When the first notes of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino opera rang out on February 2, part of a pre-Opening Ceremony event held beneath the gilding and elaborate woodwork of La Scala theater in Milan, Cyril Linette and Edgar Grospiron put on a stoic show of solidarity. Linette, the director general of the 2030 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games organizing committee, known as COJOP, responsible for developing the 2030 Games to be held in the French Alps, and Grospiron, its president, insisted behind the scenes that the trust between them had not been broken. But this, in fact, was where the real theater began. Just as in the opera by the Italian master, tragic fate soon took hold. Barely a week after the event, and as the grand celebration of winter sports was in full swing in Milan-Cortina, the COJOP publicly acknowledged “insurmountable disagreements” between the two key French organizers and initiated Linette’s departure.
“I have the mandate to see this process through to the end. And that will happen in the coming days,” Grospiron, the president, told the press on Sunday, February 22. A few hours later, during the closing ceremony at the Verona Arena, France symbolically received the Olympic flag. On Monday, it made its way to Albertville, in the Savoie region, to mark the return of the country’s medal-winning athletes and a roughly 1,400-day countdown to the next Winter Games, held, this time, on the other side of the Alps. Yet this future is hard to imagine. The fragile structure of the upcoming Winter Games, painstakingly built in the year-and-a-half since France was chosen in July 2024 to host the mega-event, appears increasingly unstable. The position of COJOP director general is expected to become vacant soon, and the role of president seems primed for transformation into an ejection seat.
The first tremors began in December 2025, with the departure of the chief operating officer, followed in January by the resignation of the director of communications. Then, in early February, Bertrand Méheut, chair of the remuneration committee – an independent body tasked with advising on salaries and in-kind benefits for employees – also walked out. Before stepping down, he delivered a harsh indictment of Grospiron: “He behaves as if he were chairman and CEO, completely unchecked, without having the competence for it,” Méheut wrote in an email to his colleagues.
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