For authorities tasked with ensuring the safety of the Winter Olympics, which begin this week in northern Italy, a crucial moment will come before the competitions even begin.
The opening ceremony, on Friday (6), will attract billions of spectators and bring together a host of dignitaries at the San Siro stadium in Milan for the grand presentation of the Games. It also represents an important target.
“If attackers want to alter the Games, sabotage the Games, the opening ceremony is a great opportunity,” said Franz Regul, who led cybersecurity efforts for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
The ceremony (scheduled to start on Friday at 4pm Brasília time) involves more than a thousand artists who spent hundreds of hours rehearsing and will serve as Italy’s calling card to the world.
Protecting the spectacle — which will also feature simultaneous events at Olympic venues in the mountains around Cortina and Livigno — requires one of the largest and most complex security operations in Italian history, involving 6,000 police and security officers, as well as a fleet of drones and surveillance robots to carry out inspections.
“We train, we prepare for the Games and in our case, during the opening ceremony, we have our own Olympic final,” Regul said. He recalled the relief he felt when the biggest controversy surrounding the opening ceremony two years earlier in Paris concerned the artistic performance rather than a security breach.
Yet before dawn on the day of the opening ceremony, a sabotage attack disrupted France’s high-speed rail network, leaving thousands of passengers stranded and tarnishing a moment of national glory. No group has claimed responsibility.
In 2018, a major cyberattack led to the unprecedented disruption of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The attack disrupted internet access and television broadcasts, prevented the flight of drones that were supposed to be part of an elaborate presentation, and took down the Games website. It also prevented spectators from printing tickets and attending the ceremony, resulting in an unusually high number of empty seats.
This attack was attributed to Russia, which, according to the British government, tried to disguise the action as being perpetrated by North Korea.
Russian actions have posed a threat to the Olympic Games for more than a decade, since the exposure of a massive state-sponsored doping program led to an international ban on Russian athletes representing their country at major sporting events — bans that have remained in place since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russians can only compete at the Milan-Cortina Games as neutral athletes, without carrying the national flag.
Russia’s attempts to undermine the recent Games have included cyberattacks and even an elaborate disinformation campaign ahead of the Paris Olympics that included a fake documentary featuring a voice purporting to be that of actor Tom Cruise.
Daniel Byman, director of the Washington-based CSIS (Irregular Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies), said that Olympic organizers are concerned about state threats “because they tend to be more qualified and have more resources.”
However, although Russia is seen by experts as one of the biggest state threats to the safe holding of the Olympic Games, it is the security agents of another nation — the United States — that most worry Italians.
The announcement last week that ICE agents would accompany American officials to the Olympic Games sparked outrage in Italy, with officials and protesters expressing outrage at the conduct of ICE agents during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
American officials sought to clarify that Italian authorities are responsible for all security operations. They stated that the ICE contingent will not carry out immigration enforcement, but will instead work through HSI (Homeland Security Investigations Division), which often works with international partners on security and public order issues.
“HSI’s role in the Olympics will be strictly advisory and intelligence-based, without any involvement in patrolling or law enforcement,” Tilman J. Fertitta, U.S. ambassador to Italy, said in a statement last week.
Still, ICE’s presence in Italy generated the biggest pre-Games diplomatic friction. Milan’s mayor said the Italian government should block entry by ICE, which he described as a militia involved in “criminal acts.”
The backlash was so severe that American Olympic officials announced this week that the “Ice House,” a hospitality space for American athletes in a Milan hotel, would be renamed the “Winter House.” The venue “was designed to be a private space, free from distractions,” organizers said in a statement.
Byman, a former US government intelligence analyst, said he was unaware of ICE’s presence in previous editions of the Games.
To ensure the safety of the Paris Olympics, considered one of the most successful in recent times, organizers blocked large areas of the city to traffic and mobilized thousands of uniformed soldiers.
The security plan for the Milan-Cortina Games will also include robots capable of inspecting dangerous or inaccessible areas and — just like in Paris — a 24-hour cybersecurity command center that will monitor Olympic networks and essential transport infrastructure.
