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French businessman takes over 2030 Winter Olympics amid leadership turmoil / Photo: © AFP
French businessman takes over 2030 Winter Olympics amid leadership turmoil
High-flying businessman Geoffroy Roux de Bezieux was on Thursday unveiled as the new head of the organising committee of the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps.
Organisation of the 2030 Games has been hit by a leadership crisis, with Edgar Grospiron resigning as head in September, the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the organising committee.
"Presiding over Alpes 2030 is an honour because above all it is a commitment to promoting, as a team, sport and France," he said.
The 64-year-old, former president of France's largest employers' association (Medef) between 2018-23, was also on the board of both the 2024 Paris Olympics and 2023 Rugby World Cup organising committees.
"Presiding over Alps 2030 is an honour because above all it is a commitment to promoting, as a team, sport and France," said Roux de Bezieux.
Grospiron, 57, who won an Olympic ski gold in the moguls at the 1992 Albertville Games, had been in the job for 18 months.
Grospiron had had to contend with political power struggles and tensions with regional stakeholders, who resented the efforts of some officials to impose methods used in the highly successful 2024 Paris Summer Olympics on the organisation of the Games in the French Alps.
Key Games stakeholders, including the French government and the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur and Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes regions, as well as the French Olympic and Paralympic committees, told the International Olympic Committee (IOC) last month that they no longer believed they could work with Grospiron.
O. Larsen--BTZ
