Opening Ceremony

Towering 250 metres above the city centre, Bergisel Stadium will offer the athletes and officials attending the Opening Ceremony of the 1st Winter Youth Olympic Games a unique panoramic view of Innsbruck. The ski jumping stadium was designed by the world-famous architect Zaha Hadid and is one of the Tyrolean regional capital's main sporting landmarks. Since hosting its first competitions in 1927, Innsbruck has developed step by step to become a mecca for the international ski-jumping elite and, following comprehensive reconstruction work on the stadium in 2001, today offers an infrastructure which meets the highest international standards.

With a total capacity of 28,000, Bergisel Stadium is the perfect place to host the spectacular Opening Ceremony of the inaugural Winter Youth Olympic Games. After 1964 and 1976, the stadium will in 2012 become the only sports venue on the planet to have hosted opening ceremonies of three separate Olympic Games. As well as welcoming the world's best ski jumpers every January for the legendary Four Hills Tournament, Bergisel Stadium has also established itself as one of Innsbruck's main locations for events during the summer months: in 1988 Pope John Paul II celebrated an open-air Mass for over 60,000 people in the bowl-shaped arena, and during the UEFA Euro 2008 Football Championship the stadium became a popular meeting point thanks to a series of concerts and a huge screen showing the games.

For more information visit the official website at www.bergisel.info .