Streets once lined with swastikas are now full of spectators and sports fans as Cortina-d’Ampezzo welcomes the world for the 2026 Winter Olympic Games.
In the same spot where a giant portrait of Mussolini once hung, modern day curlers now hope to avoid hanging stones in their quest for gold.
Nothing political remains from these 1941 scenes — just photos, faded film, and now a long-lost list of names.
“I found this paper in my office, just in a corner, a little corner,” said Max Vergani, who recently found the official record book of the Cortina 1941 World Games inside his office at the Italian Winter Sports Federation.
“It was very old and very powdery. I mean, full of names,” he said of the handwritten ledger. “This was very emotional for me.”
Vergani serves as communications director for the federation, but he is also an author who has studied and written about these somewhat hidden “Olympic” games.
“Nobody knows the story,” he said.
Mussolini’s mini-Olympics
In 1939, Cortina d’Ampezzo was named host of the 1944 Winter Olympics. But with the Second World War progressing, the International Olympic Committee voted to cancel the 1944 Games.
Undeterred, Mussolini invited the world’s best winter athletes to Cortina anyway.
“Mussolini called his men and said, ‘We will do it’, and they organized the World Championships of ’41,” Vergani said, calling the competition more propaganda than sporting event.
“This became an event to publish (publicize) the Italian man, the fastest man and so on. We are the biggest, we are the strongest. We can do a World Champs without any trouble during the war. This was a big message for Mussolini.”
It wasn’t a true international event though.
Allied nations like Britain, France and the United States were excluded from the competition.
But Italy and Germany showed up in force — with a handful of other occupied and Axis nations.
Germans, competing under the Nazi flag, nearly swept all the Alpine skiing events.
Finland dominated the Nordic events.
But by 1946 — after the end of the war — the International Skiing Federation wiped out all the results and withdrew the athlete’s medals.
A story to be written
Vergani said he saw more than a book of names when he found that official record. He saw a story.
“After the war it was colored black and needed to be canceled in some way but what I found and what I feel today is that the stories of these athletes, the emotion of the bigger crowd that was there, all the story needs to be remembered,” he said.
“There were absolute champions who, fascism, non-fascism, Nazism, non-Nazism, would have won anyway. And the sporting aspect is what convinced me to tell these stories of these great athletes who, due to the removal of the World Championships from the rankings, lost their medals. And because of the war, they no longer had any other opportunities and lost the best part of their careers. I thought it was right to remember instead what they achieved as athletes and in their competitive careers.”
One of the most decorated athletes from the 1941 games was German skier Christl Cranz. She won gold in women’s downhill and combined and took silver in slalom. Even without those three medals, Cranz still holds the record for total career World Championship medals, matched only recently when Mikaela Shiffrin of the United States won her 15th world medal in 2025 and gold in the 2026 Games.
Italy’s only gold medal winner at the championships was skier Celine Seghi. With 25 first place finishes at the national level, her first chance at a major international competition came in 1941 in Cortina. Shegi won the women’s slalom event and earned silver in combined but had to give up those medals when the ski federation nullified the results.
“When the war was finished and she came back to normal races, she was almost 30 and her career was gone. She was never able to win another gold medal,” Verdani said. He interviewed Seghi in 2022, shortly before her death at 102 years old. “She was enraged. Still enraged because she will say to me, ‘I lose my only gold medal. I worked all my life to win this medal.’ She was an incredible woman.”
Seghi also told Verdani about the athletes’ experience at the Games — where politics were front and center, but behind the scenes athletes were focused on their sport.
“Celine told me that when they were out of the scene in the hotel and so on, there was a normal feeling, like an athlete to another, talking about skiing. Talking about the snow. Talking about what do you feel on the slope? Like today, more or less. Like today. So it’s a strange story because you have politics outside and the athletes inside.”
The Games in days of modern conflict
The canceled Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo were not the first, nor the last to be canceled due to political upheaval. The 1916 Games in Berlin were right on track until 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated, leading to the start of World War I.
The 1940 edition of the games were set to take place in Tokyo and Sapporo, Japan, until unrest forced Olympic committee members to call off the event. The International Olympic Committee reawarded the games to Finland and Switzerland but the start of World War II forced their cancellation again.
London was supposed to host the Summer Games in 1944, along with Cortina d’Ampezzo’s Winter Games, but the lingering war left Britain unable to host. London got the chance to host 1948, three years after the end of the World War II.
Cortina d’Ampezzo was granted another opportunity to host the Olympic Games in 1956, an event that ultimately eclipsed the 1941 Games and emerged as a symbol of renewal as Italy embraced democracy after the war.