In the last Olympics, the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, the U.S. went second-to-last as athletes paraded down the Seine River. The logic there was similar: Los Angeles is hosting the next summer Olympics in 2028.

The performance in Milan looked squarely at the past, both in substance and in style.

Marco Balich has helped design grand spectacles at more than half a dozen Olympics. On Friday, he’ll do it again, on home turf in Italy.

The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics kicked off with an opening ceremony on Friday that averaged 21.4 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings and digital data from Adobe Analytics.

A Russian woman in Milan made a quiet protest against the war by leading Ukraine’s Olympic team into the stadium

Paolo Petrecca, head of the sports unit of Italian state broadcaster RAI, stepped down on Thursday following backlash triggered by a series of live blunders he made while commenting the Milan-Cortina

The Games will conclude on Feb. 22 with the closing ceremony at the historic Verona Arena, a Roman amphitheater and UNESCO World Heritage site in the heart of Verona. Check out the full schedule on the official Olympics website.

Paris 2024's controversial Olympic ceremony sparked culture wars with its modern reinterpretation, while Milan-Cortina embraced tradition and unity, expert say.