Ahead of the highly anticipated return of NHL players to the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Games, hockey fans had a lot of questions about ice quality, local fan interest, and perhaps most importantly, sleeping arrangements.
Unlike other Olympic Games, athletes this year will be spread out across an area of more than 22,000 square kilometres, a far cry from the large, centralized Olympic villages of the past.
Even the two official Italian host cities – Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo – sit roughly five hours apart by car.
But all ice-based events are scheduled to take place in Milan, which is where men’s and women’s hockey players will be staying during the tournament, in a pared down athletes village containing newly constructed dorms.
In total, roughly 1,500 athletes and team members will be housed there for the games, which officially begin Friday.
When it comes to the individual beds athletes are assigned and what material they are made of – a source of controversy at past Olympic Games – a British ice dancer appears to have answered that question on social media.
“I just arrived at the Olympic village, and I think it’s time to answer a question everyone’s asking,” Olympian Phebe Bekker said in a video posted to TikTok.
“Are the beds cardboard? We’re looking good … that is a mattress,” she said after knocking on what appeared to be a solid wood bed frame.
Olympic organizers in Paris and Tokyo were criticized following reports that some athlete beds were made of cardboard, and there was speculation online that it was partly to discourage intimacy between Olympians, though that claim was disputed.
“There are no cardboard beds,” Bekker added, “well, as far as I know.”
For NHL players who will be competing in the men’s Olympic hockey tournament for the first time in over a decade, games get started on Feb. 11 and run until the gold medal game scheduled for Feb. 22.
The women’s hockey tournament, meanwhile, had already gotten underway on Thursday, with preliminary round games between Germany and Sweden, France and Italy, and the U.S. and Czechia.
Team Canada was scheduled to face off against Finland, but the game was postponed until next week due to the spread of norovirus amongst the Finnish players.
With files from The Associated Press
