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Just days before the world’s best skiers, skaters, and snowboarders descend on northern Italy, the 2026 Winter Olympics have achieved something remarkable: They’ve managed to disappoint almost everyone without enraging anyone. In an age when every major sporting event seems to provoke either a boycott or accusations of sportswashing, Milan Cortina has slipped through the cracks of our outrage machinery.

Call it the Compromise Olympics.

Just days before the world’s best skiers, skaters, and snowboarders descend on northern Italy, the 2026 Winter Olympics have achieved something remarkable: They’ve managed to disappoint almost everyone without enraging anyone. In an age when every major sporting event seems to provoke either a boycott or accusations of sportswashing, Milan Cortina has slipped through the cracks of our outrage machinery.

Call it the Compromise Olympics.

The numbers tell the story. Five Russian athletes have been approved to compete—not as Russians but as “individual neutral athletes.” They’ll wear no flag, sing no anthem, and won’t march in the opening ceremony. Ukraine has protested that even this is too much, documenting alleged connections between approved athletes and Moscow’s war effort. Russia, meanwhile, treats the whole arrangement as an insult to national pride. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) insists it’s threading the needle perfectly.

Everyone is a little bit angry, which means everyone gets to pretend they’ve won.

This was not how things went down in 1980. When President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he didn’t offer Benn Fields—to take but one example—the chance to compete under a neutral flag. The high jumper, then at the peak of his powers, never had another chance to try for Olympic gold.

Representatives of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Athletes Advisory Council—from left, Larry Hough, Anita DeFrantz, and Fred Newhouse—speak to reporters at the White House after meeting with Carter administration officials on April 3, 1980. They said they held little hope that President Jimmy Carter would alter his position on the boycott of the Olympics in Moscow. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Athletes on both sides saw their dreams vaporized for a geopolitical point that, as then-IOC President Thomas Bach—who lost his chance to fence in Moscow for West Germany—noted in 2020, “serves nothing.” The boycott hurt........

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