Swiss Ski is pushing for the 2038 Winter Olympics in its bid to make Switzerland the heart of winter sports, even as it finds itself in a legal dispute with the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS).
wintersportsnews: According to reports, Switzerland is holding exclusive preliminary talks with the International Olympic Committee for the 2038 Olympic Winter Games after the 2030 bid was awarded to France.
“The biggest event you can have in sport is the Olympic Games and we have an exciting project in 2038 that we are convinced can trigger a positive hype again when it comes to the Olympic Games,” said Swiss Ski co-managing director Diego Züger.
For Züger and Swiss Ski, the 2038 Winter Olympics bid is part of a bigger plan to make Switzerland the center of winter sports. “We would like to have more world championships in our core sports in Switzerland. We have excellent World Cup events and have already had world championships,” he says. “With these major events, we can develop the sport. At all levels: among young people, at the grassroots level, and at the top.”
The Biathlon World Championships in Lenzerheide next year and the Alpine Ski World Championships in Crans Montana in 2027 are two huge events being hosted in Switzerland in the next few years and Swiss Ski’ hopes to hold consistent World Championships and World Cups.
One stumbling block, however, is the ongoing legal dispute with the FIS over marketing rights for World Cups and World Championships. The locations for World Cups and World Championships in cross-country skiing, alpine skiing, ski jumping, and Nordic combined are all still decided by the FIS and its president Johan Eliasch. Ski associations in Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia, as well as Swiss Ski, have notoriously tainted relationships with Eliasch and the FIS.
From 2026, the FIS intends to market the media rights for World Cups entirely on its own rather than the national associations which have done so themselves up until now and see the TV rights as a main source of income.
Earlier in October, the German Ski Federation (DSV) won a media rights battle against FIS when the Munich Regional Court halted the FIS’s attempt to centralise the marketing of media rights for the World Ski Championships, marking a pivotal moment in the long-running dispute between FIS and DSV but also making a huge step for the ownership of rights for national federations. The court ruled that the plan constituted a deliberate “objective restriction of competition” under European antitrust law and violated free market rules.
“The national associations like the DSV have the right to set up central marketing together. The key word is: together,” said DSV’s Head of Communications, Stefan Schwarzbach, at the Forum Nordicum. “We hope that the FIS will now accept the ruling to the extent that we can sit down together and consider how we can get this project, which everyone has been repeating over and over again for two years now, to the finish line together.”
The FIS, however, reportedly has no intention of giving in and immediately announced that it would appeal emphasising that the ruling in Germany meant little to other disputes with national associations like Swiss Ski.
“We are not at all against central marketing if it is done well and we are involved. What we will resist is if we are expropriated and are not involved in the process,” said Swiss Ski’s Diego Züger. “And that is what we are discussing right now. And we hope that we will find a solution as soon as possible.”
Much of Switzerland’s dream of hosting future World Championships, World Cup and, of course, the 2038 Winter Games, will likely depend on how its relationship with the FIS plays out in the coming months and years.
