Italian 2026 Bids Make Deadline -- Top Story Replay

(ATR) The three competing Italian bids for the 2026 Winter Olympics have all turned in dossiers to the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) on time.

CONI says Milan, Turin and Cortina d’Ampezzo have met the deadline of Tuesday to present their feasibility studies.

A decision on which bid, or combination of bids, will move forward is expected to be determined by CONI on July 10.

The president of the Veneto region Luca Zaia is taking the process a step further, as ANSA reports he plans to meet with both the acting sports minister Giancarlo Giorgetti and CONI president Giovanni Malago to personally hand over Cortina’s dossier.

The 1956 Winter Olympics host’s dossier claims that more than 70 percent of the structures already exist while the rest need to be modernized, or built according to criteria of sustainability and future reuse. The Cortina bid calls for the Olympic Village to be a temporary structure that would be dismantled at the end of the Games, according to ANSA.

Milan mayor Giuseppe Sala says that his city’s plan includes building the Olympic Village on the site of a former railway station.

The president of Lombardy Attilio Fontana is quoted by ANSA as saying that his region’s Milan bid "is certainly better from all points of view. For infrastructures, the proximity to the airports, I think the Milan dossier is excellent."

Turin’s feasibility study is based on the principles that "we do not plan to build anything from scratch and we do not want to go into debt," Mayor Chiara Appendino tells ANSA.

She also says that Turin will learn from the mistakes it made in hosting the 2006 Winter Games.

Sapporo 2026 Bid in a Holding Pattern

While the process to choose an Italian bid moves on, the future of a Sapporo bid for 2026 appears to be fading.

The Sapporo bid tells Around the Rings that a planned survey to see whether the residents of the 1972 Winter Olympics host city would prefer to bid for 2026 or 2030 has not happened yet and that there is no specific timetable for doing it.

ATR was told in May that Sapporo would conduct a survey of its own to gauge public interest in a 2026 bid after opinion polls showed people thought it might be better to bid for the 2030 Games.

In the meantime, the Sapporo 2026 team is meeting with stakeholders to weigh all options, including moving the bid to 2030, and that more time is needed to reach a decision.

The end of the dialogue stage for the 2026 bidding process is in October. At that point, the IOC will be choosing cities for the candidature stage, the final phase of the process. The candidature phase will culminate with the winner being decided at the IOC Session in Milan, Italy in September 2019.

Written by Gerard Farek

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