A hub for major events

In recent years, Innsbruck has staged the 2012 Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG), the 2016 International Children’s Winter Games, the 2018 UCI Road World Championships and the 2020 Winter World Masters Games, among other major sporting competitions. All of them were held at venues built or upgraded for the Olympic Winter Games Innsbruck 1976.

Round three of the prestigious Four Hills Tournament is held at the Bergisel Ski Jump every January, and the Olympic Ice Track has staged several world championships over the years, including the 2016 IBSF Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Championships. Meanwhile, the 2019 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships were held at Seefeld, the venue for the biathlon, cross-country skiing, Nordic combined and normal hill ski jumping competitions at Innsbruck 1976.

The quality of Innsbruck and Tirol’s Olympic venues has been vital in attracting these events and more. For instance, the Olympiaworld brand was created in 2004 to further enhance the city’s Olympic heritage and promote Innsbruck as a sporting and cultural hub. Covering more than 20 sports, its venues and services are marketed as one entity, giving event organisers, companies and sports clubs a range of choices for their events.

Consequently, Innsbruck and Tirol’s Olympic venues have played their part in generating economic benefits, creating jobs and boosting visitor numbers, as have entities such as Innsbruck Tirol Sport (ITS). A not-for-profit company set up after the 2012 Winter Youth Olympic Games to build on the event’s legacy and develop the expertise it helped create, ITS was responsible for attracting sporting events to the city. By 2020, it had helped set up seven major sporting events – three of them multi-winter-sport gatherings – and over 60 smaller events, which attracted over 850,000 spectators in all. In the process, ITS generated an economic impact in excess of EUR 80 million and gave employment to over 180 people. Most of its responsibilities, including management of the volunteer network, were transferred to Olympiaworld in 2020.

Innsbruck has not lost sight of the environment in welcoming the world. Keen to protect the breath-taking landscapes of the Tirol region, ITS worked with local partners and institutions to ensure its events were environmentally friendly and saved resources. It worked with the Green Event Tirol Initiative to promote projects that met its ecologically, economically and socially sustainable criteria. For example, the events held at the 2016 International Children’s Winter Games were all awarded Green Event Tirol certification.