The Olympic rings adorn the Stadio Olimpico del Ghiaccio, which will be called Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium, the venue for the curling discipline at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. (AP )

CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 5, (AP): In Sochi, workers were still hammering away in the media village and shower water ran yellow when journalists from around the world arrived for the 2014 Winter Games.

The chaotic preparations for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro were labeled the "worst” ever by a vice president of the International Olympic Committee.

The next Olympics, though, might set an unofficial record for running late on preparations.

That’s because the century-old sliding center being completely rebuilt for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games is pushing the deadline so tight that the IOC has gone so far as to demand a Plan B option that would require moving bobsled, luge, and skeleton events to Lake Placid, New York if the track in Italy isn’t finished in time.

Thursday marks exactly one year to go before the Feb. 6, 2026 opening ceremony at the San Siro stadium and the track in Cortina is still a half-completed construction site.

The IOC has set a deadline for the end of next month for pre-certification of the Cortina track and nobody is saying for sure if it will pass the test.

But Fabio Saldini, the Italian government commissioner in charge of the 118 million euro ($123 million) project, told The Associated Press during a recent visit that almost 70% of the track was completed - even if it was tough to tell inside the muddy and chaotic construction site.

With 180 people working from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day to build the sliding center, the first ice is slated to be laid down on the track at the start of March.

"We have huge support from the construction firms, the government, and (Infrastructure and Transport Minister Matteo) Salvini,” Saldini said. "With everyone’s support, we will be able to finish in time.”

Construction began less than a year ago and no sliding track has been built in such a short timeframe. An official test event is slated for October, a step that has taken on more importance since the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili in a training crash hours before the start of the opening ceremony for the 2010 Vancouver Games.

The IOC would have preferred to use an active track in nearby Austria or Switzerland instead of rebuilding the Cortina venue, which had been closed since 2008. However, it let the local organizing committee select the Plan B option.

"We chose Lake Placid because it was the only place where they offered us the track without requiring us to make any investments,” Milan-Cortina CEO Andrea Varnier told AP. "But we’re counting on holding the sliding sports here in Cortina.”