Milano Cortina 2026Olympics 2026
"Authoritative" sources in the speed skating world anticipate a release from the AGI agency that Trentino governor Maurizio Fugatti would hold a press conference on Monday 9 January to opt out of hosting the speed skating competitions of the 2026 Olympics in Baselga di Pinè.
Thursday 5 January 2023 5 minutes reading time
It was possible to guess that something was boiling in the pot when, on the occasion of the end-of-year conference of the Metropolitan City of Turin, the mayor of the Savoyard city, Stefano Lo Russo, had unexpectedly made a hasty opening "the Turin 2006 plants are at your disposal". The story of the difficult relationship between Turin and the 2026 Games is experiencing a new moment; after the initial CONI house project for a Milan - Turin - Cortina organization rejected with indignation by the then mayor of the Five Star Movement Chiara Appendino who would have liked to have sole ownership of the candidacy, he moved on. "Our territory makes itself available to the country should delays occur and they cannot be filled in other terms. I really would have liked the Olympic Games to also involve Turin: they are international events and the whole country system must lend a hand”, are the words of Lo Russo who spoke of the trampolines in Cesana, but nothing could prevent the planned event in Predazzo, of the Cesana bobsled rink, which would also require heavy work, and of the Turin Oval which hosted speed skating competitions seventeen years ago and is now used as an exhibition space in many fairs.
On the other front, the facility designated for Speed Skating in the Milan - Cortina candidacy is the open-air facility of Baselga di Pinè which is an iconic facility for the history of the Italian movement. However, the Olympics expect the stadium to be covered and the works necessary for the construction of the roof have already reached a cost estimate of more than 50 million and the project is not yet more than a preliminary draft when the works should necessarily have started at the latest in the summer .
As reported by the newspaper L'Adige in its edition yesterday, no one in the autonomous province of Trento seems to have torn their clothes off to defend the project in the face of the offer from Turin also because the 2006 Oval would be the only viable alternative. Alternative available, presumably at limited cost but in time; as recalled by the architect Zoppini, designer of the Turin facility and author of the preliminary project for Baselga, "If you do it there, you repair the track, which needs to be redone after twenty years of exhibitions; you renovate the changing rooms and the lighting system and that's it. Then everything is dismantled".
It would be yet another missed opportunity to take advantage of the Olympic organization to create a national center for this discipline which, moreover, should have been designed in a central location to also be able to accommodate the "refugees" of inline skating who are distributed throughout the territory .
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