‘Ladies and gentlemen! The women’s preliminary Group B match between Italy and France will get under way in five minutes! And the question is: Are! You! Ready! For! Hockey?!” Well, quite.
That had been the question for the past five months, as it happens, ever since it first became obvious that construction of Milan’s new Santagiulia arena was running massively behind schedule. At the test event last month the ice was grey because there was so much building dust in it, and midway through the match a man had to come on to the rink to repair a melted patch with a watering can.
So what was the answer at last? Well, it depends on how you define “ready”. As the International Olympic Committee’s executive director for the games, Christophe Dubi, admitted a couple of days ago: “Do we have every single space in that venue finished? No.”
There were a lot of half-built concession desks and dangling wires, the construction dust was so thick that shoes left tread outlines on the concrete, and some of the water pipes were leaking into the press room. But they had an ice sheet, 12,000 or so full seats, and someone even turned up with a bucket to catch the drips, which, when it comes down to it, was really all they needed.
There hasn’t been an Olympic Games yet that hasn’t been plagued by questions about whether or not everything would be ready on time, but even by those standards the Italians have cut it fine. They had a team going around the toilets at Santagiulia putting plastic mats into all the urinals during the breaks between periods. No one had got around to filling the soap dispensers. Or wiring up the pumps on the drinks machines. Or putting up permanent lighting along the escalators. Or finishing the paint work.
Ten days before the game the man in charge of the ice, Don Moffatt, said it was “50/50” whether they would be able to get a game on. They did, which is a hell of a credit to Moffatt and his team, who have been working 12-hour shifts to do it. And it was a good one too. A crowd came out, made a hell of a lot of noise, and had a high old time. Even in the north of Italy ice hockey is a minority sport and, after qualifying automatically as hosts, they are the lowest ranked team in the women’s competition. But they enjoyed a famous victory, beating France 4-1.
If you were watching it on TV, you wouldn’t even have known anything was wrong. The exterior cameras had been positioned in just such a way to cut out the vast brown industrial wasteland that surrounds the arena.
Santagiulia isn’t really a hockey project at all. Milan doesn’t need, or want, a permanent venue for a sport hardly anyone here plays or watches. Hosting this tournament was just the price they had to pay to unlock the funding and permission they needed to redevelop this entire district around the new arena, which has been designed by the British firm David Chipperfield.
Come back here in a decade and the place will be unrecognisable. There are plans for 3,400 new homes, a park, and a shopping mall. By then the hockey rink will be long gone, repurposed for use as a concert hall.
