With The Winter Olympics In Cortina, I Celebrated By Rewatching The James Bond Movie Filmed There

The 2026 Winter Olympics, which you can watch all of with a Peacock subscription, are rounding the halfway point. Since Cortina d'Ampezzo is one of the co-host locations (along with Milan), I was inspired to watch one of my favorite James Bond movies, For Your Eyes Only, starring Roger Moore, which was partially filmed in the Alpine town.

I have a long history with the movie, as it was the very first Bond film I ever saw, way back in the early ‘80s when we first got a VCR. It was a movie I asked my mom to rent over and over. Watching it now shows off the town’s rich history of winter sports and why it’s such a great location for the Olympics.

There Are A Bunch Of Sports On Display In The Bond Movie

The Bond franchise has taken fans all over the world and shot in many exotic locales. Cortina definitely fits the bill in that respect. The mountain town is quaint, sure, but as it previously hosted the Olympics back in 1956, it is replete with winter sports training and competition venues. In the movie, we get to see quite a few of them.

The most notable action sequence in the town features Bond on skis being pursued by henchmen on motorcycles. Bond does some traditional skiing on the famous mountain, then ends up at the top of a ski jump, which he takes on with regular skis, knocking the rifle out of the hand of one of his enemies (who is also a biathlon competitor). The motorcyclists chase him through the woods, as vacationers dodge bullets from the bikes’ machine guns. Eventually, Bond ends up on the bobsled track before he finally escapes the biathlete.

In the next scene, Bond finds himself on a skating rink with a young figure skater with a crush on him. When she leaves after her practice, 007 is jumped by three goons in hockey gear. Bond scores a hat trick after knocking the last goon into the goal by using the Zamboni machine as a battering ram. The Roger Moore Bond era was so gloriously goofy at times, and this sequence stands out in that regard.

I Still Love For Your Eyes Only, All These Later

I rewatch Bond movies all the time, but it had been a couple of years since rewatching For Your Eyes Only (the whole series is now available with a Netflix subscription). It remains one of my favorites. In part, that’s because it was the first one I saw, and it will always have a special place in my heart for that reason.

It’s also just a really fun movie. It’s probably my second favorite from the Moore era, behind The Spy Who Loved Me. Like so many Bond movies, we get to travel to some excellent European locations as varied as Spain, Corfu, Albania and, of course, the mountains in Italy in Cortina.