The Lausanne-based body “is firmly convinced that the current number of sliding centers, on a global scale, is sufficient for the current number of athletes and competitions” in the disciplines concerned, a spokesperson indicated to the AFP.
This position is anything but a surprise, since the hypothesis of seeing the organizers of the 2026 Olympic Games opt for a new site was already “a concern of the IOC evaluation commission” in its first report in 2019, “reiterated during of each discussion concerning this site,” specifies the same source.
Basically, the path chosen on Tuesday in Milan by the organizing committee – which must still be validated by the company responsible for delivering the Olympic infrastructure for the 2026 Olympic Games – is a clear departure from the reforms adopted by the IOC in 2014 in its “Agenda 2020”. In order to stem the soaring costs and the crisis of bids to host the Games, the organization had notably decided “that no permanent site should be built without a clear and viable legacy plan”, i.e. -say without planning its future use and financing.
For this reason, the IOC was very satisfied, during its session held last October in Bombay, to see the Italian organizers moving towards relocating the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events abroad, for example. in neighboring Switzerland and Austria. “In addition”, as the body had already underlined in Bombay, “only existing runways already in service should be taken into consideration due to the very short deadlines”, recalled the spokesperson.
But eager to avoid what it considers to be a snub when it has put “Made in Italy” at the center of its action, the ultra-conservative government of Giorgia Meloni regained control of the file in December and relaunched the runway project in Cortina, abandoned for the first time in 2023 for lack of interested companies. A new call for tenders was therefore launched at the end of December for a so-called “light” version of a new site in Cortina: the Italian construction giant Pizzarotti applied for a contract worth 81.6 million euros and delivery in March 2025.