Disputes and defections are shaking France in the run-up to the Winter Olympics

As the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games close the doors to organizationally successful games, the next winter host city is battling headwinds.

A year has passed since Martin Fourcade withdrew his candidacy for the 2030 Winter Olympics. The biathlon star was considered by most to be the ideal president of the organizing committee for the games, which will be held in the French Alps in four years. French President Emmanuel Macron even called Martin Fourcade the “Tony Estanguet of the Winter Olympics,” after the former French canoeist who was responsible for the successful 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

“The differences are too great to approach the mission calmly. The governance, the vision, the local roots; we do not agree on these fundamental areas,” six-time Olympic champion Fourcade wrote in a statement last February.

Since then I have the conflicts surrounding the hosting of the Winter Olympics.

In less than three months, three of the heads of the organizing committee have resigned from their positions, just months after their appointment.

Olympic Committee chairman Edgar Grospiron was described in a leaked email from a rogue member of the committee “as if he were an executive director without control and without the competence to be one.”

It was discovered last week “insurmountable difficulties in cooperation” between Grospiron and the committee’s general director, Cyril Linette. The latter is now leaving the job.

At a press conference on the final day of the Milan-Cortina Olympics, Grospiron admitted that the project had problems.

– We know that we are short on time and money. But we are confident in our performance. We will host an Olympic Games at the level that people expect.

Mid-MarchOnce the Paralympics arrive in Italy, the French 2030 Committee will present a report setting out the vision for the coming years.

Emmanuel Macron has appointed Prime Minister Sébastien Lecournu to oversee the project. After the closing ceremony in Milan, Lecornu is expected to put pressure on the parties in the French Alps. It is described as a kind of ultimatum for the Olympic Committee, whose internal conflicts have been covered in the French media for a year.

The French organization of the 2030 Olympics only had five and a half years to prepare for the games. Four years before the opening, the project faces an unusually large number of question marks.

In July last year The Alport Méribel withdrew from the event after the city’s mayor objected to being allowed to “only” host competitions for the Paralympics. Nice has been declared the home of ice hockey and curling, with a spectacular renovation of the Allianz football stadium seen as a stopgap solution, although funding for the reconstruction still needs to be secured.

– There is so much to comment on, not least the construction of a new ice rink, which is estimated to cost 138 million euros (almost one and a half billion crowns), said Frédéric Maillot, who holds the French government’s sports budget, youth and popular movements portfolio, in November last year.

For the first time in Olympic history, the discipline of figure skating will be outsourced to another country, most likely Italy or the Netherlands.

Several civic and environmental organizations have also highlighted the lack of local democratic influence in this process.

France has one unusually successful Summer Olympics in the background, widely known as a triumph at home and abroad. But clouds are gathering over the 2030 Winter Olympics, and with just four years to go, nothing seems to be going as it should.

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