFactory will pump out artificial precipitation even when temperatures hover above freezing.

The math is brutal. This year’s Games will require 250 million gallons of water, taken from newly built reservoirs that environmental scientists say alter local ecosystems. As climate change worsens, the number of cities capable of hosting the Winter Olympics without massive infrastructure spending and environmental vandalism shrinks every cycle. Switzerland for 2038, if we’re lucky. After that, who knows? Anchorage? Nuuk?

The IOC’s response has been to congratulate itself. Milan Cortina will use 85 percent existing facilities, the committee notes—a sustainability triumph! The organizers call it a “more sustainable future.” What they mean is: We’ve figured out how to keep the party going a few more cycles before the climate sends us a bill we can’t pay.

This is compromise as a survival tactic. The Winter Olympics can’t solve climate change, so the IOC is performing climate consciousness while pumping millions of gallons of water through snow machines. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of ordering a Diet Coke with your double cheeseburger.

Even the geography screams compromise. These will be the most distributed Winter Olympics in history, spread across 8,500 square miles of northern Italy. Events scattered from Milan’s new hockey arena to Antholz near the Austrian border, from the Dolomites to the Valtellina valley. The IOC calls it “regional development.” What it really is: an admission that no single city wants to shoulder the whole financial burden anymore.

But here’s the trouble with compromise: It rarely makes for compelling television. The five Russian athletes competing under no flag satisfy no one—not Ukraine, which protests their presence; not Russia, which treats neutral status as an insult; and certainly not the viewers, who watch an awkward pantomime where medalists stand silent during what should be their national anthem. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of mediocre dinner theater; everyone pretends something meaningful is happening while we all know it isn’t.

The same goes for the environmental theater. When you’re staging snowfall in the Alps, you’re not hosting a Winter Olympics—you’re hosting a requiem for winter itself. Young viewers especially notice this dissonance. U.S. Gen Z viewership for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing crashed 36 percent from the previous Summer Games in Tokyo—a steeper decline than any other generation, even among expected drops. Perhaps they’re less willing to pretend that business-as-usual is sustainable when the “business” requires manufacturing 2.4 million cubic meters of snow in a warming world. Or perhaps they’ve simply figured out that watching highlight clips on TikTok beats sitting through NBC’s tape-delayed pageantry. Either way, the compromises that allow these Games to happen are the same compromises making them harder to care about.

The Olympics have always been about more than sport, of course. They’re soft-power projection and national branding played out on snow and ice. What has changed is the honesty of the exchange. Today, the Olympics are just one of many sporting events to embrace sportswashing. Qatar spent $300 billion on a World Cup, calculating that the positive public relations would outweigh the slave labor accusations. Saudi Arabia pays Cristiano Ronaldo $400 million to play soccer, and everyone shrugs. We know the game now. We’ve seen the playbook.

Milan Cortina represents the evolution of that understanding. These Olympics won’t whitewash Italy’s political drift rightward. They won’t make anyone forget Russia’s war in Ukraine. They won’t reverse climate change or restore the Winter Games to environmental viability. They’ll simply happen, and we’ll simply watch, and everyone will walk away having preserved exactly as much as they needed to.

The Russian athletes will compete without a flag and tell themselves they struck a blow against discrimination. Ukraine will protest their presence and claim moral victory. Meloni will smile for the cameras and bank the prestige. Climate activists will point to the snow machines, and the IOC will point to the reused venues, and both will be right.

This is what compromise looks like in 2026: Nobody’s happy, but everyone gets through it.

Maybe that’s enough. The 1980 boycott achieved nothing except breaking hearts. The Beijing 2022 criticism changed nothing except making Xi briefly annoyed. If the choice is between righteous confrontation that hurts athletes and cynical accommodation that lets the show go on, perhaps accommodation is the adult choice.

Or perhaps we’re just tired. Tired of manufacturing outrage for events that come and go in 17 days. Tired of pretending sports can solve problems that governments can’t. Tired of expecting the Olympics to be anything more than what they’ve always been: a brief, beautiful, and ultimately meaningless truce in the endless noise of geopolitics.

The Milan Cortina Games won’t inspire the way we pretend the Olympics should. They won’t unite the world or transcend politics or prove that sport can conquer all. They’ll simply be the Olympics of our age: compromised and compromising.

We’ll watch the downhill runs and the figure skating. We’ll marvel at human excellence on ice and snow. And then we’ll move on, having changed nothing and preserved everything.

That’s the deal we’ve struck. That’s the compromise we’ve chosen.