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Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News
There’s a new look for the next Winter Games, coming to the French Alps in 2030.
A pair of abstract images said to draw inspiration from “a mountain revealed by light” will serve as emblems for the 2030 Winter Games, set to be held in multiple locations throughout France and even the Netherlands.
The mountain-like image, filled in with bright blue stripes tinged with reds for the Olympics, is reversed for the Paralympics that follow for athletes with disabilities. Both “Alpes 2030″ emblems use the French name for the country’s portion of Europe’s iconic peaks.
“The same mountain will unite the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in 2030,” said Edgar Grospiron, president of the French Alps organizing committee, calling the two emblems “complementary expressions of the same vision.”
What do Utah’s Olympic logos look like?
It was nearly 29 years ago that organizers of Utah’s first Olympics rolled out their logo for the 2002 Winter Games, a stylized gold, orange and purple snowflake embodying snow-capped mountains, crossed skis and a high desert sunset.
The snowflake can still be seen in places ranging from manhole covers to venue signage, even though a controversial new interim logo with rock-like lettering for the 2034 Winter Games was unveiled late last year.
Officials from the Organizing Committee for the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games have said the new Utah 2034 logo, described by critics as hard to read and something better suited to a “Flintstones” cartoon, could be revised or even replaced in a few years.
“It’s a journey. We’ll continue to be creative and listen to feedback,” Fraser Bullock, the Utah 2034 organizing committee’s president and executive chair, said last December as complaints piled up.
With no change anticipated before the end of the next Olympics in the U.S., the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, Bullock said there’s time “to look at all the opportunities we have in front of us, whether we continue with that logo or whether we do something different.”
New look, new venues for French Alps Games
The new emblem for the French Alps comes as the locations of venues for 2030 are changing. Monday, International Olympic Committee leaders approved moving ice sports from Nice to Lyon, France, with the exception of long-track speedskating.
Those events are headed to the Thialf arena in the Netherlands, one of that nation’s more than a dozen speedskating ovals. France, which does not have a modern speedskating oval, also considered the track built for the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy.
Nice, located on the sunny French Riviera in the south of France, had been scheduled to hold ice sports in 2030. But plans to turn Nice’s main soccer stadium into a temporary ice hockey arena were opposed by the city’s recently elected far-right mayor, Eric Ciotti.
The mayor’s issues with that and other venues led organizers to look for alternative locations, including Paris, the site of the 2024 Summer Games. The IOC Executive Board decision relocates curling, figure skating, ice hockey and short-track speedskating to Lyon.
The IOC said in a news release the “adjustments are aimed at preserving the overall vision of the Alpes 2030 Games while ensuring a balanced approach across athlete experience, operational delivery, financial sustainability and territorial coherence.”
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