UPCOMING EDITION | The World Converges in Milan: Blood, Politics, and Sport

—Original Artwork by Isabella Befring—

The Olympic flame descended upon Milan-Cortina in February 2026, carrying the weight of the promise of a temporary ceasefire in the arena of global politics, where athletes compete not as representatives of governments, but as embodiment of human potential. What unfolded was not a suspension of politics, but an intensification, revealing the complex nature of how it is impossible to separate sport from blood, and politics.

This edition of The Forum examines the 2026 Winter Olympics as a convergence point where failures of our era become impossible to ignore. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declared these as the “most gender-balanced Games in history”, the celebration collided with the deeper truth, that one of the original disciplines, Nordic combined, in its 102 years of existence, still excludes women entirely. When Kazakhstan celebrated its figure skating champion the gold medal masked a system that undervalues dancers who brought home world championship titles, leaving non-olympic sports like ballroom dancing to survive on private grit alone. While American athletes carried their flag into the stadium, doing so while ICE agents walked the streets of Milan, met by protesters that saw beyond the sports neutrality and in itself claimed it was a political position.   

Members of The Forum travelled to Cortina to witness these tensions unfold firsthand, to move beyond the headlines into the arenas, to speak to spectators and athletes. Getting a feel of the weight of a game that interrogates what unity costs and whom it excludes. What emerges is the unmasking of politics in sport. 

The articles presented investigate the convergence of blood, politics and sport through the distinct lenses: the economics of athletic sacrifice, the persisting gender barriers despite headlines of equality, protests against American enforcement abroad, and the structural corruption that binds global governing bodies. The Winter Olympics are never just a game, they are the world condensed into two weeks of ice and ambition, offering no escape from our world, but a stage upon which the deepest contradictions perform.  

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