Milan-Cortina triumph highlights Italy's north-south divide

Italy's winning bid in June to host the 2026 Winter Olympics highlighted the growing gap between the north and the south of the country.

Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo won the vote Monday to stage the Games as International Olympic Committee members voted 47-34 for the long-favored bid over Stockholm-Are from Sweden.

It is the third time an Olympic Games will be held in the north of Italy after Turin hosted in 2006 and Cortina staged in 1956 and comes shortly after two Rome bids for the Summer Games had to be scrapped.

Rome, which hosted the Olympics in 1960, was forced to end its bid for the 2024 Games because of staunch opposition from the city mayor. And in 2012, then-premier Mario Monti scrapped the city's candidacy for the 2020 edition because of financial concerns.

"Milan and Rome are so different," Milan mayor Giuseppe Sala said. "But the most important thing is that the basic structure of services are different: in terms of public transport, in terms of waste collection, in terms of medicine and so on."

The 2026 Games will be held in two of the wealthiest regions of Italy — and indeed Europe. They serve as a contrast to Italy's underdeveloped south, where youth unemployment runs 50 percent or higher, and the jobless rate among all ages is nearly double that in the north.

While Rome is Italy's actual capital, Milan is the nation's business and financial capital as well as one of the world's leading fashion hubs.

Milan has grown significantly over the past decade and was further boosted by hosting the Expo World Fair in 2015.

Expos, which are held every five years, can last up to six months and cost millions of dollars to host, but can also help put a city on the global map by bringing in international visitors and attention — much like hosting an Olympics.

"We made a progress in the last 20 years which is impressive and we had the opportunity with Expo to test (the progress)," continued Sala, who was the man responsible for delivering the Expo.

"My hope is that we will see an improvement in Rome because we love Rome ... Milan is more solid at the end of the day."

Italian Olympic president Giovanni Malago had a more concise explanation.

"Simple," he said, speaking in English. "The mayor of Milan and the mayor of Cortina gave me faith and the mayor of Rome did not give me faith. This is the true."

An emotional Malago was close to tears at the winner's news conference.

The 60-year-old said it goes some way to easing the pain of the bid being scrapped in Rome — his home city.

"There is no personal sense of revenge but just the really great win of a Olympic commitee of which I have the honor to be president," Malago said. "I think in life you have to risk things, responsibly, and our courage was rewarded.

"The wound has closed completely but if you lift up the shirt you'll see the scar. The scar will always remain because Rome remains my city."

Star quality can’t save Sweden from 8th Olympic bid loss

Sweden sent its heir to the throne, its prime minister, and a hockey icon to help persuade International Olympic Committee voters.

Carrying the baggage of seven failed Winter Games bids in four decades, the 100-strong delegation for Stockholm-Are thought it met all the IOC’s demands to host in 2026.

The mayor of Stockholm even sang the chorus of an Abba song on stage.

None of it was enough.

The Swedish bid lost a 47-34 vote — not a rout but not at all close — as IOC members chose the northern Italian bid centered on Milan and the ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo.

Italy gets its third-ever Winter Games, the second in a 20-year span, and a second for 1956 host Cortina.

Sweden continues to wait for its first. Being viewed as reliable, trusted and pleasant partners in world sports circles did not save Stockholm and Are joining Gothenburg, Falun and Ostersund as Swedish candidates rejected by the IOC since 1978.

“Nice and losers is the worst,” bid supporter Peter Forsberg, a two-time Olympic champion and two-time Stanley Cup winner, told The Associated Press. He spoke after the result was announced in the 10th hour of a voting day of closed-door questioning, on-stage presentations and news conferences.

“I heard the longer the day went it was more negative in the group, and we heard what was going on,” said Forsberg, the former Colorado Avalanche center.

The Italian bid was favored even before an IOC panel published its assessment last month. The Swedes trailed badly in public support for the project, while Stockholm’s city government coalition left Are to sign a key Olympic hosting agreement.

“It was quite obvious in the evaluation report that they thought we were lacking some guarantees,” Sweden’s top Olympic official, IOC board member Gunilla Lindberg, told The AP.

Lindberg went down fighting. In the day’s most pointed comment, she ended Stockholm-Are’s formal 30-minute presentation on stage with a challenge to voters.

A key policy of IOC President Thomas Bach’s first eight years in office is cutting the costs of Olympic bidding and hosting after Russia’s runaway $51 billion spend on the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

The standout feature of the 2026 bids — both seeking to avoid white elephant venues, and sharing the burden across regions — was Stockholm-Are including a bobsled track in Latvia rather than build its own.

Lindberg, a long-time IOC member, asked her colleagues if they believed in Bach’s reforms: “Or is it just talk?”

“It just came. I felt it (needed to be said),” Lindberg told the AP after the vote. “We have these decisions — we need to implement them.”

Instead, IOC members felt able to overlook the presence of Crown Princess Victoria and assurances on stage from Prime Minister Stefan Lofven.

A burst of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ — “You can dance, you can dance, having the time of your life” — from Stockholm’s mayor, Anna Konig Jerlmyr, couldn’t swing enough votes.

Not could short speeches from the chairman of Volvo and the director of the Nobel Foundation, which awards the peace prize long coveted by IOC leaders.

Still, this is one country that handles Olympic rejection well.

“It’s not like we lost to the worst enemy ever,” Forsberg said. “We Swedes are pretty good at when we get knocked down, we come back.”

Swedes struggle with rejection after bitter Winter Games defeat

A devastated Swedish bid team struggled with rejection on Monday after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) snubbed their promise of a sustainable Winter Games, instead awarding the 2026 event to Milan-Cortina d’Ampezzo.

Milan romped to victory in the race, winning 47 IOC votes to Stockholm’s 34, in a one-sided result that left the Swedes almost as confused as they were crushed.

“I am very sad for the 34 people who voted for the Games of the future,” Stockholm2026 chief Richard Brisius told reporters in Lausanne.

“Our proposal for a transformative Games was a good one, but the IOC did not choose it.. Of course we are very disappointed. We had a bid that included all the reforms for a sustainable Games. But it did not happen.”

When the final hammer blow came with the opening of IOC President Thomas Bach’s envelope, it was hardly unexpected.

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven had left Lausanne before the announcement, having earlier addressed the IOC membership.

There was a sense the Swedes had known their chances were becoming increasingly slim after Gunilla Lindberg challenged her fellow IOC members in the morning.

“As IOC members, you must choose a city that embodies the principles of Olympic Agenda 2020 and The New Norm,” she told them. “Not just on paper and, frankly, not just in the bid, but in every part of culture and way of life.

“This is your chance to prove that The New Norm is not just talk,” she added, prompting sharp intakes of breath from seasoned Olympic watchers.

The IOC’s reforms in recent years under the ‘Agenda 2020’ banner and ‘The New Norm’ program — “an ambitious set of 118 reforms that reimagines how the Games are delivered” — aim to make it cheaper and easier to stage the Olympics.