D-Day for the three countries vying to host the 2030 Winter Games. On Tuesday, November 21, France, Sweden and Switzerland will give their final presentations to the IOC’s Future Host Commission, chaired by Austria’s Karl Stoss. The presentation of the three bids, scheduled to take place by videoconference, will be the final stage in the selection process before the meeting of the Olympic body’s Executive Board, scheduled for November 29 to December 1 in Paris. At this meeting, the dossier(s) selected for the “targeted dialogue” phase will be announced. On the French side, confidence is at an all-time high. Renaud Muselier (photo above), President of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region, which is involved in the bid alongside the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (AURA) region, confided on Monday November 20 that he hoped to “fold the match right away“. Invited to speak to the media about the French Alps’ bid on the sidelines of the signing of a partnership agreement between the region and Olympique de Marseille, he detailed the strengths of the French bid: “We’ve got a good grasp of the subject, we’ve got a good grasp of the file. We have snow, know-how, champions, the support of elected officials, a vision of developing our Alps around snow and chalets, in other words, the opposite of what was done in Beijing or Sochi. We have a very good record, a legacy to leave behind, no new constructions, we committed ourselves before others to the fight against global warming, we refocused our sites to have only four poles. It’s a pretty good job. We’re going into it with modesty, we’ve worked, we’ve prepared and we’re going to try to get a positive response“.
