Alps 2030: IOC confirms Lyon as the ice heart of the Games
The last open question for the Alps 2030 Winter Games was settled this week in Lyon: the IOC Coordination Commission confirmed on 16 September exactly where the ice will be. Ice hockey will be split between the LDLC Arena in Décines-Charpieu and the historic Halle Tony Garnier, while curling, figure skating and short track will share the Eurexpo exhibition centre, which also takes the main media centre. The Games run from 1 to 17 February 2030.
The LDLC Arena is the newest of the three venues: opened in 2023 next to Olympique Lyonnais’ stadium, it will already host the 2028 Ice Hockey World Championship and offers 10,500 to 11,000 seats for the Olympic tournament. The Halle Tony Garnier, an emblematic hall with more than a century of history south of Lyon, takes the second rink. Speed skating stays at the Thialf in Heerenveen, the Netherlands, and the Lyon Olympic Village will rise in Oullins-Pierre-Bénite.
The most interesting part of the plan is its least glamorous: Eurexpo is a trade-fair ground, not a sports hall. Turning exhibition halls built for commercial shows into rinks that can carry Olympic figure skating — at the first fully gender-equal Winter Games, with the debut of synchro9 — is a real temporary-ice engineering problem: floor levelling, refrigeration power, humidity control, and a surface that stays hard through the last lap of a short-track final.
That is precisely our trade at Napapiri. We have been building real-ice rinks since 1993 — more than 30 years installing mobile and permanent ice for events, municipalities and clubs — and we know a fairground is often the most demanding site there is. Lyon 2030 will show the world what we already know: with the right refrigeration base, any good hall becomes a world-class rink.
Photo: Chabe01 (Charly Bernard), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
