Real Gold: Getty Images' fight for photographic authenticity at the 2026 Winter Olympics

The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games are a defining chapter for Australian sport. We've recently watched Australia’s most successful Winter Olympics campaign unfold; with five medals and historic golds from the likes of Jakara Anthony, Josie Baff, and Cooper Woods.

As Australian athletes push the boundaries, the way we witness them is also being fundamentally reshaped. From remote robotic cameras and drones unlocking impossible vantage points – to thermal imaging technology being used by photographers to show athletes in sub-zero environments; these tech advances are shaping the spectacle, immersiveness and storytelling of sports.

Milano Cortina is a live case study for how innovations in sports photography are key to capturing Olympic history in fresh and compelling ways. And when a nation’s pride is caught in the millisecond of a technical turn on the slopes, the raw and unfiltered truth is exactly what sports fans demand. 

So in a world where deepfakes and AI-generated slop are a 'reality', our photographers, editors and staff are committed to providing imagery to audiences worldwide that ensures when we rewatch history, we’re seeing the truth.

The 'reality' verification process and trust

As generative AI intensifies concerns around authenticity, our approach at the Winter Olympic Games is a deliberate blueprint for the industry. We do not accept AI-generated images into our editorial or creative libraries, and we reinforce verification processes at every stage of ingestion, from requiring original material to maintaining a strong global network of accredited photographers on the ground. In an era where anyone can generate a photorealistic image from a prompt, this is the only way to safeguard the editorial record and establish trust. 

At the Milano Cortina Games, one of the most spread out in Winter Olympic history, we have deployed a team of 120 photographers, editors and operations specialists to produce more than six million images across 16+ sports. The team delivers over 10,000 uploads per day in near real time, often within 30 seconds of a defining moment. While technology enables the rapid search and download of this content, we continue to invest in the specialist expertise of our editorial staff who verify content using proprietary tools to identify high-risk files. 

In an era where “efficiency” and “productivity” are often conflated with automation, we’re proving that scale, speed and trust can coexist — and that human expertise, backed by robust infrastructure, remains essential to documenting history as it unfolds. 

For more than three decades, Getty Images has operated under strict editorial and journalistic standards and in a world of ‘AI slop’, that responsibility has grown. All photographers must now treat trust as a technical requirement; a watermark must be more than a brand, it must be a guarantee of reality.

Combining innovation with human expertise 

Expertise cannot be synthesised. The intuition to anticipate a split-second turn of the head, the discipline to hold position in brutal conditions, the instinct to frame emotion against landscape — these are capabilities forged over decades, not prompted into existence. At world events of this magnitude, where history unfolds in fractions of a second, human judgment is irreplaceable.

For the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, our team is developing creative projects powered not by generative AI, but by technology in the hands of photographers. ‘Winter Heat’, for example, uses thermal imaging cameras to make visible what traditional photography cannot: the muscular exertion, body heat and energy exchange between athletes and the freezing air around them.

Shooting in thermal requires almost relearning photography – composing with temperature and motion instead of aperture and shutter speed, embracing delayed heat imprints that trail behind athletes like echoes of effort. The result is work that is both documentary and poetic, revealing the physical cost of performance in sub-zero arenas.

We are pushing the limits of how we see the Games. With ‘Infrared’, our team is using cameras to capture light the human eye can’t see, using familiar stadiums to create surreal landscapes of light and shadow. We are also expanding ‘Layers of the Games’ introduced at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, which merges several moments into one photo to show an entire race or event unfolding in a single, dramatic frame.

And sometimes innovation means looking backward. In ‘Back to the Future’, our photographers are working with vintage Graflex cameras – the kind used when Cortina last hosted the Games in 1956 – now ingeniously adapted to transmit images via smartphone in near real time. The aesthetic evokes another era; the workflow is unmistakably modern.

Together, these projects affirm a simple truth: innovation is not a departure from photography, nor is AI its synonym. The future of visual storytelling belongs to those who pair technology with experience – and to the human eye that knows when history is happening.

Is this kind of visual purism still sustainable?

Across the industry, we’re seeing that trust matters, and authenticity is at the core of that trust. Our VisualGPS research shows visual integrity matters to Australians too. Audiences crave the honesty, realism and craftsmanship in how sport is represented. Visual sameness, whether driven by algorithms or AI shortcuts, risks eroding emotional connection rather than strengthening it.

Milano Cortina 2026 is a new benchmark for Australian sport, but it is also a benchmark for history being documented in the AI era. While we continue to look for new ways to push the boundaries of visual content at sporting events and how fans experience it, preserving and protecting an accurate, comprehensive, and verified archive for the future remains at the heart of our work.

You can see more of the incredible Getty Images editorial coverage of the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics on their website.