| Salt Lake City |
 |
 |
| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
 |
| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
|
| NOR |
11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
|
| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
|
| RUS |
6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
|
| AUT |
2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
|
| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
|
| FRA |
4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
|
| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
|
| NED |
3 |
5 |
0 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
Utah's quest for Winter Games began in 1929
Utah's quest to stage the Olympic Winter Games began about the time of the Winter Games themselves.
For decades Utah's ski enthusiasts tried to sell the ice and snow of the Wasatch Front as the place where the world's greatest winter sports athletes should compete. But only after years of research, addressing environmental concerns, garnering public support, investment in winter sports facilities, many twists of fate, and learning and playing the intricacies of the bidding game, was that enthusiasm rewarded.
Finally landing the 2002 Winter Games was the result of a lengthy, educational, persistent and costly effort. Perhaps no host city in Olympic history has put forth such dedication to garner the Games.
Utah's Olympic interest began in 1929, about five years after the first Winter Games in France, when the Norwegian Athletic Club of Salt Lake (later to become the Utah Ski Club) put in a token bid to host the 1932 Winter Games. Construction had just finished on Ecker Hill, Utah's first ski jump on a ranch in Parleys Canyon, but there were no ski resorts or lifts in the state.
In those days the host country of the Summer Olympic Games also put on the Winter Games. Los Angeles staged the 1932 Summer Games and an American site was needed for the Winter Games. Lake Placid was eventually selected as that site. With its bid, however, Utah's interest in world-class ski competitions was recognized, and the 1935 U.S. Olympic ski jump trials were held at Ecker Hill, as was the 1937 U.S. National Amateur Ski Jumping Tournament.
Over the next three decades several ski resorts opened for business in Utah, but there was no other concerted Utah bid for the Winter Games until the early 1960s.
The Olympic movement of the past few decades had its beginnings over a business lunch at a downtown Salt Lake City restaurant where four prominent businessmen — Gene Donovan, Jack Gallivan, Max Rich and Walker Wallace — all community leaders with clout, began talking about bringing the Winter Games to Utah. Those discussions evolved into a grass-roots campaign to bring the 1968 or 1972 Games to Utah. The campaign was financed by selling some 27,000 OUI (Olympics for Utah Inc.) buttons at $1 each.
In the fall of 1962, Utah lost the U.S. Olympic Committee bid for the 1968 Games to Lake Placid. A few years later, however, Utah eventually won the nomination of the USOC for the 1972 Games. A small group of business leaders traveled to Rome in 1966 to make Utah's presentation to the International Olympic Committee, only to lose out to Sapporo, Japan.
A year later Utah was at it again, this time bidding for the 1976 Winter Games. This time around, however, Utah didn't even win the USOC bid. Denver was selected as the U.S. bid city and was later selected by the IOC as the site of the 1976 Games.
Some five years later, in a stunning blow to the Olympic movement, Denver citizens forced a referendum and rejected the Games just three years before they were to be held. Voters were fearful of mounting environmental and economical concerns and retaliated via ballots against the bigwigs who pushed the bid onto the city.
This sudden state of Olympic limbo returned Utah to the scene. Salt Lake Mayor Jake Garn made a bid to the USOC to replace Denver, but only if a number of stipulations were met — mainly that the federal government funded the Games. Utah won the unanimous support of the USOC, but the state ran out of time to prepare a bid for the IOC. When it became clear Utah wouldn't have federal support by the IOC bid deadline, Garn withdrew the bid.
By all accounts, Utahns supported the Olympic bids of the 1960s. Because of the problems in the Denver bid, however, support for the Games began to wane. Concerns over environment, economics and even terrorism associated with the Games made most Utahns skeptical about hosting the Olympics. From 1973 to 1983, Utah's Olympic effort basically took a decade break.
In late 1983, however, Brad Barber, a state planner, was approached by Utah State University professor John Nicholson, who felt Utah was a natural site for the Winter Games. Barber and Nicholson did some research and met with officials from other Olympic cities to determine how Utah should best decide whether to bid on the Games. In January 1984, the two took a slide show on their findings to then Gov. Scott M. Matheson and Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson. Matheson and Wilson formed a committee to study the feasibility of bidding on and hosting the Winter Games.
For the next several months, while the committee did its work and awaited the results of a feasibility study, public debate intensified over the wisdom of hosting the Games. To ensure the feasibility committee had no conflict, Wilson and new Gov. Norman Bangerter decided that a second committee was needed to promote Utah as a possible Olympic site. Ogden lawyer and businessman Tom Welch was appointed chairman of that committee.
In June 1985, the feasibility committee voted 19-4 in favor of bidding for the 1992 Winter Games. The vote was anticlimactic, however, because it came a few days after the promotional committee had already submitted a bid for the Games to the USOC. Later that month the USOC selected Anchorage, Alaska, to be the U.S. nomination for the 1992 bid. A few months after Anchorage lost the 1992 Winter Games to Albertville, France, the USOC decided to stick with Anchorage as the American city for the 1994 bid.
When Anchorage lost the 1994 bid to Lillehammer, Norway, the door was again opened for Utah. The state showed its commitment to the Olympic chase by forming a task force on bringing amateur sporting events and winter sports competitions to Utah.
In June 1986, after Utah had committed to construct a bobsled-luge run, ski jump and speed-skating oval, the USOC picked Salt Lake City to be the U.S. nomination for the 1998 and 2002 Winter Games. Utah beat out Denver, Anchorage and Reno-Tahoe. In November 1989 Utah voters approved spending $56 million in state funds to construct the three venues.
With public support for the Winter Games boosted by the referendum results and construction of Olympic facilities promised, Utah was the front runner to land the 1998 Games. That status suffered a setback, however, when Atlanta was picked by the IOC in September 1990 as the site for the 1996 Summer Games. Observers believed the IOC would not award consecutive Olympics to the same country. That belief was substantiated in June 1991 when the IOC awarded the 1998 Winter Games to Nagano, Japan by a 46-42 final round vote. A prominent IOC member later admitted that geography was to blame for Salt Lake City losing the 1998 bid.
With no Olympic revenue in line to help maintain and operate the $56 million in Olympic facilities Utah promised to build, and some discontent with the politics of the Olympic bidding process, polls showed many residents felt Utah had given its best shot and it was time for the state to get out of the bidding game.
Instead, government officials and bid boosters drafted a new game plan, reorganized the committee in charge of bid oversight, redefined some roles and renegotiated the state's agreement with the USOC to delay construction of some winter sports facilities. With a $6 million privately funded budget in place and belief that the 2002 Games would go to a North American city, Utah officials vowed to go after the Winter Games one more time with a well-orchestrated bid.
In January 1995, the IOC narrowed its choices for the 2002 Winter Games to four sites — Salt Lake City; Ostersund, Sweden; Sion, Switzerland and Quebec, Canada. On the morning of June 16, 1995, more than 50,000 revelers gathered on the grounds of the Salt Lake City-County Building erupted into pandemonium when IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch announced from meetings in Budapest, Hungary, that the 2002 Winter Games were awarded to "the city of Salt Lake City."
The victory was decisive. For the first time in Winter Games history a bidding city had won on the first ballot, with Salt Lake City receiving 54 of a possible 92 votes.
Finally, after several decades of trying, the Olympic Winter Games were coming to Utah.
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