Photo by Laura Seitz
Thousands in Washington Square as Utah and Salt Lake get the Games
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah | July 20, 2024 — When then-Gov. Gary Herbert set up the structure for Utah to bid for another Olympics a decade after the 2002 Winter Games, he didn’t really think it would be coming back to the state.
“I didn’t. It was kind of like you’re one and done,” the former governor told the Deseret News about his assessment then of the chances the International Olympic Committee would let Utah host again. But during his weekly tennis game with Utah Sports Commission Chairman Jeff Robbins, he decided, why not try?
After all, Herbert reasoned, Utah taxpayers had spent $59 million building venues for 2002 that were still used by community and elite athletes, thanks to Winter Games profits used to repay the investment and establish an endowment to keep them up and running. Maybe, he thought, that could help convince the IOC to come back to Utah “rather than go through all this rigamarole.”
So to mark the 10th anniversary of the Feb. 8, 2002, start of the Salt Lake Games, he called a news conference and stood near the ice at one of the state-built venues, the Utah Olympic Oval in the Salt Lake County city of Kearns, to announce the formation of an exploratory committee to look at bidding for another Olympics.
The difficulty the state faced was acknowledged at an early committee meeting, when members were advised that a bid for another Winter Games should be sold to Utahns as a long shot that will bring positive publicity to the state no matter what happens. The strategy was described as “great stuff” by the committee’s co-chairman, then-Lt. Gov. Greg Bell.
That would be the status of bringing back a Winter Games for years to come. It would end up taking more than a decade of bidding ups and downs for Utah to now be on the verge of being awarded the 2034 Winter Games. A final vote by the International Olympic Committee will be held in Paris on July 24, celebrated as Pioneer Day in Utah.
“We were very stubborn. And we had to be disciplined, too,” to stay in the competition for so many years, said Robbins, the head of the commission responsible for bringing more than 1,000 sporting events to Utah since 2002. Remaining “ready, willing and able” to host another Olympics, he said, means knowing when “to put our heads down and say, ‘Let’s keep going, man.’”
How the Olympic bid process works
The first big jolt for Utah’s hopes of bringing the Olympics back came in mid-2012, when U.S. Olympic officials chose to go after a Summer Games rather than provide the required backing for a Winter Games bid following the renegotiation of how Olympic revenues are split with the International Olympic Committee.
The deal smoothed the way for American bids to once again be seriously considered after years of rejections blamed on financial tensions. Los Angeles sought to host the 2024 Summer Games, but in an unusual dual award, those Games went to Paris and the California city was given the 2028 Summer Games.
One of the three U.S. negotiators that made the deal, Fraser Bullock, became the president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games after working quietly toward another Olympics for the state since serving as chief operating officer of the 2002 Winter Games.
Bullock recalled making a pitch to pursue the 2022 Winter Games, at a private meeting that included American Olympic leaders and others with ties to the Games held in New York City. But the then-U.S. Olympic Committee made the decision to keep trying for the larger Summer Games.
While Bullock was left surprised and disappointed, today he says he’s grateful that Utah didn’t host in 2022 given the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those Winter Games were held in Beijing, which implemented strict protocols including a “closed-loop” system that isolated participants.
It took until December 2018 for the USOC to move ahead with a Winter Games bid, picking Salt Lake City over Denver as the country’s choice to compete for an unspecified future Winter Games. That was too late for a run at the 2026 Winter Games, which would go to Torino, Italy, but 2030 — or 2034 — became a possibility.
By then, the IOC’s new, less formal bidding process was in place. Part of the reforms that followed the bribery scandal surrounding Salt Lake City’s bid for 2002, the new process was intended to reduce the “reputational risk” associated with “aggressive lobbying (that) led to ethical issues” while encouraging more participants by promising lower costs and fewer losers.
Replacing efforts to court the votes of the more than 100 members of the IOC is a loosely structured selection system that puts the Switzerland-based organization’s leaders in charge of advancing would-be hosts without specifying a timetable for decisions to be made. Previously, bids were awarded seven years in advance of a Games, and only to a city.
Now, cities, regions and even countries can team up for private “informal exchanges” with IOC staff in the early stages, moving on to what’s called a “continuous dialogue” if they get the support of the relevant national Olympic committees, but the talks are still considered noncommittal on both sides.
It’s the next stage, called “targeted dialogue,” where the bid process really gets serious. It’s up to the 15 members of the IOC Executive Board, led by the IOC president, to decide whether to name a bid a “preferred host” of a specific Games, triggering a technical assessment by the IOC’s summer or winter Future Host Commission and a slew of paperwork that must be submitted.
And it’s the Executive Board that determines whether to advance their picks to host to be ratified by the full IOC membership.
Is it Salt Lake City or Utah that’s bidding?
Under the IOC’s new selection process, Olympic Games no longer had to be awarded only to a city, a move seen as encouraging more bids by getting regions and even multiple countries to come together so costs can be kept down by sharing resources, such as existing venues.
In Utah, that sparked talk behind the scenes about whether this should be the state’s bid this time.
“Gov. Herbert had a conversation with me where he was proposing that we not include Salt Lake City in the name of the bid. It would be the Utah Games,” Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said, recalling a meeting in the governor’s office after she was first elected mayor in November 2019. She considered Herbert, the first person to suggest she run for mayor, a friend.
“I felt disappointed. But mostly ready to defend our city’s place as the heart of the Games in Utah. And I convinced him to keep us in,” Mendenhall said, arguing that the capital city shows the state’s political diversity by promoting what are key issues for the IOC.
“The alignment between Salt Lake City and the IOC’s vision for the Games is perfectly in tandem,” the recently reelected mayor said, adding, “I believe that’s a very attractive thing to the IOC. The state of Utah is strengthened because of Salt Lake City’s work on those values.”
Herbert said he doesn’t remember that specific conversation with Mendenhall, but does recall raising concerns about the bid not including Utah while meeting with a larger group in his office about putting together the bid committee, which was announced to the public in February 2020 as the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games.
“I had said, ‘The I’m a little concerned about is that we end up calling it the Salt Lake City Games and yet we’ve got many other cities and areas of the state that are involved. I have nothing against Salt Lake City, but shouldn’t this in fact be kind of the Utah Games,’” the former governor said he told the group, adding, “It just didn’t seem fair to me.”
They decided instead on what Herbert said was “a better way to do it, rather than have the bid be just Salt Lake City or just Utah. We came up with the idea it ought to be called, ‘Salt Lake City dash Utah’ to include all the other areas of the state that are involved with the Olympic effort,” from Ogden to Provo, and Kearns to Park City and Midway.
“It felt like a good compromise to me,” Herbert said.
Bidding for 2030 or 2034
What wasn’t as settled was whether the bid was for the Winter Games in 2030 or 2034.
The sooner the better, backers of the bid believed, often joking they still wanted to be around by the time the Olympics returned. But 2030 posed a problem because the United States was already hosting the 2028 Summer Games, in Los Angeles. That would have created “geopolitical” issues for the IOC, which attempts to avoid favoring a single country or even continent.
And it was also seen as impacting domestic sponsorships, a key source of revenues for both Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, as well as the now-U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, raising concerns about the value of such deals as well as whether Utah might have little time to make any sales.
Still, they held out hope. Maybe the IOC would have to turn to Utah for 2030, especially after public support faltered in the two other cities in the running, Sapporo, Japan; and Vancouver, Canada. And couldn’t there be some sort of arrangement made to overcome the concerns about the sponsorships, such as selling the two American Games together as an even more valuable package?
The answer to the question of 2030 or 2034 finally became clear, Bullock said, during a decisive meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach two years ago, as part of the bid team’s official visit to the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.
“We got some wonderful counsel from President Bach,” Bullock said. “We all did. He made it clear that 2034 made better sense for all of us. He explained why, and I listened very carefully to him and realized that combined with what I heard from others, that he was right. That was really a pivotal moment.”
Bach warned there was “a lot of market risk with back-to-back Games in any one country,” a potential hit to sponsorship revenues, Bullock said, words he and other Utah bidders took to heart, along with the lesson, “not to be so anchored in my own position that I’m not willing to listen. That’s a bad trait.”
Bidders started spelling out a preference for 2034, but said they’d be ready for 2030 if needed. By the end of 2022, the IOC opened up 2030 to new candidates by delaying an expected decision to advance Salt Lake City, Sapporo or Vancouver to the next stage of the new selection process.
New Winter Games bids emerged, from Sweden, Switzerland and France. There was even talk briefly of a European “super bid,” from three countries. With no set timelines for decision making, it was late 2023 when the IOC Executive Board named the Salt Lake City-Utah bid the preferred host for 2034. In June, the IOC leaders advanced the bid to the upcoming final vote.
France’s late entry into the race, a French Alps bid to host in 2030, was also named a preferred host and advanced to a final vote on July 24, pending the submissions of the needed financial guarantees from the government that were delayed by the country’s surprise parliamentary elections. Switzerland has a preferred status for bidding for the 2038 Winter Games.
Time for a decision on another Olympics in Utah
Utah’s bidders stuck with their “ready, willing and able” motto even as the bid process dragged on, saying they’d step up to host another Olympics when called. But that didn’t stop questions being raised about whether the IOC was taking the state’s interest for granted.
In January 2023, the IOC was urged to “grab Salt Lake City while it can,” in a column by Rich Perelman, a communications company boss who’s been involved with the Olympics for more than 40 years. Perelman, the founder and editor of The Sports Examiner, wrote that “the IOC would be wrong to simply assume that Salt Lake City is a permanent bidder that it can take for granted.”
By last October, Bullock was making it clear Utah didn’t want to see a decision on 2034 postponed again. In an interview with Sports Business Journal just before the IOC was to consider allowing a dual award of the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games, Bullock suggested it might be hard to sustain the support of Utahns unless there was a “positive signal” from the IOC.
“We’ve been at this for 11 years. Fortunately, the people of Utah are very supportive of the Olympics and Paralympics. However, holding that interest indefinitely would be incredibly challenging. That’s why we are hoping for progress this year,” the bid boss told the influential publication.
The challenge, Bullock told the Deseret News then, was that “things change in the world, in terms of economic situations, political situations. Right now, we have all the pieces perfectly lined up — strong public support, strong political support, strong business community support.”
The IOC listened, giving a “green light” to naming the hosts of both the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games at the same time, as was done for the 2024 and 2028 Summer Games in 2017. Then, Paris got the 2024 Olympics, and Los Angeles agreed to wait until 2028 to host.
That decision put Utah in the position of seeming to have locked up the 2034 Winter Games, even though there were still more steps in the bid process. At the same IOC meeting that decided to go ahead with a dual award, the Salt Lake City bid was identified as the only contender for 2034.
What Mitt Romney says about the Olympic bid
For Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who took over the 2002 Winter Games at the height of the bid scandal, there never should have been any doubt that the state would host again.
“Absolutely. No question. I mean, Utah pulled off a near-perfect Olympics. It would have been malpractice for the IOC not to consider Utah an Olympic site in the future,” Romney said, noting, “clearly, the first time you do something, there are extra challenges and the environment for the Games was particularly fraught in 2002.”
Organizers then faced issues like a massive financial shortfall due to fallout from the scandal, he recalled.
“That was remedied, but we had to go to town to find sponsors and to fix our finances. And, of course, 9/11 occurred. That raised security threats that were beyond anything we had anticipated,” Romney said. “There was the public skepticism, deservedly so, given the flawed bid process. So, yeah, we had our share of challenges to overcome.”
But the organizing committee, also led by Bullock as the chief operating officer, handled it all. That, the senator said, makes a strong case for the Olympics to return.
“I really think the IOC wants the Games to be successful. What they saw was an extraordinary welcome mat put out by the state and the volunteers and superb venues and a transportation system that worked. And one thing we were lucky on, which was fantastic weather,” Romney said.
“So all in all, it was a superb Olympics,” he said, the same way then-IOC President Jacques Rogge described the 2002 Winter Games during the Closing Ceremonies held at the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium. “How could you not consider that if you’re the IOC when you’re looking for future sites?”