When the hosts of the 2026 Winter Olympics won the right to host the Games, they promised athletes the sophistication of Milan, the snow-capped alps of Cortina d’Ampezzo, and access to a two-week, pasta-fueled celebration of all things Italian.
The only catch is that some of those athletes may have to enjoy the party from Upstate New York.
That’s where the luge, bobsled, and skeleton Olympians of 2026 will all end up should the Milano-Cortina organizers fail in their race against the clock to deliver a usable track. This month, Lake Placid was officially designated as the Plan B site for sliding sports at the Milan Olympics in the event the facilities aren’t ready—never mind that it’s 4,000 miles from Milan.
“Of course, I would love to compete in Cortina,” four-time U.S. bobsled Olympian Elana Meyers Taylor wrote in an email. “But the draw of competing at my home track one final time is amazing.”
Milano-Cortina organizers insist that their track will be built on schedule for the Games, which begin on Feb. 6, 2026. They hope to obtain one stamp of approval next March and final certification in the fall of next year. But nothing about the process has gone smoothly. The first sign of how tricky this would be came shortly after Milano-Cortina won the hosting rights and issued a tender for companies to take on the sliding center project, only to receive zero bids.
It took until early 2024 to secure a contractor to carry out work on the track. And by then, the International Olympic Committee and the Italian government had made one thing clear to the organizers: they absolutely needed to have a backup.
And so Milano-Cortina opened one of the strangest bidding processes in sports, a narrow contest of cold-weather sites that already had sliding tracks so they could potentially host some Olympic events.
“The decision to adopt a potential Plan B is not a new development,” the Fondazione Milano Cortina said. “However, this does not reflect any doubt about the readiness of Cortina d’Ampezzo Sliding Center: we are confident it will be completed on time.”
Just in case it isn’t, Lake Placid will be standing by. The town tucked in the Adirondacks has twice hosted the Winter Games, in 1932 and 1980, and is due to host the bobsled and skeleton world championships next March. The Olympic Regional Development Authority, which oversees the local facilities, offered Milano-Cortina use of its track at no fee and said that it will now develop “a detailed plan to activate if necessary.”
What this winter scramble really highlights is the sheer scarcity of places to practice sliding sports. Only 16 tracks are in use around the entire globe, according to the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, and six of them are in Germany or Austria. They are huge—roughly a mile long—expensive to construct, and costly to maintain. Plus, it isn’t as though these tracks can be used casually. There’s no such thing as pickup bobsled.
So it’s no wonder people aren’t clamoring to build them. Even Milan’s chief rival to host the 2026 Games, Stockholm, intended to rely on a sliding center outside the country, in Sigulda, Latvia.
undefined Still, Italian organizers were sure that they would be able to refurbish an existing sliding track in Cortina d’Ampezzo, which had hosted bobsled at the 1956 Games. That track had fallen into disrepair due to a lack of funding and hadn’t been touched since 2008, which was of particular concern to the International Olympic Committee when it first weighed up Milano-Cortina’s bid.
In 2019, the body’s Evaluation Commission even wrote that it believed “the investment budget for the project has been considerably underestimated given the scale of the work.” The report added that Milano-Cortina should explore the option of using another existing track in Europe.
The Northern Italians wound up looking a little farther afield.
Of course, far-flung Olympic events aren’t unheard of. In 1956, the equestrian sports of the Melbourne Games were held almost 10,000 miles away in Stockholm due to Australia’s long quarantine restrictions for horses. And this past summer, the organizers of Paris 2024 put surfing in the South Pacific so that Olympians could ride the infamous Teahupo’o wave off the coast of Tahiti.
The difference for Paris was that Tahiti is at least a French territory. The most Italian thing about Lake Placid is a strip of pasta joints by the water.
But the designers of the Lake Placid Plan B are ready to address that. They intend to ferry their luge, bobsled, and skeleton medalists to special podium ceremonies near one of the densest concentrations of Italians outside Italy: At Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
