LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Olympic winter sports’ top official at the IOC said they are ready to move ice-rink events to Lyon from Nice for the 2030 Winter Games.
The persistently slippery path toward the French Alps Olympics saw organizers lose patience with Nice’s new far-right mayor Éric Ciotti, with a key dispute over using the city’s soccer stadium for ice hockey.
Moving ice events north to Lyon, 186 miles closer to Paris than the palm tree-fringed Riviera city, “now appears to be the best solution,” the French Alps organizing committee said.
“For me, having the ice sports in the one city is a great idea,” International Skating Union president Jae Youl Kim told The Associated Press in an interview.
“French Alps again, is a central location and probably Lyon is much easier in terms of getting people to compared to Nice,” said Kim, who represents winter sports on the International Olympic Committee executive board.
The 15-member board chaired by IOC president Kirsty Coventry meets twice in June and must soon approve what is, by Olympic standards, a dramatic shift of hosting plan less than four years from the Opening Ceremony.
The French Alps project, which will take events to snow to stored mountain resorts, always has been on the tightest schedule of any modern Olympic host.
It was drafted only in 2023 — when Sweden’s capital Stockholm seemed likely finally to get picked — and then fast-tracked by the IOC for approval on the eve of the 2024 Paris Olympics even when key legal and financial backing from the national government was still pending.
Internal conflicts among French Alps organizers were aired out before the Milan Cortina Winter Games in February, when project leader Edgar Grospiron sought to reassure they had the project under control.
“I’m confident that, in 2030, we’ll be sitting here four years from now and then we will be talking about the great stories from the French Alps,” said Kim, who was a senior official organizing the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games in his native South Korea.
Lessons from PyeongChang
Kim has a calmer view of what can seem to be hosting turmoil from afar, recalling how in 2017 “our North Korean friends were testing missiles” and teams had concerns about athlete safety.
“For us, at the time, this is a routine test. I have seen it for 55 years! But for the outside world this is always different,” he said. North Korea ended up sending athletes and a political delegation in what was a win for Olympic diplomacy.
Domestic politics now have affected French Alps plans and even the marquee Winter Games events in figure skating are waiting to find a home. Another of the ISU’s disciplines, speed skating, was being steered toward the Netherlands even when Nice was the anchor city for 2030.
“We haven’t got to the details about the venues, that needs to be worked out,” Kim acknowledged.
Lyon’s soccer stadium
A clear option for the Opening Ceremony planned in Nice’s soccer stadium now can be the larger soccer stadium in Lyon. It hosted the 2019 Women’s World Cup final and multiple soccer games at the Paris Olympics.
“Preparing for the Olympics is a mega task because it involves so many different parts and involvement of the government, municipality, private entities,” Kim said. “But the Olympics is something that the people take great pride in.”
“I am sure we can prepare and deliver another incredible Olympic experience.”
