Not all the competitions at the 2030 Winter Games will be held in France.
Even before France’s bid, combining the mountains in the north with the French Riviera in the south, was selected almost two years ago as the 2030 host, sites in Italy and the Netherlands were under consideration for speedskating events.
With a shortened time frame to prepare to welcome the world, organizers of what’s known as the French Alps Games determined early on they didn’t want to deal with building what would have been the country’s first indoor speedskating oval for 2030.
Now, they’ve decided the best place for the long-track events is in the Netherlands, in Heerenveen, home of one of more than a dozen speedskating ovals in a country where about a third of the population owns ice skates.
The Thialf arena was selected over the speedskating oval used for the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy, the Francs Jeux website reported this week, citing a French Alps organizing committee news release.
Discussions with the Dutch venue “already underway must now continue in order to finalize the conditions for hosting the competitions, as well as the governance and cooperation arrangements,” the news release said, according to a translation.
The news was welcomed in the Netherlands, which last hosted an Olympics in 1928.
“I’d say don’t cheer too soon, but we’ve had good reports coming out of France that they want to keep talking with us about the long-track speed skating coming to the Netherlands in 2030,” the Dutch Olympic committee’s Marc van den Tweel reportedly told a TV interviewer.
“Organizing an event on the scale of the Winter Games requires a lot of money, time and energy, and a lot of things need to be arranged,” he added, according to a translation in a Dutch News story posted Tuesday.
The English-language site’s story pointed out the “need to satisfy French and Olympic authorities on a range of issues from the quality of the ice in the arena to setting up an athletes’ village and transport arrangements for spectators.”
The president of Italy’s Piedmont region, Alberto Cirio, and Torino Mayor Stefano Lo Russo said the bid to host Olympic speedskating “confirmed our region’s international credibility in organizing major sporting events,” Italy’s Nova News site reported, according to a translation.
The leaders said their focus will turn to working with Milan, a host of the 2026 Winter Games, and other parts of Italy “to build a competitive Olympic dossier for the 2036 or 2040 Summer Olympic Games.”
This year’s Winter Games were the first with a pair of hosts that included Cortina in addition to Milan. And while the 2026 Games sprawled across much of northern Italy, the French Alps will be even more widespread.
Not only is speedskating in 2030 expected to be more than 1,000 miles away from the site of other ice sports, Nice, another major sport is also moving. Paris is among the French cities vying to be the 2030 ice hockey venue after Nice’s mayor rejected plans to use a soccer stadium.
Paris is where both the French Alps and Utah were awarded Winter Games by the International Olympic Committee, ahead of the French capital’s 2024 Summer Games. Utah’s 2034 Winter Games, however, will be among the most compact, reusing Olympic venues from 2002.
