MILAN -- There is no backup stadium if the main ice hockey arena for the Milan Cortina Winter Games is not ready on time.

Construction on the arena that is set to welcome NHL players back to the Olympics for the first time in more than a decade is behind schedule and its completion is going right down to the wire.

A test event at the Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena -- the new, 16,000-seat venue on the outskirts of Milan -- had to be moved, and new test events aren't scheduled until Jan. 9-11.

"There is no plan B," Andrea Francisi, the chief games operations officer for Milan Cortina, told the Associated Press on Saturday.

"So necessarily we have to be able to organize the competition in an impeccable manner at Santagiulia."

The first scheduled Olympic hockey game at the arena is a women'

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