PARIS (AP) — French organizers of the 2030 Winter Olympics are looking at alternative locations for ice hockey outside of Nice, including in Paris and Lyon, because of a political deadlock involving the Riviera city's new mayor.
Like the Milan Cortina Olympics, the French Alps project has split snow sports in storied mountain resorts and skating in a snow-free city, the Mediterranean resort of Nice.
Nice was to turn the city's soccer stadium, Allianz Arena, into a temporary hockey rink.
But Nice far-right new mayor Eric Ciotti opposes the plan, refusing that the resident football club lose access to its stadium for months because of the Olympics. Ciotti, a former conservative allied with the National Rally of Marine Le Pen, was elected last month.
The 2030 Games organizers said on Tuesday they have worked with officials from Nice and its wider region as well as the French government to find solutions for placing ice hockey within the Olympic hub in Nice. A temporary ice rink, intended as a replacement for the originally planned Allianz Riviera stadium, was studied at other stadiums, mainly for men's hockey matches.
“Technical, scheduling, and financial analyses highlighted the limitations of these options, particularly due to their very high cost and impact,” organizers added.
“With a focus on efficiency and budget optimization, the (organizing committee) has decided to broaden its investigations by examining the use of existing facilities in other major metropolitan areas such as Lyon or Paris, particularly those offering a minimum seating capacity of 10,000,” they added.
Results of their explorations will be presented to the organizing committee's executive board on May 11. The final venues are expected to be confirmed in June when the IOC decides the list of sports and events.
“The analyses carried out are leading us to turn toward existing facilities that are better suited and more sustainable. Several options are being studied to ensure hosting conditions that fully meet our requirements,” said Edgar Grospiron, the former Olympic champion freestyle skier who leads the organizing committee.
The Paris Entertainment Company, which operates Adidas Arena and Accor Arena in the French capital, said last week it submitted a bid to host ice hockey. Both venues were used during the 2024 Paris Summer Games.
French Alps Games organizers said a second competition ice rink for skating is still planned at Nice’s exhibition center, and other ice events scheduled in Nice remain unchanged.
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
FILE - A cyclist rides past the Adidas Arena, April 18, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)
LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced more heat Tuesday over his appointment of Peter Mandelson as U.K. ambassador to the United States, with lawmakers set to vote on whether the British leader should be investigated by a parliamentary standards watchdog over the ill-fated decision.
Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was due to testify to a group of legislators investigating how Mandelson, a scandal-tainted friend of Jeffrey Epstein, was given the key diplomatic job despite failing security checks.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was set to quiz McSweeney on Tuesday morning, before the whole house debates a demand by the opposition Conservative Party for Parliament’s Privileges Committee to investigate Starmer’s explanations of how Mandelson came to be appointed.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said that Starmer had “misled the House of Commons repeatedly” when he said that “full due process” was followed over Mandelson’s appointment.
It's a potentially dangerous day for Starmer, who has spent weeks fending off calls to resign over the Mandelson saga. Starmer fired Mandelson in September after new details emerged about the ambassador's friendship with Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.
Police opened an investigation into Mandelson in February over allegations that he passed on sensitive government information to Epstein when he was a member of the U.K. government in 2009.
McSweeney, a protégé of Mandelson who served as Starmer’s top aide, resigned in February, saying he took responsibility for appointing him as ambassador. He's certain to be asked about allegations by Olly Robbins, the former top civil servant at the Foreign Office, that Starmer’s staff pressured officials to rush through the confirmation so that Mandelson could be in the post at the start of the second term of U.S. President Donald Trump in January 2025.
Robbins' predecessor, Philip Barton, told the committee on Tuesday that he was concerned that Mandelson's known links to Epstein “could become a problem” in the future.
But he said that he wasn't consulted on the “political decision” to appoint Mandelson. It's rare but not unknown for U.K. ambassadors to be political appointees rather than career diplomats.
“I was presented with a decision and told to get on with it," said Barton, who left his job for unrelated reasons in January 2025 before Mandelson's security clearance was approved.
Ian Collard, the senior security official who briefed Robbins on the security checks, told the committee in a written statement that there was “pressure to deliver a rapid outcome,” though he said that it didn't affect his judgment.
Starmer has denied that anyone in his office put pressure on the civil service.
The prime minister fired Robbins earlier this month after the revelation that Mandelson was approved for the job against the recommendation of the government’s security vetting agency. Starmer has called it “staggering” that Foreign Office officials failed to tell him about the security concerns.
Critics say Starmer’s decision to appoint Mandelson in the first place is evidence of bad judgment by a prime minister who has made repeated missteps since he led the center-left Labour Party to a landslide election victory in July 2024.
Starmer already defused one potential crisis in February, when some Labour lawmakers urged him to quit over the Mandelson appointment. He could face a new challenge if, as expected, Labour takes a hammering in local and regional elections on May 7, which give voters a chance to pass a midterm verdict on the government.
It would require a large number of Labour lawmakers to vote with the opposition on Tuesday for Starmer to be referred to the Privileges Committee, which has the power to suspend lawmakers, including the prime minister, from Parliament, for breaches of the rules.
Starmer urged Labour lawmakers to “stick together” and vote against the motion, calling it a “stunt” timed to damage the government before the May elections.
Censure by the committee exerts considerable moral pressure on politicians to resign. Its investigation into lockdown-breaking gatherings in government offices during the COVID-19 pandemic helped end the political career of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Johnson quit as a lawmaker in 2023 after the committee found that he had repeatedly misled Parliament over the “Partygate” scandal.
Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers a speech in north-west England, Britain, Monday, April 27, 2026. (Temilade Adelaja/Pool Photo via AP)
