Milan Cortina: The Olympics of False Sustainability

The bobsleigh track, completed, meant the felling of over 20.000 square meters of forest, including around 500 centuries-old larches.  Trees that had withstood the devastation caused by Storm Vaia in 2018, but failed to survive the human intervention required for the construction works planned for the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, which have been shamelessly described as "the most sustainable in history." The construction site for the new Apollonio-Socrepes cable car, which would connect the center of Cortina with the upper Tofane area, is instead nothing more than a crater with a thirty-meter crack, covered by a pale yellow plastic sheet. They are the remains of a reckless, dangerous and illegal project, also presented as "an example of new, sustainable infrastructure": Some essential certifications are missing (such as the environmental impact assessment), and there's a serious risk of avalanches. The chairlift will never be built, nor will the adjacent parking lot, but local residents are wondering: who will clean up the horror of this pointless construction site after the competitions are over? And how many years will the remnants of such an absurd project remain in the area? The €38 million Fiames Olympic Village, just above Cortina, could have been the perfect opportunity to create a mini-neighborhood with affordable housing on the outskirts of Cortina, but instead it will be dismantled once the Olympic flame is extinguished. Another waste of money.

To reveal the gigantic bluff of the Olympics of false sustainability, a three-card trick that is all Italian, we need to go back to the assignment phase, in 2018, when the possible rivals of Milan-Cortina, namely locations in Canada, Switzerland and Sweden, withdrew under the blows of a financial hole and the pressure of national public opinion that feared a disfigurement on the territory, in a historical phase in which the mountain is already subjected to the stress of climate crisis.

To win hands down, Italians are inventing the fairy tale of a "sustainable" Olympics. In the 127-page dossier prepared for the candidacy, the word "sustainability" appears 96 times, almost once per page, and it's just an empty slogan, as everyone knows that Milano Cortina will be an event with a significant environmental impact. So much for the Sustainability Olympics! But the opportunity, in a country where it's always very complicated to open a construction site to modernize infrastructure, is too good to miss, and so the Big Olympic Lie continues.

The facts, however, speak for themselves. The first unsustainable aspect of these Olympics is the cost: in the initial budget, the cost range was between 1,3 and 1,7 billion euros; when the accounts are fully closed, the figure risks exceeding 5 billion euros. A second decidedly unsustainable factor concerns the type of infrastructure works: since 1964, Cortina no longer has its own railway line and station (previously there was the Ferrovia delle Dolomiti), and even the closest station, traditionally used to reach Cortina by rail, in Pieve di Cadore-Calalzo, has been effectively dismantled. The lavish budget for the Olympics could have been used to restore the rail link, but instead Cortina remains one of the very few ski resorts in the world that can only be reached by car. Does this make sense in the century of the sustainable mobility?

As for the sporting events, it was quickly realized that Cortina couldn't handle the impact of all the races, so they were spread across six Italian locations, hundreds of kilometers apart, resulting in a huge expenditure of energy and money and a deluge of harmful emissions related to the various travels.

But the infernal mechanism of “never-closed” construction sites is only just beginning. There are still 98 projects (47 relating to sports facilities and 51 to other infrastructure, mainly roads) that will be completed in the next few years (it is said, by 2033), but 26 are still in the planning phase, and the estimate of these extra costs is around another 3,5-4 billion euros.Who will pay this bill?

The illegal and environmentally devastating construction projects are offset by the benefits for the residents of the entire Dolomite area. But these have never been seen, and never will be. Quite the opposite. Cortina urgently needs to modernize its facilities, including its hotels, which are old and obsolete, partly due to the shortsightedness of entrepreneurs who have failed to invest and continue to rake in profits thanks to their vested interests. Among the sports facilities, perhaps it would have been wise to reopen or rebuild the public swimming pool, closed since 2012? Moreover, the comparison with the 1956 Cortina Olympics, another game of Italian-style Olympic marketing, is completely misplaced. At the time, Cortina was just emerging as a winter tourism destination, and a global event was certainly useful for launching it onto the international stage. Today, the problem is exactly the opposite: Cortina, among other things, suffers from overtourism (to get a table at a restaurant in high season, you have to book months in advance), and if anything, it needs to invent an alternative to downhill skiing, which has become increasingly complex everywhere due to the climate crisis and lack of snow. Ninety percent of Italian slopes (like 70 percent of Austrian ones, 50 percent of Swiss ones, and 39 percent of French ones) depend on artificial snow, designed only to deal with emergency situations. This consumes enormous energy and water. In Cortina itself, renovations to the snowmaking systems have allowed up to 98 liters of water per second to be drawn from the Boite stream to power the snow cannons: the equivalent of more than three Olympic-sized swimming pools a day. This ratio is absolutely unsustainable, especially when the UN has just declared the world, including Italy, in "water bankruptcy."

The serious risk is that, once the Olympic spotlights are turned off, Cortina and the Dolomites will be left with nothing but rubble for an enterprise born and raised under the banner of hypocritical and false sustainability.

PS The fact that the Milan Cortina Olympics were a gigantic bluff consummated in the name of false sustainability, does not detract from the extraordinary sporting merits of all the Italian athletes, and from the excellence of the shows connected to the Games, starting with the evocative opening ceremony.

The Cortina Milan Olympics are only the latest link in a long chain of outrages committed in the name of false sustainabilityConsumer products presented as green, yet are actually polluting and extremely expensive. Electric cars are only for wealthy or affluent consumers. Sustainable fashion, an impossible combination, considering the waste generated by this sector. Houses, which, under the guise of being green, energy efficient, and eco-friendly, have caused real estate prices to skyrocket.

Stories, characters, tales: everything in this book.

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