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With the success of Paris 2024, France has demonstrated its know-how when it comes to organizing major sporting events. Repeating this performance, however, is by no means a given, even though the French Alps have been given the honor of hosting the 2030 Olympic and Paralympic Games. For former freestyle skier Edgar Grospiron, appointed president of the organizing committee on Tuesday, February 18, the road to an environmentally exemplary and financially efficient Games will be a bumpy one.
Read more Subscribers only 2030 Winter Olympics: A conditional victory for the French Alps
The first challenge concerns the very organization of the Winter Games in an era of environmental transition. Global warming has rendered obsolete a model that is based on concreting mountains over to accommodate hundreds of thousands of winter sports enthusiasts for ever shorter periods of time, due to a lack of snow.
Olympic biathlon champion Martin Fourcade, who was approached for a time to head up the organizing committee, summed up the situation well: “We’re at a turning point for the Winter Games and at an important moment in the history of the French mountains and the issues at stake.” Clearly, they can no longer be the showcase for a system that has made French resorts rich, but whose days are now numbered. Fourcade’s appeal did not have the expected resonance. The champion threw in the towel, predicting the Winter Games would be a continuation of previous editions, at a time when the ski industry is on borrowed time.
French Alps 2030 plans to make maximum use of existing infrastructure, most of which was inherited from the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville. Nevertheless, it will be essential to adapt the bobsleigh and luge track, as well as the ski jumps, to bring them up to current Olympic standards. Given the costly upkeep of such facilities, the question arises as to the return on investment. As for the creation of a new ice rink in Nice, the project remains questionable, since several arenas already exist in the two French regions tasked with organizing the Games: Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.
Public subsidies
The fact that venues are far from each other is also problematic, as the four competition hubs are more than 500 kilometers apart − between the ski resort of Le Grand-Bornand to the north and Nice to the south − increasing travel by the public and accredited guests and, consequently, their carbon emissions.
Organizing these Games will also be a challenge. One of the factors in the success of Paris 2024 was the governance of the event, with Tony Estanguet as a unifying boss, guaranteeing efficiency. Whatever Grospiron’s best intentions, he will have to deal with a multiplicity of players: the sporting movement, two regions that will each want to take all the credit, and a government that will be careful to keep the cost of Games under a ceiling of €2 billion. Unlike the Summer Games, the Winter Games are mostly dependent on public subsidies, and the risks of overspending have already been pointed out by the authorities.
Making good on these promises will be all the more difficult as time is running out. The Salt Lake City Games, in Utah, appointed an organizing committee and a president four days before the French Alps… for a competition that will take place in 2034. After a poor start, the challenge now is for the former freestyle skier and the promoters of French Alps 2030 to overcome the obstacles – and there are many.
Read more Subscribers only Two weeks of Olympic magic in Paris
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.
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