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Put aside thin ice. Currently, there’s no ice.

As NHL players gearing up to return to the Olympic Games for the first time in over a decade, building work on the primary hockey arena for the Milano Cortina Games is going down to the wire.

Officials announced on Wednesday that the main test event for the 16,000-capacity Santagiulia arena that was scheduled for December has been relocated to a smaller venue – and that no new test event has been scheduled yet.

The issue raises the prospect that there might not be a game held in the main arena until the puck is dropped for the women's initial games at the Olympics on 5 February – 24 hours before the inaugural event.

“It’s going to be very close to the start of the games, the schedule is highly compressed. But we knew that,” Milano Cortina local organizing committee CEO Andrea Varnier stated in a recent update.

The event that was supposed to evaluate the Santagiulia playing surface was part of the U20 world championship from 8-14 December. That event has been moved to the Rho Fair hockey venue, which is being established inside a giant convention center on the outskirts of Milan and will stage secondary matches during the Olympics.

Typically, freshly built Olympic facilities are tested at least the year before to holding medal events. And with a large hockey arena, it’s not just about the playing surface and making sure that the playing surface is ready and secure. It’s also about testing food outlets, bathrooms and everything else inside a newly constructed contemporary stadium.

This new facility, which is being constructed by a commercial firm, is scheduled to become the nation's biggest indoor arena. For after the Olympics, it’s being considered as a potential future host of the ATP Finals tennis tournament.

Despite the postponements and worries, high-priced passes are already being purchased for matches at the Santagiulia venue. Seats for the men’s gold medal game on 22 February – the final day of the games – are going for as much as €1,400 (more than $1,600). This exceeds the price of any other sports event at the Milan-Cortina Games. Solely passes for the opening and closing ceremonies are priced higher.

The comeback of NHL players at the Olympics was revealed in February of last year, with the premier hockey league permitting its athletes to compete in the Winter Olympics for the first time since 2014 in Sochi.

Men's Olympic hockey tournament is scheduled to take place from 11-22 February. The women’s event runs from 5-19 February.