Barents border towns want Winter Olympics

Ylitornio in northern Finland plans to apply for the Winter Olympics together with Gällivare in northern Sweden.

The ideas are to arrange ski jumping and other ski-competitions in Ylitornio on the Finnish side of the border and in Svanstein on the Swedish side. There are no downhill areas with the needed 750 meters fall in northern Finland, but such downhill exist near Gällivare in Sweden.

Other competitions, like ice hockey and figure skating, could be arranged in the nearby located towns of Oulu, Tampere, Rovaniemi and Luleå. It is the newspaper Norrländska Socialdemokraten that reports about the plans for the first cross-border Winter Olympics in the Barents Region.

The last plans for arranging the Winter Olympics in the Barents Region was Tromsø. The northern Norwegian city wanted to apply for the 2018 Winter Olympics, but the city’s candidature was not supported by the Norwegian Sports Confederation, as reported by BarentsObserver a year ago. Without its support it was impossible to finance the games in Tromsø, because the Norwegian Government demands such support to guarantee for the multi-billion financing.

The upcoming Winter Olympics 2010 will be in Vancouver and the games in 2014 will be in the southern Russian city of Sochi. There are already several candidates for the Winter Olympics in 2018, like the Korean city of PyeongChang, the German city of Munich and the French city of Annecy.

The Winter Olympics has never been arranged in the Barents Region, although many of the Olympic gold medal winners comes from the region, like Sweden’s downhill champions Anja Person and Ingemar Stenmark, Norway’s cross-country skier Vegard Ulvang. Several other gold medal winters in ski jumping, nordic combined and biathlon comes from the Barents Region.

-We will now analyse the proposal to arrange the Winter Olympics on both sides of the border, says councillor of Gällivare municipality, Tommy Nyström, to the newspaper Norrländska Socialdemokraten.