Salt Lake City on Track for 2034 Winter Olympic Approval

As we said on this site months ago: peel away the ifs and buts because for all intents and purposes, Salt Lake City will host the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

There are qualifiers and there are formal steps to be taken but there is no stopping the bid after a site visit from the International Olympic Committee’s Future Host Commission resulted in nothing but praise.

“Congratulations to Salt Lake City and Utah,” Future Host Commission Chair Karl Stoss said of the visit, but also a possible hint of what everyone knows will eventually be official. “You will become a role model also for the IOC.”

The IOC toured Rice-Eccles Stadium on Wednesday before a transfer on Salt Lake City’s light rail system down to the Delta Center. After a community forum on Thursday morning, the IOC visited Utah Olympic Park, Park City Mountain and Soldier Hollow before touring Snowbasin in Ogden and the Olympic Oval in Kearns on Friday. Commission members also had unofficial activities including attending Thursday night’s Utah Jazz home game.

“This is a hidden treasure, this city and this region,” said Christophe Dubi, Olympic Games executive director. “Everything we’ve seen here, more people than ourself should know about. … the rest of the world have memories of 2002 but this city has profoundly changed. This story needs to be told.”

The International Olympic Committee’s Future Host Commission invited Salt Lake to targeted dialogue for 2034 in late November. The IOC Executive Board is expected to put Salt Lake City forward for election during its meeting June 12-14 ahead of the official announcement in Paris.

“In this new dialogue process, we are not in a competition,” said SLC-Utah Committee for the Games Chief Executive Officer and President Fraser Bullock. “We’re in a partnership. It’s a whole new world and we feel that partnership in every sense of the world with our IOC friends.”

The Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games submitted its official bid to host the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in February to the IOC with an eye toward being announced as the host for 2034 on July 24 which is Pioneer Day, the state’s official holiday.

“There’s a possibility to think wider now, to think how could the Olympic Winter Games here in 2034 be transformative,” said Jacqueline Barrett, the IOC’s Future Olympic Games Hosts director, later adding of the visit “what surprised me most was the passion that still exists here for the Olympic Winter Games 22 years later in the people, everywhere we went.”

The 2034 venue plan includes all three Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation venues. It also features resorts, including Park City Mountain and Deer Valley Resort in Park City, along with Snowbasin near Ogden. Indoor facilities include the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Maverik Center in West Valley City and Peaks Ice Arena in Provo.

Opening and Closing ceremonies are proposed at Rice-Eccles Stadium. A proposed downtown location for big air is Block 85, the site of the Medals Plaza in 2002. It is located in proximity to the Delta Center and Salt Palace Convention Center and big air generally takes place on a portable scaffold structure.

Another new proposed competition venue is the Salt Palace Convention Center for Olympic curling and Paralympic wheelchair curling. SLC-UT made the venue selection in concert with World Curling and will feature a temporary curling ice sheet and seating for 6,500 spectators. Moving curling to the Salt Palace would be a change from 2002 when the sport was at the Weber County Ice Sheet in Ogden. Alpine skiing at Snowbasin would be another change from 2002 when events were held at the Deer Valley and Park City resorts.

“We are not looking for white elephants in the countryside,” Stoss said at Saturday’s news conference at the Edison House, a private club in Salt Lake City. “We found just used venues — excellent venues — for the next Winter Olympic Games.”

The venue plan could be adjusted in the coming decade should two new major sports venues come online. State Lawmakers have approved funding plans for a new baseball stadium and hockey arena should Salt Lake City get teams in Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League — which in the case of the NHL will reportedly be this fall.

SLC-UT organizers and the IOC have stressed that no venue that currently exists could be considered for events but in the past, local organizers have raised the idea of big air and the medals plaza being at the proposed MLB stadium on the edge of downtown.

“They said, ‘Even though your venues are so great, you undersold them in your bid. You describe them, but they’re even better than what we thought,’” Bullock added.

Hosting the Olympic Games in 2034 would make Salt Lake City the fifth city to host the Winter Games twice, joining Lake Placid, New York (1932 and 1980); St. Moritz, Switzerland (1928 and 1948); Innsbruck, Austria (1964 and 1976) and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, which hosted the 1956 Games and will co-host the 2026 Games with Milan.

Hosting the 2034 Games would be the first time the event would be in the U.S. since Salt Lake City in 2002. It would also be the second Games, Summer or Winter, in a six-year span in the United States with Los Angeles hosting the 2028 Summer Games in a time where the past few Games have been met with declining TV ratings and fan attention in the U.S.

“We have a unique opportunity in the United States with LA28 and hopefully Salt Lake City 2034,” USOPC Board Chair Gene Sykes said. “It’s not just an opportunity for the United States of America, but for the entire Olympic and Paralympic movement worldwide.”