By the way...

Salvini and sustainability

"Krone" columnist Harald Petermichl looked at the next Winter Olympics, which will open in Italy in February 2026. Including a new ice channel that the host wants to build especially for it. Sustainability is probably interpreted differently there than elsewhere.

With less than a year to go, the XXV Winter Olympics will open on February 6 at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza in Milan's San Siro district. However, as the Lombardy capital is not considered by experts to be particularly snow-sure, there are a whole series of tried-and-tested competition venues outside of Milan, such as Antholz, Predazzo, Bormio and, last but not least, Cortina d'Ampezzo, 400 kilometers away, which is why the Games are officially called Milano-Cortina. It can be assumed that the ÖOC will have a new president by then, after Karl Stoss from Dornbirn announced shortly after the Paris Games that he would no longer be available as Lord of the Rings, just as IOC boss Thomas Bach has done.

He is not on particularly good terms with the Milano-Cortina organizing team because there is still a tug-of-war over the Olympic bobsleigh, luge and skeleton track. After the Pista olimpica Eugenio Monti, where stuntman Paoli Rigon lost his life in 1981 during the filming of "James Bond 007 - A Deadly Mission", was closed long ago, the IOC, which supposedly only thinks about sustainability, recommended not to build a new track and to move the competitions abroad in order to avoid having another expensive, unused labyrinth of bends in the area after Sochi, Pyeongchang and Beijing. However, Giorgia Meloni and above all Matteo Salvini were left out of the equation, because what does the Minister for Sustainable Infrastructure care about sustainable games if he can have a beloved prestige object built instead?

What useful ideas have Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni cooked up again?(Bild: AFP)

And so, to the delight of many nature conservation associations, concrete is being poured and welded for all it's worth so that the track can be approved this March after test runs. However, if the tests do not lead to a positive result - and there are many indications that they will - Meloni and Salvini will have fabricated a veritable disaster. A new building costing over 80 million would then be built in Cortina, but the competitions would still have to be held somewhere abroad. Conveniently, the next IOC session with new elections will take place in Athens in March. After that, we will know whether Kirsty Coventry, the only female candidate, or one of the five men who also want to succeed Bach will be allowed to continue dealing with the issue. Either way, a good start in office looks different.