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Next year's Olympic sliding races will be in Italy after all, international luge officials predicted Saturday in another ringing endorsement of the newly rebuilt track in Cortina d'Ampezzo.
The International Luge Federation followed its bobsled and skeleton counterpart in declaring the testing of the track that Italy hopes to use at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics a success. That's another sign that the sliding community fully expects the Olympic races to be in the Italian Alps and not at the Plan B site in Lake Placid, New York, next winter.
“See you in Cortina in February of 2026,” FIL general secretary Dwight Bell, the former longtime USA Luge president, said in a statement released by the international federation.
That’s not an official announcement; one of those will likely come from the International Olympic Committee. But the luge community’s backing, combined with rave reviews that came from the International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation on Friday, almost certainly means sliding events will be in Italy — essentially ending plenty of doubt about whether an ambitious construction project to restore the historic Eugenio Monti track would be done in time for the Olympics.
“We are extremely satisfied with the testing conducted on the luge track in Cortina,” said Claire delNegro, the FIL’s vice president for sport. “Testing was done with athletes and coaches representing 11 countries from Europe, Asia and North America over 178 runs. The track was well prepared and improved daily so that final speeds achieved to date were aligned with design specifications.”
About 60 athletes from around the world — roughly half of them Italian — took part in the bobsled, skeleton and luge runs over the last week.
There is still much to do at the Cortina track, including building a roof and continuing to prepare the site for thousands of visitors during the 2025-26 sliding season. Various construction projects there are scheduled through Nov. 5, and Italian officials say they believe that target is doable.
“It’s incredible what the Italians have achieved here in such a short space of time, at a level that is second to none,” world men's luge champion Max Langenhan of Germany said. “I would never have thought that. I arrived with rather low expectations because there was so much going on around it. But when you see the energy here — they really do everything for it, and you can probably expect this spirit at the Olympic Games. It’s fantastic.”
Luge athletes are scheduled to have an international training period at the new track from Oct. 27 through Nov. 2, then return for a test event there in the final week of November. The bobsled and skeleton tours will hold their international training period from Nov. 7-16, followed by the season-opening World Cup races there from Nov. 17-23.
The 1.749-kilometer (1.09-mile) Cortina track features 16 curves with an estimated top speed of 145 kph (90 mph) and with run times slated for 55-60 seconds.
The Olympic Regional Development Authority, a state agency in New York that oversees Lake Placid's Olympic facilities — including the Mount Van Hoevenberg sliding complex — is going forward with major upgrades to refrigeration systems and other improvements this year anyway, and planned to whether or not the Olympic sliding races were coming to the Adirondacks. The final runs of the season on the track in Lake Placid were being taken this weekend, and construction has already started at the facility.
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/winter-olympics
