The Winter Games will take place Feb. 6–22, 2026, in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo. It will be the first Olympics to have more than one official host city; the cities are nearly 200 miles apart.

It will be the third time overall and the second time in two decades that Italy will play host to the Winter Olympics. The 1956 Games were in Cortina d'Ampezzo, and the 2006 Games were in Turin. Rome was the host city for the 1960 Summer Olympic Games.

The other nation in the running was Sweden, with a bid from Stockholm-Are that had a curious carrot of a bobsled track in Sigulda, Latvia.

The 2018 Winter Olympics were in Pyeongchang. The 2022 Winter Games will take place in Beijing.

The IOC delayed the announcement of the 2026 host city because they had to move the location of the announcement. The original announcement ceremony was to take place on September 11 in at the IOC Session in Milan. However, because one of the two nations had submitted a bid that included the city in which the IOC Session was taking place, the committee endorsed the relocation,, to Lausanne, Switzerland, which contains IOC headquarters.

Five other cities had expressed an interest initially, when the first phase of selection began in September 2017: Graz, Austria; Calgary, Canada; Sappor, Japan; Sion, Switzerland; and Erzurum, Turkey. All withdrew for various reasons by November 2018.

Sweden missed out on being the host country for the Winter Olympics for the seventh time. It is the country that has the most Winter gold medals yet to hold a Winter Games. The 1912 Summer Olympics were in Stockholm.