{"id":277901,"date":"2026-02-03T03:45:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T03:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/277901\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T03:45:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T03:45:12","slug":"boy-stranded-over-olympic-prices-invited-to-opening-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/277901\/","title":{"rendered":"Boy stranded over Olympic prices invited to opening show"},"content":{"rendered":"

An 11-year-old boy left stranded in the snow after failing to pay a bus ticket inflated for Italy’s Winter Olympics will take part in Friday’s opening ceremony, a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

Riccardo had boarded the bus home from school last week<\/a> in the Cortina d’Ampezzo region with a \u20ac2.50 ticket, the usual fare.<\/p>\n

But the operating company had raised the fare to \u20ac10 ahead of the Milan-Cortina Games, which run from 6 February until 22 February, and he had to get off.<\/p>\n

The story made headlines in Italy and beyond and the bus driver apologised, saying he made a “serious mistake”.<\/p>\n

The Games organising committee has offered Riccardo a role in Friday’s opening ceremony at Milan’s San Siro stadium to try to make it up to him.<\/p>\n

“He will play a symbolic role during the opening ceremony,” a spokesperson confirmed, while noting that the role still needed to be defined.<\/p>\n

Local authorities also said they would start offering discounts on bus prices for poorer local residents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 11-year-old boy left stranded in the snow after failing to pay a bus ticket inflated for Italy’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-277901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}