By The Numbers: A look at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics

MILAN (AP) — The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics officially started on Friday, with the opening ceremony and the lighting of the cauldrons.

And these Games are particularly supersized.

These are the first Olympics to fully embrace cost-cutting reforms installed by the International Olympic Committee, and use mostly existing venues — which has meant scattering the Games all over northern Italy.

Here’s a look at some of the key numbers ahead of the opening ceremony:

The number of new sports at these Games. Ski mountaineering — also know as skimo — is making its Olympic debut. The sport combines uphill sprinting (on boots and on skis) and downhill skiing.

That's how many times Italy has hosted the Winter Olympics previously: in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1956 and Turin in 2006. Italy has held the Summer Games once, in Rome in 1960.

The number of locations for events in the most spread-out Winter Games ever. Ice sports will take place in Milan and women’s Alpine skiing, curling and sliding events in Cortina — the two main hubs. But there will also be competition in Bormio, Livigno, Predazzo, Tesero and Anterselva, and the closing ceremony will take place in Verona.

Number of Russian athletes set to compete as neutral individuals along with seven Belarusians. They are not allowed to compete under their national flag or anthem and cannot take part in the opening ceremony athlete parades.

The number of days of competition.

The age difference (in years) between Team USA's oldest athlete at the Games and its youngest. Curler Rich Ruohonen will set a Team USA Winter Olympic record at age 54, while the youngest member of the team is 15-year-old freeskier Abby Winterberger.

Lindsey Vonn's age at her fifth Olympics after making a sensational return to ski racing. If she wins what would be a fourth Olympics medal she would edge France’s Johan Clarey — who was also 41 when he claimed downhill silver in 2022 — to become the oldest Olympic Alpine skiing medalist ever.

How old San Siro turns this year. The stadium that will host the opening ceremony will be knocked down in the next few years after a new arena is built next to it.

The number of medal events at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. If that sounds like a lot, it's not even close to the Summer Games. There will be more than 350 medal events at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The number of athletes competing at the Milan Cortina Games. The United States will have the largest presence with 235 athletes — the largest ever U.S. Winter Olympics team. Host nation Italy will have 196.

That's how many volunteers will be helping out at the Games. About 900 of them will be working behind the scenes at the opening ceremony.

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

The sun sets over the mountains and the Livigno Valley prior to the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games opening ceremony in Livigno, Italy on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP)

Japan's Goshin Fujiki poses for a photo in front of the Olympic rings at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

United States' Lindsey Vonn concentrates ahead of an alpine ski, women's downhill official training, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Marco Trovati)

Milan Cortina 2026 is projected on the facade of a building in front of the Duomo gothic cathedral, in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

An athlete skis past Olympic rings during a cross country training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Tesero, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

CAIRO (AP) — Iranians began to regain internet access on Wednesday after authorities ended a monthslong shutdown. But users said service was slow and spotty in some areas, with apps like YouTube and Instagram heavily restricted, as they were before the cutoff began during nationwide protests in January.

Authorities justified the outage as a military imperative after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Their decision to lift some restrictions this week came as negotiators appeared to be closing in on a more permanent truce. But many Iranians feared access could be cut off again at a moment's notice.

Internet tracking company Netblocks said Iran’s connectivity, which measures the ability of devices to connect to the internet, is at around 86% of capacity from before the cutoff. Internet analysis firm Kentik said internet traffic, which measures the amount of data transferred and is a good illustration of usage, was at around 40%.

Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity analyst, said there were still widespread disruptions. “It's too early to say the shutdown is over,” he wrote on X.

Iran’s roughly 90 million people have been cut off from the internet for most of 2026, one of the world’s longest and strictest national shutdowns. Young people with online careers saw their incomes evaporate. Job losses and the closure of online businesses added to the war's steep economic costs.

The cutoff made it difficult for Iranian families to communicate through months of unrest and war. At some points, phone lines were also cut off, though they were later restored.

A woman living in Tehran said that for months she was barely able to speak to her sons living abroad. She couldn't believe authorities had restored access, saying she had assumed they would find some justification to prolong the outage.

A taxi driver said service was restored but weak. He expressed hope it would improve so he could use messaging apps with family and friends. Both spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Prices spiked during the shutdown, with residents in Tehran at times paying around $7.50 per gigabyte. Prices are back down to around $2.25 for 30 gigabytes, roughly where they were before the protests.

Even then, Iran tightly controlled access to popular social media sites, leading many to rely on virtual private networks, or VPNs. The cost of those workarounds soared during the shutdown, making them unaffordable for many as the economy was battered.

Businesses have started reappearing online, announcing their return with posts on sites like Instagram and Telegram.

A gamer and tech influencer in the central city of Isfahan said the shutdown had caused him to lose a lot of his audience on YouTube and Instagram, where he had spent years building up a large following.

“All my views and interactions are way down. I’ve been erased from the algorithm,” he said in a voice note sent by WhatsApp, adding that his internet connection was still slower than before the shutdown.

“The situation is such that many content producers have had their income reduced to zero, have moved on to other jobs, or have been forced to sell their equipment to survive,” he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Iranian authorities first shut down the internet in January during mass anti-government protests that were eventually stamped out in a violent crackdown. Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands detained.

That cutoff was just starting to ease when the government imposed a complete internet blackout after the start of the war, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and other top officials.

The government faced criticism for the prolonged shutdown, which caused even more harm to an economy devastated by inflation, strikes on key industries and a U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.

The internet cutoff cost an estimated $30-40 million daily, with indirect losses likely twice that much, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Afshin Kolahi, told a local newspaper last month. About 10 million people have jobs that depend on internet connectivity, according to Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi.

Iranians still had access to a national net, but that has a far narrower reach, and users complained of poor service and heavy censorship. Senior government officials are given SIM cards granting them access to the global internet. Under pressure, the government expanded access to the SIM cards to some professions during the shutdown.

A woman checks her smartphone while sitting on a bench along a sidewalk in northern Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, May 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)