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A cable car being built to carry spectators to the women’s Olympic Alpine skiing events in Cortina is in serious doubt of not being completed in time, prompting Games organisers to request school closures to ease the pressure on the Dolomite resort’s transport system.
The Apollonio-Socrepes lift is one of the most contentious pieces of Olympic infrastructure for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. Work on the system, designed to take spectators from the centre of Cortina d’Ampezzo directly to the slopes, began behind schedule, and some residents raised safety concerns about its location in an area prone to landslides.
Despite mounting doubts over the project, still unfinished a week before the opening of the Games next Friday, Simico, the state-backed agency in charge of Olympics infrastructure, said on Friday that work on the site was progressing according to schedule.
However, in a letter dated 29 January to the central government’s top representative in the Belluno province, the chief Games operations officer, Andrea Francisi, said Simico had notified organisers the previous day that the gondola lift would not be delivered within the planned timeframe.
In a statement on Saturday, Simico said work on the cable car was continuing and that safety checks required for the final commissioning were planned for the coming week. It said logistical problems such as school closures were not part of its remit. The Milano Cortina organising committee declined to comment.
In the letter, which has not been previously reported, Francisi described the lift as an essential element of the Olympic mobility plan for Cortina, which will also host curling, bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events. “The loss of this strategic infrastructure, just ahead of the start of Olympic operations, creates significant organisational challenges, with major impacts on flow management, on security and on the overall ability of the system to absorb the alternative mobility required,” the letter said.
As a result, organisers asked local authorities to close schools in Cortina on 10 and 12 February, and if possible on 11 February, to ease pressure on the town’s transport network during critical days for Olympic operations.
Closing schools on the most critical days was described as “indispensable” to safeguard order and ensure the transport network could function. Games organisers have capped the number of tickets for events in Cortina pending clarity over whether the cable car would be ready.
A spokesperson for the Milano Cortina 2026 organising committee said on Friday they have so far released a number of tickets in line with the capacity guaranteed by road transport.
Set in the Dolomites, Cortina is one of Italy’s best-known winter resorts and staged the Games in 1956, but it has no railway station and access by the only main road into town can often be slow at peak times. Cars remain the main way to get around a town that is home to only around 5,500 permanent residents.
Meanwhile, it was confirmed on Saturday that Milan’s Serie A match against Como, which at one point might have been played in Australia, will now be staged at San Siro during the Games on 18 February, raising the number of Serie A fixtures to be held in Milan during the Olympics to three.
