MILAN — The breakout star of theMilan Cortina Winter Olympicsisn't an athlete.
It's a fleet of 25 drones.
With spotters by their side, goggles-wearing drone operators at these games have daringly flown drones through luge tracks with only a few feet of clearance on either side, shadowed speed skaters around tight corners, and captured downhill skiers against the stunning backdrop of the Dolomites while flying at speeds up to 75 mph.
"We saw an opportunity there to try and bring the coverage of the sports into a new dimension, we believe," said Yiannis Exarchos, the chief executive of Olympic Broadcasting Services. "And especially for some of the winter sports, it was a great opportunity to really show and make people feel what it is (like) actually practicing these sports at this level."
Drones were first used at an Olympics in 2014, and "first-person-view" drones debuted during mountain biking at the 2024 Paris Olympics because of courses that made traditional camera positions difficult. The 25 drones deployed at these Olympics, including 15 "first-person-view" drones, still make up a small slice of the more than 800 cameras used by Olympic Broadcasting Services to capture footage it then shares with its 21 media rights-holders, including NBC.
Yet they are having a moment, making a buzz that goes beyond the whirring sound their fly-bys produce. Demand from journalists for how OBS implemented the drones was so strong that the Olympics brought Exarchos into a large briefing this week.
"Olympic drone pilots might be the most underrated upgrade of these Games,"said one person on X. "The shots are insane."
Said U.S. Alpine skier A.J. Hurt: "It's pretty cool, especially in the downhill when it follows athletes for so long off those huge jumps."
"We are surprised a little bit" by the reaction, said Marcin Grzybowski, a senior host broadcast producer for OBS overseeing the coverage of cross-country skiing, biathlon and ski jumping. "But also (we) expect to impress, to give our Olympic viewers something new, something they like, and something they can be surprised (by)."
The planning to expand the use of drones began more than two years ago, because organizers wanted to find a way to hook casual sports viewers who Exarchos said make up more than half of any Olympics' viewing audience.
Advancements in technology had reduced their size, increased their broadcast capabilities and reduced the lag time transmitting shots via RF signals to broadcast trucks. These drones have been modified for their sport, and come from a number of vendors, including Chinese-based companies, Exarchos said. Weighing between a half-pound to a pound, they weren't added as a gimmick.
"We use a technological innovation only if it adds to the story that we're telling, not just to showcase technology," he said. "If we simply started flying around drones and showing random things, people after the first day would get sick of it."
Of the 16 sports at the Winter Olympics, drones have captured footage in all but hockey, curling, short-track speed skating and figure skating, where the organizers felt traditional cameras, including overhead cameras that move on cables, were a better fit.
Ski jumping has long been a sport watched from below. But at these Olympics, they've been seen from above, as a drone operator — a former ski jumper himself — maneuvers a drone behind skiers at the moment of liftoff, high above the ground. The operator's background in the sport helped develop their plan to shoot the sport, Exarchos said, adding he hopes that more Olympic athletes will become trained drone pilots to enhance the games' coverage.
Long before viewers began embracing the footage, however, organizers needed athletes to get on board, with Exarchos calling their safety his top priority. All drones must comply with civil aviation rules and are required to be flown behind or to the side of athletes to avoid the possibility of an aerial mishap that could endanger a competitor, Exarchos said. Test crashes have taken place; at the short-track speed-skating venue, course marshals have practiced how to dispose of any fallen drone parts and get the course ready for the next run.
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The owner of a Dutch drone company, whoposted that he wasamong the pilots flying at the luge track, said he had been preparing for 12 months.
"100% the most difficult job I've ever done, flying a tight space like this 50 times per session consistently without any room for error. Now let's go for 2 more weeks!"
Some Olympic sports allow extra chances for mistakes. But with drone operators, "there isnoroom for error," Jelmer Poelsma, a drone operator at speed skating, said.
It's generally considered easier to operate drones in so-called "linear speed" sports in which athletes move at a consistent speed, rather than a sport like moguls, where athletes speed up and slow down, requiring pilots to do the same.
Poelsma had been flying drones for 11 years before he began training for the Olympics. The drone he uses can't stabilize the image, he said, requiring him to both keep a safe distance from skaters traveling about 40 mph while doing it smoothly enough that producers can get a usable shot. He first tested the drone in Milan two months before the games opened and said he was "not nervous."
"Some of the athletes already get in contact with me, and obviously it was if I could share the footage of them," Poelsma said "They thought it was really cool."
Drones lose their connectivity at different distances based on different conditions, Grzybowski said, but at luge, drones follow the first three turns before flying back to their "base," often for a battery swap after only a couple runs. The drone team stationed at ski jumping has come up with a way to catch the drone, change the battery and throw it back in the air.
"Even better than an F1 pit stop," Grzybowski said.
Grzybowski will oversee coverage of canoe slalom at the 2028 Olympics, and said he's already interested in flying a drone between the slalom course's gates to show "what kind of feeling (it's) like going through all this course."
Their use has been praised by athletes, but hasn't drawn universally rave reviews.
Bea Kim, the U.S. snowboarder, said that drones had sometimes flown too close to competitors. Their presence wasn't distracting to Zoi Sadowski Synnott, a silver medalist in Big Air from New Zealand, but "the bird's eye view of our tricks isn't the best or coolest way to see what we're doing," she said.
Anna Riccardi, the Milan 2026 Sport Director, said this week that organizers had not received any complaints from athletes "that could have led to the non-use of drones."
The noise the drones produce has also been a persistent topic. But between noise-damping wind and helmets, some athletes don't notice.
"When you're watching it, you're thinking there's no way they're not hearing that," Hurt said. "But I have never heard it when skiing."
Austrian snowboarder Anna Gasser said the presence of a drone during her runs was nothing new because her boyfriend already flies racing drones around her when she trains.
"I didn't care at all about the drone," Gasser said. "If it had hit me, I hope they would have given me another run."
