The soap opera continues. On Tuesday, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transport Matteo Salvini relaunched the idea of building a track in Cortina d’Ampezzo to host the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events of the 2026 Olympic Games in Milan Cortina. Salvini, an ally of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in his ultraconservative government, made the proposal Tuesday evening during the steering committee for the 2026 Olympics which took place at the Palazzo Chigi in Rome, the seat of the council presidency.
“The Ministry of Transport will develop a proposal that will not cost the Italians a cent more,” the ministry said at the end of this meeting. “The objective is to present a project to decision-makers as soon as possible,” continues the Ministry of Transport, before quoting Salvini: “We have already lost too much time.”
Just over two years before the 2026 Olympics (February 6-22, 2026), the organizers still do not have a track for the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events. The idea of building a new track in Cortina, which initially appeared in the application file, however seemed abandoned, because it was too costly (80 to 100 million euros) and risky so close to the deadline.
The organizers of the 2026 Olympics have two other options: renovate the track built for the 2006 Turin Olympics, in Cesana, dormant since 2015, or relocate these events to a track already in use abroad, a scenario which is favored by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which repeated it again on Tuesday at the end of its Olympic Summit.
The organizing committee for the 2026 Olympic Games, which is meeting its board of directors this Wednesday from 2:00 p.m., indicated in a press release that “it was waiting to receive the projects (for Cortina and Cesana) in order to carry out a verification phase with the IOC and the International Federations concerned. However, he indicated for the first time in this press release that “the deadline for defining the path forward is set in agreement with the IOC at January 2024”.
Finally, the Milan Cortina 2026 organizing committee specified that it had contacted “the American, German, Austrian and Swiss Olympic committees” to obtain information on the tracks in service in their countries if the option of relocating these events to abroad, unprecedented in the history of the Winter Olympics, was finally selected.
