Innsbruck 1964: Austria and Tirol step into the spotlight

The IX Olympic Winter Games gave the city of Innsbruck a visibility it had not previously enjoyed and introduced it to a global audience. This helped trigger the growth of the local tourism industry, with the local authorities making sustained efforts in the years after the 1964 Games to promote both Innsbruck and Tirol.

In successfully staging the 1964 Olympic Winter Games, Innsbruck showed that it could be relied upon to host major events. Innsbruck and the Tirol region hosted the Olympic Winter Games again 12 years later, in 1976, and have since staged the 2012 Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG), the 2016 International Children’s Winter Games and the 2018 UCI Road World Championships, to name but a few major sporting competitions.

The quality of Innsbruck and Tirol’s Olympic venues, which include the Bergisel Ski Jump and the Olympiahalle, has been vital in attracting these events. All nine of the Innsbruck 1964 competition venues, which were used again for the Olympic Winter Games 1976, remain in use. Six of them hosted Olympic events for a third time at the 2012 Winter YOG. The volunteer network and ethos developed when Innsbruck staged the first of its two Olympic Winter Games continue to serve the city and region well. Innsbruck and Tirol can draw on an extensive network of motivated helpers to staff the many major events they organise. Nearly 1,400 of these volunteers were on duty at the 2012 Winter YOG, 30 of them veterans of both the 1964 and 1976 Olympic Winter Games.

Innsbruck’s venues have helped the city become a centre of excellence for Austria’s athletes. The nation’s bobsledders, skeleton athletes, lugers, ski jumpers and speed skating teams all train in Innsbruck, making use of facilities such as the Olympic Ice Track and the Federal Centre for Tobogganing. The city is also home to the Tirolean State Sport Centre (Landessportzentrum Tirol). Part of the extensive Olympiaworld complex, it offers state-of-the-art amenities and accommodation to high-performance athletes and is also used by local clubs, associations and schools. 

In short, the staging of the 1964 Olympic Winter Games helped create the infrastructure needed to support the region’s development. It provided the impetus for improvements to the city’s road network, which increased accessibility to the city and region and triggered economic growth, through the hosting of events and tourism. Tirol’s tourism industry directly and indirectly employs 60,000 people and generated around EUR 8.4 billion in turnover in 2021. Tirol is Austria’s most visited province, while Innsbruck, which attracted a record 3.2 million overnight stays in 2017, is the country’s second most popular city for visitors behind Vienna.

Meanwhile, the building of an Olympic Village helped to alleviate the city’s post-war housing shortage, with apartments made available to local residents after the Games. The Olympic Village, popularly known as the O-Dorf, also comprises accommodation built for the 1976 Olympic Winter Games and is currently home to around 7,000 people of over 50 nationalities.

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