Municipal government leaders in Sigulda, Latvia are open to plans to host bobsleigh, luge and skeleton should Sweden win its bid to host the 2030 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
The Latvian government will have the final say on whether it will support the use of the national sliding track for Sweden’s proposed Winter Olympics bid because the project will require funding for upgrades, the construction of an Olympic Village, legacy maintenance and security during the event.
Sigulda County Council Chairperson Līga Sausiņa told Latvian news agency LETA that these investments would be required with or without the Games to support the long term economy in the region. Plans to prepare the facility for a Winter Games have been in development since 2019 when Stockholm Åre was bidding for the 2026 edition but was later defeated by Milan-Cortina in Italy.
Reports suggest the upgrades to the track alone will cost 58 million euros (USD $63 million).
“Already for 2026, as a candidate to become the venue for the Olympic Games, a plan was developed for the construction of a new residential block, the so-called Olympic Village, which in the future will provide space for both the development of the housing stock and the opening of a new preschool educational institution. Likewise, the adjacent road infrastructure development is already planned,” Sausiņa said according to Latvian Public Broadcasting.
This week the Swedish government approved plans for the the 2030 Winter Games bid, setting up the project for consideration by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at the end of the month. Details will be presented to the IOC’s Future Host Commission next Tuesday (November 21) and the IOC’s Executive Board could elevate the bid to targeted dialogue by December 1 – positioning it for a possible final election tentatively scheduled for next July.
Bids from France and Switzerland are also in the running.
Under recent IOC reforms, Winter Games hosts are strongly encouraged not to build any new facilities and instead use existing venues where they already exist even if across national borders. Earlier this month Italy’s Milan-Cortina 2026 Games abandoned plans to reconstruct a sliding track in Cortina d’Ampezzo and will instead host the sports elsewhere – possibly at a track in Austria or Switzerland.
It marks the first time the Winter Games will be hosted in two separate countries.
Sweden does not have a sliding track and the International Luge Federation (FIL) has said that there are already enough facilities in the world. For this reason the Swedish Olympic Committee (SOC) proposed the Sigulda venue for 2026, and again for 2030.
Sigulda is roughly 500 km from Stockholm across the Baltic Sea.
