The drones that are starring in the Olympics

I think they should have a drone competition at the next Olympics. Of course the French pilots will naturally cheat.

Everyone Watching the Olympics Is Buzzing About $150,000 Flying Robots

Drones have brought viewers closer to the athletes than ever before. The pilots behind them have to be at the top of their game, too.

Song Qiwu competes in the ski jumping competition as a drone films at the Winter Olympics.

By Robert O’Connell, WSJ

Feb. 13, 2026 7:00 am ET

Drones are capturing close-range footage of athletes at the Milan Cortina Games, changing how the Olympics are watched.

The real stars of the Milan Cortina Games aren’t on skis or skates or even bombing downhill on sleds. Instead, they have propellers, reach speeds of 110 miles per hour and emit high-pitched buzzing sounds.

They’re also changing the way the world watches the Olympics.

All over Northern Italy, organizers have unleashed a fleet of drones to capture athletes at close range while they execute terrifying feats of winter athleticism. They’re whipping around corners at the speedskating oval. They’re tailing skiers as they rip through moguls. They’re even shooting down skeleton runs.

If you’re marveling at an athlete at these Winter Games, it’s probably because you’re getting a drone’s-eye view.

Behind each of those flying robots is someone like Florian Blang, a professional drone pilot who has spent years training for his Olympic moment. Blang could never ski his way into the Games, but with a joystick in his hands, he’s learned every inch of the race course.

“You want to fly as low as possible and stick as close as you can, but those gates are very dangerous,” he said. “And it’s the Olympics—the biggest event in the world. It’s totally mind-blowing.”

When a drone pilot makes a mistake, the effects can be disastrous. For a long while following an infamous incident in 2015, the idea of drones hovering over ski races was verboten. That’s the year a drone crashed into the slope during a World Cup ski race in Italy, narrowly missing Marcel Hirscher. The International Ski Federation immediately banned the use of drones in broadcasts.

But the appetite for footage that took viewers closer to the action didn’t fade.

“Athletes always say, ‘You’re not showing how fast, how hard, how dangerous this is,’” said Michael Sheehan, the coordinating director for NBC’s Olympics coverage. “‘Why can’t television do that?’”

Now television can. And it’s all thanks to $150,000 pieces of technology—and the fast-twitch virtuosos who pilot them. Behind every shot of a luger hurtling around a bend or a freestyle skier twisting through thin air is a drone operator. Donning video headsets and armed with nothing more than a joystick and the Olympics’ fastest fingers, these maestros have the exact same objective as the athlete they’re filming: to be the best in the world.

“We trained them in the specific sport for a long time,” said Yiannis Exarchos, the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services. “I don’t dare to say they trained as much as the athletes, but they spent many, many days.”

Except for the drone pilots who actually are athletes. The pilot covering ski jumping is a former competitive ski jumper himself, and Exarchos has a plan to pull other ex-Olympians into the pipeline.

The pilots who are already at the Olympics all tell similar stories about the day their lives changed forever when they first test-drove a first-person view drone simulator. As a videogame obsessed kid in Germany, Blang dreamed of racing futuristic spaceships. The next best thing was piloting clunky, first-generation drones to get simple aerial shots. and then along came these sci-fi speedsters made of 3D-printed carbon fiber.

“It’s like going from a normal car,” Blang said, “to Formula One.”

A drone operator prepares to cover the men's 5,000 meters speedskating race.

But he learned to master this new machine that could achieve insane speeds and execute hairpin turns while taking crystalline video. He whipped it around human subjects and through vast buildings, filming shorts and commercials, which prepared him for the toughest test in his profession: keeping up with live sporting events.

After Blang had sped along with mountain-bike world championships, skiing World Cups and hockey games without the safety net of a second take, André Theis, the CEO of a company supplying drones to these games, knew he was just the man to film gold-medal events. But even Blang was nervous in the days leading up to the Olympics.

“There are amazing pilots who wouldn’t dare fly here,” he said. “The director wants you to get closer, and you have to decide in split-seconds if it’s safe enough—because skiers make mistakes too.”

For all of the technological advances that have made this footage possible, even the most sophisticated equipment is little more than a hunk of carbon-fiber without a skilled human manning the controller.

Pilots log hundreds of hours chasing imaginary cars, bikes, and skiers through digital landscapes to practice—so that when the whole world is watching, they can reach their own rarefied plane of athletic zen.

“I don’t want to think about what I’m doing with my fingers,” Blang said. “I want to see—and react.”