Long before the world’s best skiers carved down the Italian Alps, certain giants roamed the very same mountains, leaving thousands of footprints behind. With just a few weeks left for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, a wildlife photographer noticed strange shapes carved into the rock while exploring a remote alpine area near the Games venues.

In September, Elio Della Ferrera had set out to photograph deer and vultures. While scanning a steep rock wall about 600 meters above the nearest road, something unusual caught his eye. The site sits between 2,400 and 2,800 meters above sea level on a shaded, north-facing wall. Despite being in plain sight, the footprints were nearly impossible to detect without a powerful lens.

Driven by curiosity, Della Ferrera carefully climbed the vertical rock face to take a closer look.

The area had likely never been explored before due to harsh weather and difficult access. But high inside Stelvio National Park, near the Olympic site of Bormio, Della Ferrera had stumbled upon one of the oldest and largest collections of dinosaur footprints ever found.

The tracks date back around 210 million years to the Triassic Period. Experts estimate there could be as many as 20,000 footprints spread across nearly five kilometers.

The location itself made the find even more interesting.

This area, close to the Swiss border, was once a prehistoric coastal zone but had never before revealed any dinosaur traces.

“The dinosaurs of the Stelvio were very similar to this plateosaurus…Bipedal with long necks and little heads,” Cristiano Dal Sasso, Paleontologist, natural history museum of Milan, said in an interview with WLBT. “They were herbivores, and they walked in large groups, as we have seen and witnessed from the just-discovered orbs.”

Scientists believe the prints were made by long-necked plant eaters similar to Plateosaurus. Some were up to 10 meters long and weighed as much as four tons. Several tracks measure nearly 40 centimeters wide, with claws still clearly visible.

Even Lombardy regional governor Attilio Fontana later called the discovery a “gift of the Olympics” and mentioned that there are plans to make the remote site accessible to the public in the future.

As Milan Cortina prepares to welcome the world, the Alps have already shown us that long before medals, crowds, and cameras, these mountains were alive with much more. In fact, the 2026 discovery is part of a curious pattern of unexpected finds near Olympic sites.

Winter Olympic Games reveal hidden history

As early as the year 2002, the Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, had a well-known fossil history. But this history has faced modern threats.

In 2018, tourists at Red Fleet State Park in Utah accidentally destroyed 200-million-year-old dinosaur tracks by throwing them into the water. As a result, some of the bigger tracks, such as those left by dinosaurs like Dilophosaurus, were lost permanently. However, history re-emerged in unexpected forms.

In the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the remains of a 12th-century Jin Dynasty palace in Taizicheng, Hebei Province, were discovered during the Olympic Village construction. Soon, archeologists identified the site as Taihe Palace: a summer residence of Emperor Zhangzong with a complete set of city walls, moats, roads, foundation of buildings, and various artifacts, such as dragon head sculptures and Ding ware porcelain.

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The discovery was important because it changed the construction plans. The authorities decided to preserve the location, and it was opened to visitors as an archaeological park.

These discoveries are like scouting reports on the ancient ‘inhabitants’ of the Olympic venues, demonstrating that the Games often lead not only to human success, but also to a lost page in the history and pre-history of mankind.