Abdallah Jreij
Abstract The decision to rebuild the Eugenio Monti sliding track in Cortina d’Ampezzo for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games—despite the International Olympic Committee’s Agendas 2020 and 2020 + 5 emphasis on venue reuse—offers a revealing case for examining the politics of Olympic infrastructure in fragile mountain environments. Drawing on critical mega-event studies and the literature on infrastructural and spatial citizenship, this paper argues that the Cortina track exposes a hierarchy of citizenship claims through which national-symbolic, regional-tourism, and federation-technical interests override ecological, resident, and trans-Alpine concerns, even within an Olympic edition explicitly aligned with sustainability agendas. To address this tension, the paper develops the concept of Alpine spatial citizenship , understood as forms of territorial claim-making mediated by ecological fragility, vertical and seasonal mobility, and the cultural authority of mountain communities. It further identifies four distinct registers of sustainability mobilised in Olympic communications—carbon-operational, venue, legacy, and territorial—and shows how slippage between them produced what is termed as acknowledgement-without-decisiveness for territorial and resident claims. The argument is grounded in document analysis of IOC, national, and regional sources, in addition to site visits and informal stakeholder engagement during the planning and construction phases. The paper finds that the legacies of Olympic infrastructure—who counts as a legitimate leisure-citizen of a rebuilt facility, and on whose behalf its legacy is claimed—constitute a critical site for the politics of Alpine spatial citizenship beyond the Games themselves.