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Associated Press

There will be no backup stadium if the main ice hockey arena for the Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games is not ready on time, officials have said.
Construction on the Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, which is set to welcome NHL players back to the Olympics for the first time in more than a decade, is behind schedule and its completion is going right down to the wire.
A test event at the arena – a new, 16,000-seat venue on the outskirts of Milan – had to be moved, and new test events are not scheduled until January 9-11.
“There is no plan B,” Andrea Francisi, the chief games operations officer for Milan Cortina, said on Saturday.
“So necessarily we have to be able to organise the competition in an impeccable manner at Santagiulia.”

The first scheduled Olympic ice hockey game at the arena is a women’s preliminary round match on February 5, one day before the opening ceremony.
Usually, new Olympic venues are tested at least the year before hosting medal events. With a large ice hockey arena, that is not just about the ice and making sure the playing surface is ready and safe, but also about testing concession stands, bathrooms and everything else inside a brand new arena.
Francisi admitted there was “no precise date” for the venue to be handed over to local organisers, but he was confident “for the moment” that it would be ready for the Olympics.
“There are daily updates in the sense that our team is there working every day,” Francisi said. “The companies which are involved with the building of the facility have sped up their work significantly.
“We’re monitoring all that daily together with them, there’s great collaboration between us, we’re creating a coordinated plan between their work and our preparations, and for the moment we’re healthily optimistic, but 100 per cent we’ll do it.”
The men’s Olympic ice hockey tournament is scheduled for February 11 to 22. The women’s tournament runs from February 5 to 19.


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Construction on the 16,000-seat Santagiulia Arena on the outskirts of the Italian host city is running late but organisers are optimistic


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