This is a particularly important project for me, and I am pleased to be focusing my energies on the Lausanne 2020 Youth Olympic Games.

The Games give me the chance to use my past experiences in organising big events for the organisation of this particularly fascinating event that aims to celebrate both the Youth and the Olympic Movement.

It is an important task but also a great challenge that I am looking forward to being part of.

Lausanne 2020 should be able to bring together the whole region and, let’s be ambitious, the whole country behind the same project. And this is not just any project.

The Youth Olympic Games are much more than a ten-day sport competition, they are a unique opportunity to reach ambitious objectives for our youth who are our future and our talents of tomorrow.

Let’s think big, let’s be ambitious and let’s develop national sport programmes based on the Olympic Values. It starts now and it will benefit generations to come.

We need to take advantage of the assets of our country, Switzerland. We can count on an extraordinary pool of very talented and ambitious youth, no matter their schooling, from apprentices to academics or if they are making their first steps in the professional world.

We need to find a way to integrate all our youth in the Games and make their countless ideas flourish. This is one of our objectives for the Youth Games: organise Olympic Games for the youth, by the youth.

The reflection behind the Games should be new, using innovation to promote fundamental values of sport, the Olympic Values.

In order to reach our objectives, we need to involve all the stakeholders of Lausanne 2020. We will need the support of our National Olympic Committee, Swiss Olympic, of the winter as well as summer sport federations and of the sports clubs across Switzerland to put in place new programmes to leverage on the opportunities offered by the Games.

We will also need the support of the public sector in order to reach the schools and to promote physical activities among the youth. We need to spread the Olympic values of respect, friendship and excellence, which are essential for the development of a healthy and social lifestyle.

We have now a little bit less than four years to build a great enthusiasm around Lausanne 2020, to create an exceptional event and to organise it in a new way that it will have the power to unite and to leave a mark in Swiss and Olympic history.

Our next short term objective is the presentation in front of the IOC of our strategic and operational roadmap next October. What are the Games that we want? How do we want to put them in place? The answers of all those questions will be in this document on which we are already working hard.

I am pleased to share with you, through those few lines, the progress of the project in the next weeks, months and years to come.

Let’s get to work and, together, let our dreams come true.