The problems just keep piling up for Italy’s 2026 Winter Games ice hockey arena that’s still under construction in Milan, raising questions about the participation of National Hockey League players.
Not only are there concerns about whether the arena will be finished in time for the Olympics, there are new reports that the ice surface is some 3-feet short of the NHL standards agreed to in a deal finalized in July.
But Utah Mammoth owner Ryan Smith posted Thursday on X that he’s “confident Italy will solve this ice problem by February.” He also said Utah’s 2034 Winter Games will do better.
Smith promised in the post that the “@nhl Utah Olympic experience will be next level!” Ice hockey will be held on the Mammoth’s home ice at the Delta Center in 2034. The arena, owned by Smith, is being retrofitted to accommodate hockey.
Italy is supposed to welcome NHL players back to the Olympics for the first time since the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. But an official has already said that players won’t be there if the arena isn’t completed.
That warning came Wednesday from the NHL’s deputy commissioner, Bill Daly, who was asked by a Daily Faceoff reporter about the chances that league players won’t go to the Games that begin in February.
“Depends on % you want to place on the possibility the rink doesn’t get completed. If there’s no rink completed, there’s no NHL players going to the Olympics,” Daly told the Toronto-based hockey news and betting information site, according to a post on X.
Organizers of the Milan-Cortina Games announced Wednesday the arena will host a pre-Games event next month. The key test event to “officially inaugurate” the 16,000-seat Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena is scheduled for Jan. 9-11.
A test event planned for December had to be moved to a smaller facility in Milan but the chief Games operations officer for the 2026 Winter Games, Andrea Francisi, told The Associated Press last month that if the new arena isn’t ready by Games-time, “there is no plan B.”
The decision to dismiss the possibility a rink in Switzerland could be “a standby venue” came at a mid-November meeting of International Olympic Committee and hockey representatives in Stockholm, The Athletic reported, citing unnamed league sources.
The size of the Milan arena’s ice apparently surprised hockey officials.
When the agreement for NHL player participation was signed in July, Daly confirmed the Olympic games would be played on the league’s standard-sized ice sheet, which is 200 feet long by 85 feet wide, in Milan and likely in the next Winter Games, in the French Alps in 2030.
“I know that’s been speculated on by others in the media that it would be some hybrid,” Daly was quoted as saying then in an article on NHL.com, the league’s official website. “No, it’s 200 by 85. I think that will be the case going forward as well.”
However, Team Canada assistant coach Pete DeBoer said in a radio interview Monday that the ice “looks like it’s going to be smaller than NHL rink standard by probably 3 or 4 feet. I don’t understand how that happened.”
Tuesday, The Athletic reported the International Ice Hockey Federation approved a 60-meter by 26-meter sheet of ice (196.85-foot by 85.3-foot) for the Milan arena, noting that NHL players have competed in past Olympics on ice that was 60 meters long but 4 meters wider.
The NHL hasn’t publicly addressed the ice issue, but ESPN reported Wednesday that while there’s concern “about the status of the ice hockey arena for the Milan-Cortina Games,” unnamed sources said “there are no indications the league would pull out of the event.”