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Construction work takes place at the Cortina Sliding Center, venue for the bob, luge and skeleton disciplines at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The 2026 Winter Games will begin in just over 10 months in the Milan-Cortino region of northern Italy. But it’s possible a few events might take place a whole lot closer to Americans’ home — in Lake Placid, New York.
Most of the venues slated to host the 2026 Winter Games’ 116 events across 16 disciplines are either already constructed or slated to be completed well in advance of the Games. The chief exception: the Cortina d’Ampezzo Eugenio Monti Sliding Centre, prospective host site for bobsled, skeleton and luge. With less than a year before the Games begin, the sliding center has not yet received final approval from the International Olympic Committee to host competitions.
Built in the 1920s and named for an Italian Olympic hero, the Eugenio Monti center has hosted significant sliding events for decades, but required considerable upgrades in order to meet current Olympic sliding standards. Italian Olympic officials rejected calls from the IOC to move the sliding events to nearby venues in Austria or Switzerland, instead opting to upgrade its own existing facility.
In just under a year, and at a cost of more than €118 million, the Società Infrastrutture Milano Cortina 2026 (SIMICO), a public company managed by the Italian government, has engineered the construction of a 1,730-meter, 16-turn track roughly following the original track’s layout.
While safety is a paramount consideration for any Olympic venue, sliding sports have a particular vested interest given the fatalities that have occurred during sliding events. In 2010, for instance, just before the start of the Vancouver Olympics, luger Nodar Kumaritashvili of the nation of Georgia died when he lost control of his luge and was ejected from the track, colliding with an unpadded support pole.
The Cortina sliding center’s readiness has been such a question that Olympic organizers have reached out to Lake Placid, host of the 1980 Games, about the possibility of hosting sliding events. Unlike many — perhaps even most — Olympic facilities, which slide into disrepair and ruin shortly after the torch is snuffed and the world leaves town, Lake Placid has maintained its sliding center as one of the world’s finest bobsled and luge facilities.
“We are still in a holding pattern on whether we will be activated,” Darcy Norfolk, Lake Placid Olympic Regional Development Authority communications director, told Yahoo Sports in an email. “Should we be needed, we are here to support the sliding athletes and provide an Olympic experience from competition to celebration.” Norfolk noted that Lake Placid “continues to be hopeful” that the Eugenio Monti facility is prepared in time “to ensure the sliding sports are held in Italy.”
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Just one year ago, the abandoned Eugenio Monti Olympic sliding track was covered in snow. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Vittorio Zunino Celotto via Getty Images
There’s precedent for staging Olympic events far from the host country; last year, Paris Olympic organizers held surfing events in Tahiti, since there’s little quality surfing on the Seine River. However, speaking of the Seine, there’s also precedent for Olympic events running right up to the absolute go or no-go edge of deadlines. Paris Olympic organizers battled contamination in the Seine for months in preparation for staging triathlon and marathon swimming events there, finally completing the swimming events even after several in-Games delays.
So it’s possible, even likely, that Lake Placid’s dreams of hosting another Olympic event in 2026 will soon vanish. Over the past week, the Cortina track has conducted tests of bobsled and luge runs in coordination with the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) and the International Luge Federation (FIL). Sixty athletes from 11 countries all over the world performed 176 runs, and members of both federations have expressed satisfaction with the results of the initial certification testing, or “homologation,” as it’s known in sliding circles.
"It is just fantastic to see our track for the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games taking such good shape,” IBSF President Ivo Ferriani said in a statement. “We all know that the timeframe for the re-construction was very tight and ambitious, but SiMiCo has done an amazing job.”
“The diverse group of athletes, coaches and from various countries have put this newly reconstructed track to the test and were very happy with it. The athletes can't wait to compete at the Olympic Winter Games next February,” FIL General Secretary Dwight Bell said in a statement on Saturday. “See you in Cortina in February of 2026!"
Final approval will rest with the IOC, but the verdicts of the two sport federations will carry substantial weight. The track is scheduled to be completed by Nov. 5, with various luge, bobsled and skeleton events and training slated to start soon afterward. The Milan-Cortina Olympics are scheduled to begin on Feb. 6, 2026, although a roof and support facilities still need to be constructed to prepare the Eugenio Monti facility for its Olympic spotlight.
Sliding tracks are, by their very nature, expensive to construct and maintain; there are few in the world that meet the highest standards of competition. The intention on the part of all involved is to make the Eugenio Monti track a significant stop for sliding events in the foreseeable future.
“The sliding track in Cortina will become a fixed part of the IBSF calendar planning post-Games, and we have already worked on a multi-year plan for our events and training camps at this track,” IBSF officials told Yahoo Sports in a statement. “This track has always been popular as a training and competition venue for teams coming from across the globe and we are convinced this will also be the case in the future.”
If the IOC opts to keep the sliding events in Italy, the United States as a country won’t have long to wait for more Olympic events — Los Angeles is scheduled to host the Summer Games in 2028, and the 2034 Winter Olympics will take place in Salt Lake City.
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