Egon Winkler, director general of the Salzburg bid, stated: “We have intensively studied the report. With our adjustments our aim is to take a good concept and make it great. Our goal has always been to stage perfect Games and therefore, we are willing to revisit our planning and do our best too make our weaknesses strengths.
“The overall changes that will be made will result in a tremendous cost savings for the organizing committee and will better meet the needs of athletes, the IOC, media and spectators."
Salzburg 2010’s executive board has decided to relocate the three snowboard disciplines and move curling from Kitzbuhel to the existing Stadtaren (5,000 seat capacity) in Salzburg, reducing the venue count from 15 venue sites to 12.
Winkler said that by doing this Salzburg will be able to manage logistics more effectively and reallocate about $32million to other areas of needs such as the Paralympics, transportation and contingency budgets.
St. Johann, which was the venue site for snowboarding events will be dropped and the Snowboard-Parallel Giant Slalom will move to Flachau, which is already host of the women’s alpine technical events. The Halfpipe-event and Snowboardcross will move to Zauchensee to host ladies alpine speed events.
The IOC released reports on all three of the bidding cities for the 2010 Games with the other candidates being Vancouver in Canada and Pyeongchang in South Korea.
A decision on the winning bid will be made by the IOC in the first week of July.
Hosting and managing sports events is one of the topics of discussion at the SportAccord conference in Madrid next week. The event, which runs between May 12-16, features a number of high profile speakers and delegates.
To find out more information on SportAccord, click on the link below.
Following last week's release of the International Olympic Committee report on its bid to host the 2010 Winter Games, Salzburg has made significant adjustments to its proposed venues.
