LYON, France: Just five years before the opening ceremony, French organizers of the 2030 Winter Games put on a united front Tuesday to unveil the team given the tightest schedule of any modern Olympics.
The 2030 French Alps Olympics must tie together snow and sliding venues in the mountains with skating and curling arenas among the palm trees on the Riviera coastal city Nice.
A bid hastily pulled together in 2023 was approved by the International Olympic Committee only last July — in Paris on the eve of a hugely successful Summer Games — and even then with a special exemption to wait several months for guarantees from the national government.
The project is now led by Edgar Grospiron, a freestyle skiing gold medalist in 1992 when France last hosted the Winter Games and a late hire in recent days as president of the organizing committee.
“What’s important now is that from now we organize it, we deliver it,” Grospiron said at a slick launch event at the stadium of soccer club Lyon, aiming for a Winter Games that is “impeccable and irreproachable.”
Grospiron spoke after a parade of national and regional political figures, including sports minister Marie Barsacq and Michel Barnier, who as prime minister last October signed off the government’s support.
Layers of lawmakers’ support has been vital to a project that still needs an ice arena built in Nice and a venue for speed skating, which could end up in Italy or the Netherlands.
The popular success and expertise gained at the Paris Olympics was stressed as a foundation for the Winter Games which used to be given seven years by the IOC to organize.
“We are not starting from zero,” the IOC’s executive director of Olympic Games, Christophe Dubi, told The Associated Press. “We had a great shortcut and it’s called Paris 2024. Many of those things we can cut and paste.”
The IOC started 2023 with no clear candidate and a shrinking pool of options to host a cost-effective and sustainable Winter Games in 2030. A Swedish project centered on Stockholm seemed favored before a French bid emerged out of the IOC’s strong pre-Paris relations with President Emmanuel Macron and national Olympic officials.
France’s win was confirmed on the same day in Paris as the 2034 Winter Games were awarded to Salt Lake City with four extra years to prepare. Its organizing team was unveiled in Utah last week.
“We are the cradle of Olympism,” said David Lappartient, leader of the French Olympic body and a candidate in the IOC presidential election next month. France already hosted three Summer Games in Paris and three previous Winter Games: Chamonix in 1924, Grenoble in 1968 and Albertville in 1992 that Barnier helped organize.
The French Alps organizing committee has a prudent operational budget of €2 billion ($2.1 billion) and speakers Tuesday stressed the need for a project that was financially sober and in moderation.
A key theme also was adapting to climate change and delivering an Olympics and subsequent Paralympic Winter Games that are sustainable.
“I would never pretend that the games want to save the world,” Grospiron said, “but I think we can contribute to changing how it moves forward.”
Rising to environmental challenges was stressed by the head of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region that includes Nice and Marseille. Renaud Muselier cautioned that in dealing with the reality of climate change “defeatism has the same effect as skepticism.”
