LETTER FROM GENEVA
Only the evil spirits will see a symbol there, whereas it is only a question of the chance of the allocation of the plots. In Lausanne (Switzerland), the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is next to the wastewater treatment plant. On the edge of a vast century-old park, the IOC has had a new glass and steel building facing Lake Geneva for several years. Designed by Copenhagen architectural firm 3XN, the curved structure has more than tripled the 5,000 square meters of the old patrician residence of Pierre de Coubertin to which it came to attach itself. Cost of the work, 145 million Swiss francs (128 million euros), enough to comfortably accommodate the 500 or so employees of the institution.
The same number of demonstrators gathered on Thursday, February 3, in front of this “Olympic house” before starting a three-kilometre march on the quays towards the Olympic Museum. Tibetans, who came from all over Europe to express on the eve of the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics (OG) their disgust with the “Games of Shame and Genocide”. For the artist Loten Namling, a refugee in Switzerland for thirty-two years, “We should never grant their organization to mass murderers and dictators”.
Thomas Bach could not hear them behind the bay window of his office, and not only because it is soundproofed. The former German fencer, president of the Olympic institution, is indeed in Beijing where he declared “open”, Friday, February 4, the XXIVth Winter Olympiad alongside the Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Games during which Swiss athletes also hope to win a harvest of medals – they had won two, Tuesday evening February 8 –, especially in alpine skiing, a discipline in which the country has shared honors with the great rival for all eternity. Austrian.
A whole ecosystem that irrigates the local fabric
But regardless of the results of the races in China, Switzerland has already won. Indeed, it is home to almost all of the major international sports federations, and the economic benefits they generate are increasingly significant.
Between 2014 and 2019, they brought in more than 1.7 billion Swiss francs a year (1.5 billion euros), up 57% from the previous five-year period. According to a study of the International Academy of Sports Sciences and Techniques of Lausanne (AISTS), the canton of Vaud is the main beneficiary of this windfall: forty-six of the fifty-three federations established in Switzerland have taken up residence there, including forty in Lausanne same. They also provide more than 3,300 jobs in the country, including 1,840 in the canton of Vaud: the IOC in Lausanne, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) in Nyon, the International Cycling Union (UCI) in Aigle , the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in the village of Mies, etc.
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