Operations Director Departs Libération After 5 Months

After months of delay, we thought the Paris 2030 Games would finally be launched in the fall, with the adoption of a multi-year budget of 2.1 billion euros and, very recently, the satisfaction granted by the IOC during its first visit to the Alpine lands.

However, we must believe that behind the scenes, it is something else. The organizing committee, Cojop, announced this Tuesday, December 9, the resignation of Anne Murac, its director of operations, just five months after her arrival. Anne Murac was already part of the organization chart for the Paris 2024 Games as head of the Ile-de-France “cluster”.

Her appointment as director of operations within Cojop 2030 was announced in July. In particular, she supervised the “site map” – allocating the competitions of the different disciplines to each of the four major centers, Savoie, Haute-Savoie, Nice and Briançonnais – which has not yet been finalized.

Card whose finalization has already been announced several times in recent months. At the start of the year, the organizers said that the final version should be approved by summer at the latest. However, several unknowns remain for the future distribution of sites: the definitive reintegration of Val-d’Isère into the project to host the technical alpine skiing events; the location of the Paralympic Games; that – in Italy or the Netherlands – of the speed ring, without forgetting the choice of additional sports (trail, ice climbing, gravel, etc.) which will integrate the programming.

The reasons for this departure have not been communicated. But the Parisian evoked “serious disagreements within governance”born from tensions around the Val-d’Isère and Nice sites and especially from the designation of the four responsible for the clusters (Savoie, Haute-Savoie, Nice and Briançon). Anne Murac “would not have really had a say, the four directors having been chosen by the political leaders omnipresent in the file, and validated by Edgar Grospiron”the president of Cojop. RMC Sport also reports a gap between its experience within Paris 2024 and the reality of the mountain terrain, which did not allow it to copy its methods which worked in Ile-de-France.

The Cojop says “respect” the decision and “salutes the work accomplished” by Anne Murac, who “actively contributed to the establishment of the first key milestones for planning, field coordination and preparation of future sites”. “A recruitment process will be launched as soon as possible” to replace it, it is specified.

This departure adds to other problems facing the organizers of the 2030 Olympic Games: last week, the Savoie departmental council announced “suspend participation until further notice” at the preparation meetings for the 2030 Olympics, refusing in particular to be “a budgetary adjustment variable”. Hervé Gaymard, president of the departmental council, also deplored that Savoie has not “not been consulted […] on the map of sites, the first official version of which is not satisfactory”.

Procedures are also underway to denounce the absence “public participation in the decision-making process” – before the candidacy as well as since the award of the Games – before a UN body in Geneva as well as before several French administrative courts. They come from the citizen collective “JOP 2030” and other organizations.