PARIS — Utah will host the Olympics again.
The International Olympic Committee voted in Paris on Wednesday to award the 2034 Winter Games to the state. Their long-awaited decision followed a half-hour presentation showcasing plans for what will add up to a $4 billion event built on the success of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
The vote was announced at 4:21 a.m. MDT after a lengthy discussion about the issues raised for sport by a recently launched U.S. government investigation into doping allegations rather than accepting the findings of the Canadian-based World Anti Doping Agency.
The controversy, which surfaced earlier this month, had put Wednesday’s decision on Utah’s bid for the 2034 Winter Games at “significant risk,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told reporters. “We started hearing several days ago that there was a possibility that they wouldn’t even take a vote today, after all of this work … you can imagine how that would have gone over.”
In the end, the governor said the IOC members “also recognize there’s danger in kind of turning off Salt Lake City, who has done everything right. They recognized that it is not our fault that these conversations were happening. So they very wisely came together and said, ‘Is there another path, can we at least agree to work on this problem together,” the governor said.
“So we were able to get here. There were some anxious moments that we might not get the bid today,” he acknowledged.
Before the 83-6 vote in favor of bringing the Games back to Utah, IOC President Thomas Bach urged members to support the bid.
“You have nothing to do with this. It is very unfortunate. I am sorry for you and for us,” Bach told the bid leaders on stage, calling their presentation “brilliant.”
The pitch was made by the governor, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, Olympian Lindsey Vonn, Paralympian Dani Aravich, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee Chair Gene Sykes, and the top leaders of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games — president and CEO Fraser Bullock and chair Catherine Raney Norman.
“We have a history together,” Cox told the IOC. “We have been good partners before and you can count on us.”
Bullock said Utah hopes to use the Games to “do good.”
“We believe the 2034 Games have a vision that is focused outward — not inward,” he said, fighting back tears when he described watching the spectacular fireworks ceremony during the Closing Ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Games. “For me, it was a dream come true. I really, and I mean really, did not want that moment to end.”
Mendenhall said youth are at the heart of every major move Salt Lake City makes. The “Olympic values are imbedded in our DNA and will serve as a scaffolding” that will support the next generation as they follow their dreams, she said.
Speaking of the power of optimism and partnership, Mendenhall said, “the Games are a perfect fit for our future.”
The culmination of more than a decade of selling the state as “ready, willing and able” to host another Olympics was celebrated at a party in downtown Salt Lake City’s Washington Square by Utahns on the state’s Pioneer Day even though the IOC announcement came in the pre-dawn hours.
What’s going to be new for the 2034 Olympics?
The bid emphasized using the same venues as 2002, all no more than an hour away from the University of Utah, where athletes will once again stay in student housing. Rice-Eccles Stadium will be the site of opening and closing ceremonies. An addition is a massive temporary ski and snowboard jump in downtown Salt Lake City for big air competitions.
Also new for 2034 will be the first-ever “Athlete Family Village,” also at the University of Utah, key to the bid’s pledge to elevate a second Olympics in Utah. The plan is to offer housing for family members of athletes from around the world, along with ticketing, transportation and other services.
The latest budget for putting on the Olympics, and the Paralympics for athletes with disabilities that will follow, is $2.83 billion, a number that rises to $4 billion with the inclusion of a proposed legacy fund and the USOPC’s share of sponsorship revenues. The money is to come entirely from private sources, largely through the sale of sponsorships, broadcast rights and tickets.
While Utah taxpayers aren’t being tapped to organize the Games, they are responsible for picking up the tab should the budget fall short. That’s spelled out in the host contract with the IOC that Cox is to sign on behalf of the state immediately following the bid award. The state was also the financial guarantor of the 2002 Games, but those ended up with around a $100 million surplus.
Not included in the budget are the big infrastructure projects state and local officials want to get done before the Games, such as double tracking the FrontRunner commuter rail and a “Green Loop” of park space around downtown Salt Lake City. The federal government is expected to help fund their plans as well as Games-time security and transportation.
Another Olympics in 2034 is expected to have a $6.6 billion economic impact on the state over the coming decade, according to a new analysis by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, a boost that includes more than 42,000 job years of employment to the state, along with $2.5 billion in personal income and almost $3.9 billion in state gross domestic product.
With a decade to go before Utah will welcome the world again, what would become an organizing committee charged with staging the Games is expected to stay small for several years and focus on community initiatives, particularly those that encourage young people to get involved in winter sports.
How many other Olympic sites have hosted a second time?
The bid to bring the Winter Games back was launched in 2012, by then-Gov. Gary Herbert. It would take nearly a decade for U.S. Olympic officials to commit to going after a Winter Games as soon as 2030, although 2034 was seen as the better option financially to avoid competing for sponsors with the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.
The IOC’s new, less formal bid process doesn’t spell out any timelines so it was never clear when the initial field of 2030 candidates would be reduced, a list that included Sapporo, Japan; and Vancouver, Canada. But when public support lagged for those two cities, the IOC chose to delay an expected decision in December 2022, allowing new contenders to emerge.
Sweden, Switzerland and, eventually, France jumped into the race. By the end of 2023, IOC leaders finally named Salt Lake City their preferred host for 2034, and gave France’s French Alps bid the same designation for 2030, but only after a decision was made to allow both Games to be awarded at the same time.
Last month, both bids were advanced to a final vote of the full IOC membership, but the surprise national elections in France that concluded in early July put a decision on 2030 on hold pending the signing of the needed government guarantees that any financial shortfalls would be covered.
But the French Alps bid for 2030 was awarded earlier Wednesday subject to their submission after an appearance by French President Emmanuel Macron offering the “full commitment” of the French government.
Utah now joins 10 other places in hosting at least two Olympics. For Winter Games, that’s St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 1928 and 1948; Lake Placid, New York, 1932 and 1980; Cortina, Italy, 1956 and 2026; and Innsbruck, Austria, 1964 and 1976. Athens, Paris, London, Los Angeles and Tokyo have all been hosts of at least two Summer Games and Beijing has hosted both summer and winter.
The support of Utahns for hosting again has stayed strong. The latest Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll showed 79% of Utahns are in favor of hosting the 2034 Winter Games. Previous Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics polls in 2022 and 2023 also found a similar level of public backing for another Olympics in Utah at an unspecified date.
Austrian IOC member Karl Stoss, the head of the Future Host Commission that toured Utah’s venues in April, brought up the bid’s “exceptionally high level of public and political support” in the state during a brief report to the IOC ahead of the vote. Stoss said he saw that firsthand at the Salt Lake City International Airport at the end of the visit.
“I went to an information desk and asked for my gate,” he said, the man there “looked at me and said, ‘Hey! You are from the Olympics. Yes, man, bring it back. Bring back the Olympic Games to Salt Lake City.’ This is Salt Lake City, Utah.”
Happy crowds gathered in the Rural restaurant in Paris for an Olympic bid watch party and then to celebrate. Just like the presenters in the massive main hall of the Palais des Congres de Paris, many wore matching jackets and accessories (the men in dark blue with ties, the women in light blue with neck scarves) and rang cow bells.
Before leaving the stage at the IOC meeting, Cox had a message directly to Utahns celebrating the news of the award back home.
“We’re back, baby,” the governor said.
