The Olympics are a celebration of athletic and sporting excellence. Yet if you ask most people what they remember from last month’s Winter Olympics, they probably won’t start with a medal table. They’ll talk about Norway’s curlers in their ridiculous pants. The medallist who confessed to cheating on his girlfriend. The New Zealand jackets which let fans beam messages straight from home to the mountain. Basically, a lot of things that really have nothing to do with peak performance at all.
What Milano-Cortina really proved is that, for an increasing number of viewers, the Olympics aren’t about sport in itself. Instead, it is a serialised drama about human beings under extreme pressure, dropping tiny, memeable, emotionally loaded breadcrumbs as they go. Yes, people watch for the double backflips. But they stay for the grief tributes, the friendship arcs, the “did you see that?” details that travel through group chats and TikTok feeds.
And yet, many of the brands paying for all of this still mostly behave like it’s 1998: pick the safest favorite, slap on some branded gear, and hope a podium equals cultural relevance. Milano-Cortina was a live case study in how out of step that reflex is – and what a different kind of sponsorship might look like instead.
Officially, Milano-Cortina 2026 will be remembered as the return of big Winter Games viewership, the “Italian postcard” Olympics with Alpine sunsets and picture-perfect ski jumps. Unofficially, it will also be known as the one where Norway’s men’s curling team brought their party pants back.
If you’ve somehow missed this saga: more than a decade ago, Norway’s curlers became cult icons after showing up in loud, diamond-patterned red, white, and blue trousers that looked like something between a circus tent and a dad’s golf nightmare. The pants went viral, the team became internet darlings, and in 2022, skip Thomas Ulsrud, one of the stars of that run, died of cancer. In Milano-Cortina, the team brought the pants back as a one-game tribute to him.
It was instantly one of the most shared images of the Games. Broadcasters told the backstory; fans posted side-by-side photos; people who had never watched a full end of curling in their lives suddenly had opinions about Norwegian men with brooms. It wasn’t about perfection. It was about a small, human ritual that let the world in on their grief.
Elsewhere, the New Zealand team quietly ran one of the most emotionally intelligent plays of the Games. Their official uniforms, designed with outdoor brand Kathmandu, embedded QR codes that let fans send messages of support directly to athletes. Scan a jacket, leave a note, and it would appear in a digital hub the team could access in the Village. It was simple and almost low-fi in a sea of flashy tech activations, but deceptively radical: instead of treating spectators as eyeballs to monetize, it invited them into the story.
You didn’t need to know anything about ski halfpipe scoring to understand what that meant. You just had to have ever wanted to tell someone “I’m rooting for you” from far away. It’s the same instinct that fuels parasocial relationships across the internet. Like a season of prestige TV, it had recurring characters, narrative callbacks, cold opens, comic relief. And like any good series, the moments that stuck weren’t always the most technically impressive. They were the ones with emotional payoff.
At Milano-Cortina, the corporate sponsor playbook played out as expected. Corona Cero threw lavish (alcohol-free) beer garden parties in the Olympic Village, Skims handed out branded loungewear chilling between events, and Coca-Cola ran its familiar fanzone activations with custom cans and pin trading. Familiar executions and familiar faces – the kind of safe, visible presence that fills pitch decks and delivers reliable ROI.
It’s a predictable formula, and one that works commercially. Take Eileen Gu, the world’s highest-paid non-tennis female athlete, who earned $23M+ in the past 12 months. Her partnership list reads like a Fortune 500 roll call: Red Bull, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., Canada Goose, even Longchamp handbags alongside Salomon skis. She’s a proven winner – and brands piled in because winners guarantee eyeballs, social lift, and that clean “performance excellence” narrative.
The reflex is utterly predictable: back the medal favorites and the most bankable stars and hope that some of that magic rubs off on you. Or, if you’re a Nike, as comfy proof points that your technical outerwear will shave microseconds off personal bests.
It’s not that any of this is bad… but it’s a narrow lane. It assumes that what audiences admire most, and want to be closest to, is dominance. That we are all aspiring Olympians in some deep corner of our souls, looking at these people as slightly more aerodynamic versions of ourselves. There but for the grace of God, 30 pounds, and 7000 hours of practice go I.
Milano-Cortina exposed how incomplete, and actually how out of touch, that perception truly is. Most of us are not training at 5 a.m. in subzero temperatures. We are watching cosy at home. What pulls us in is not the fantasy of being them; but the feeling that, briefly, we are with them. The stories that deliver that feeling are rarely the clean “favourite wins again” ones.
And yet, sponsor rosters overwhelmingly favorued exactly that: the already-victorious, the sure things, the narratives that look great in a pre-Games pitch deck but leave very little room for surprise.
If you zoom out, this isn’t just an Olympics thing. It’s a broader entertainment shift that the Games are now fully caught up in. The way we consume sport has collapsed into the way we consume everything else: as short arcs in an endless scroll of stories.
We follow athletes not just for what they do in competition, but for who they’re dating, how they decorate their rooms in the Village, what their parents look like crying in the stands. The Paris Olympics in 2024 brought us the “muffin guy”. Milano-Cortina brought us the biathlete who publicly declared his love for an ex on live TV (it didn’t work out). These are not outliers; they’re the emotional infrastructure of modern fandom.
Milano-Cortina didn’t just happen to foreground that reality against a clean white backdrop. The Olympics have always been a cyclical cultural reset – every two years, the world briefly synchronises around stories of pressure, redemption, and the absurd. Audiences show up primed for it, and Milano-Cortina’s pristine Alpine stage simply made the human messiness impossible to miss. Norway’s pants were a perfect example: they condensed an entire narrative – history, loss, humor, defiance – into a single visual object. The NZ jackets fused fan participation and athlete psychology in one functional garment. Those are both, at heart, storytelling devices.
And stories move beyond sport accounts into fashion feeds, queer Twitter, group chats that only wake up for big events. They’re remixable. They’re sticky. They’re what you think about a week later, long after you’ve forgotten who placed fourth in men’s slalom.
For brands, that matters because cultural relevance now follows the same path. You can buy your way into a winner’s circle. You cannot buy your way into a meme – or a shared, collective memory – without actually being part of the story that generated it.
So how do brands actually intentionally take part in this new story-first Olympics economy?
First, it means shifting the core question from “Who is most likely to win?” to “Whose story is most likely to resonate?” That usually isn’t the dominant superpower. It’s the almost-there, the returning-from-injury, the late bloomer, the tiny delegation with three athletes and a borrowed coach. It’s the emotional volatility that makes sport feel alive.
Backing those narratives doesn’t have to mean abandoning high performance. It means consciously carving out budget and attention for the fringes: the cult team with a devoted online following; the alpine skier whose parents remortgaged their house; the 18-year-old snowboarder whose second run after a brutal fall becomes an instant folklore moment.
Second, it means investing in formats that let stories unfold, not just slapping logos on equipment. Imagine if a brand had underwritten Norway’s pants tribute as part of a broader project about ritual and legacy in sport – short films, interviews, a traveling exhibition of fan-made memorabilia. Or if a sponsor had partnered with New Zealand to expand that QR-code idea into a platform that connects fans and athletes across sports all year round, not just at the Games.
Third, it means building reactive muscles. Not everything can be pre-planned in a glossy 40-page strategy booklet. Some of the best stories at Milano-Cortina emerged out of chaos: shocking upsets, unexpected friendships, weather delays that turned into human TV. The brands that will win at LA 2028 are the ones with small, empowered teams who can spot a story as it’s happening and decide, quickly, “We’re going to help tell this one” – by resourcing creators, commissioning a mini-doc, or simply amplifying the right voices instead of pushing out pre-scheduled generic content.
And finally, it means being okay with not owning the narrative, but supporting it. The easiest way for a brand to ruin a good Olympic story is to center itself in it. The pants worked because they were about Ulsrud, not any sponsor. The NZ jackets worked because they were about fans and athletes, not a hashtag. The best brand moves are almost structural: they make the story possible, more visible, more enduring.
As attention turns to LA 2028, indeed any major sporting event, Milano-Cortina should act as a reminder that their glossy decks full of medal predictions and “share of voice” charts are only one part of the equation.
The other part is harder to quantify: memory. What will people actually remember, and why? Which images will still be floating around social feeds a week, a month, a year after the flame goes out? Sometimes that’s pure performance – impossible runs, or epic golds. But even those moments lodge in our heads because of the story wrapped around them: the personality, the context, the sense of what was at stake.
When the Games are over, the brands that mattered won’t necessarily be the ones on the most podium photos. They’ll be the ones attached, however lightly, to the stories people tell each other over dinner.
Maybe that looks like a small outdoor brand forever associated with a team that turned fan messages into a lifeline. Maybe it’s a local company that backed a first-time medallist from a small country and then followed their life at home after the Games. Maybe it’s a beauty label that spends its budget documenting the women behind the scenes, from wax techs to coaches.
Whatever form it takes, the lesson from Milano-Cortina is simple: performance and story are not opposites, but different layers of the same myth. The medals go into the record books; the narratives replay in culture. And if the Olympics are going to keep functioning as one of the last truly shared global dramas, the smartest brands won’t just chase the winners – they’ll help carry the plot.
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