By Elvira Pollina MILAN (Reuters) -Italy began the one-year countdown to the Winter Olympics on Thursday with a series of events designed to fuel enthusiasm for the Games that will be co-hosted by Milan and the Alpine town of Cortina d'Ampezzo.

Next year’s Olympics might be called the Milan Cortina Games but it will actually be staged across a large swath of northern Italy spread over five different venue clusters.

After all, Varnier, the CEO of the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy, spent a lot of time in Utah more than two decades ago as one of the directors of his country’s last Winter Games, in Torino in 2006.