2023-10-16 22:00:09
Issue from Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Innsbruck (OTS) – By moving the Olympic ice track competitions in 2026, possibly to Igls, IOC President Bach did justice to the ecological idea. Now we can only hope that Salvini’s Brenner transit club is not used.
Seen through an international lens, those responsible for the Olympic Games achieved an ecological milestone yesterday at their congress in Mumbai (IND): relocating the ice track competitions for the 2026 Winter Games away from Cortina is a novelty in the 102-year history of this major event. The International Olympic Committee might have learned from some of the mammoth projects of the past that have now fallen into disrepair.
This time, sustainability was not only argued with the previously worthless Agenda 2020 reform paper, but also action was taken accordingly.
IOC President Thomas Bach’s request to only hold the Winter Games in suitable areas (northern hemisphere) with appropriate infrastructure would also correspond to this wish. As a reminder:
All that remains of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang (South Korea) and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing (China) are memories and television images; the sports facilities that were built there for hundreds of millions no longer play a role in international competitions. How might the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation justify the fact that each nation sends a container overseas for each race (!) and usually spends the annual budget on this?
It remains to be hoped that the world will be spared Winter Olympics in the desert with ski races on sand dunes and figure skating competitions on iced oases, because the fact that the 2029 Asian Winter Games were awarded to Saudi Arabia recently confirmed this suspicion.
Even viewed through the Tyrolean lens, moving the ice track competitions to Innsbruck-Igls in 2026 would literally be a win: following a 50-year break, tourism might once once more be adorned with the fourth largest sporting event in the world, and the long-needed adaptation of the ice track would be a powerful boost receive financial support.
It seems impossible to estimate whether Italy’s government will play the “transit card”. Motto: You get the Olympics, but in return we get free travel over the Brenner Pass. It would be reasonable for the blustering Transport Minister Matteo Salvini to allow the awarding of the ice track competitions to Tyrol to be politically exploited, because then the welcome project would have failed before it might take shape. The International Olympic Committee, which always insists on independence, must resist this political sense of entitlement.
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