Snoop Dogg is back on the Olympic trail. The rapper from the West Coast, who has become so droll over the years, is just like he was at the Summer Games in Paris a year and a half ago as a fun boy for the US broadcaster NBC traveling in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. This time he has another job. He is the “honorary coach” of the US team and diligently shakes hands with US Olympians.
On Wednesday he took his place as the highly official torchbearer and carried the Olympic flame, which was lit in Greece in September, a few meters further towards Milan, where the large fire bowl will shine on Friday evening. He obediently saluted something about peace and love, because “that’s what the Olympics are all about,” as he said. Kirsty Coventry certainly enjoyed this.
The IOC President, before her first Olympic Games as a senior Olympian, would probably like to walk through the Olympic villages and facilities with Snoop Dogg instead of answering unpleasant questions. She didn’t really say anything when she was asked what she thought about the protests in Milan the presence of the US militia with the wintry abbreviation ICE holds. She is primarily responsible for the security of the US delegation led by US Vice President JD Vance around the opening ceremony. It is sad if such questions distract from the games. But “magic and spirit” would soon move into the Olympic world.
She certainly hopes that she won’t have to answer any more questions about Casey Wassermann. The name of the chief organizer of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles can be found in the Epstein files. Accordingly, he communicated in an extremely suggestive manner with Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking and the confidante of the pedo-criminal networker Jeffrey Epstein.
Almost 3,000 athletes
No, she hasn’t spoken to Wassermann, she’s all about the games, which open on Friday evening with the grand opening ceremony at the Giuseppe Meazza Stadium in Milan. Almost 3,000 athletes will compete in 16 disciplines in northern Italy until February 22nd. If Coventry wants to honor all the competition venues with her visit, she will have to travel a lot of kilometers.
To get from Milan to Cortina d’Ampezzo, the second eponymous location of the games, it takes a good 5 hours by train and bus. It’s not much faster by car either. Although over three billion euros were invested in infrastructure projects under the Olympic label, most of them have not yet been completed. But even if the asphalt has passed in the mountains, a journey across the Alps from Livigno, where the snow park is for fun sports on snowboards and skis, to Fiemme Valley, where the Nordic skiers are on the move, will take several hours.
It is the first time that the Olympic Games have two official venues and the expansion of the games across several regions in the Alps is unparalleled in history. This is made possible by Agenda 2020, with which the IOC wanted to take a step towards sustainability. The Olympics should go with its sports where they were already at home. Roads and ski arenas are being blown up into the mountains for the Olympics, as was the case with the unbelievable 33 billion euro games in Sochi, Russia.
Now the long-distance Olympic Games are coming up, which will definitely not have a positive effect on the climate balance. And then there is the thing with the bobsleigh and toboggan run in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Once again, an ice track represents the ecological madness at the winter games. Italy applied for the games without an intact sled system. The Cesana ice track, where tobogganing took place at the 2006 Turin Games, has been unused for years and is due to be completely demolished this summer. The Cortina toboggan run, where tobogganing took place at the 1956 Games, had long since been reclaimed by nature over the years.
The IOC would not have had anything against holding the tobogganing competitions in Innsbruck, Austria. Abroad? The right-wing extremist Italian infrastructure minister Matteo Salvini didn’t like that at all. He quickly declared the toboggan run a national concern and had it built for over 100 million euros. The Olympics aren’t just about medals, they’re about the host country’s self-expression. Let’s see what the opening ceremony has to offer in this regard.