MILAN — The Winter Olympics that wrap here on Sunday will look operationally quite different than the Games that Utah will host in eight years.
With only an hour between its mountain venues and Salt Lake City, the 2034 Games will not have a regional spread anywhere close to Milan Cortina. Ever the eager host, the organizing committee brought more than 80 observers from around the state to learn how these Games are working and study venue preparations and logistics.
“We’ll learn a lot and then we’ll do it again in four years with the French Alps,” said Utah CEO Brad Wilson. “A lot of these people, it just also stokes the enthusiasm in our community, quite frankly, to have them here.”
That enthusiasm outpaces the size of the organization, for now, at least. Utah 2034 will go from around a dozen staff to around 20 by the end of the year and 30 by the end of 2027.
As they look ahead, the commercial structure will be finalized in the coming year. The host city contract requires organizing committees to sign a marketing plan agreement with their national Olympic committee so that they work together and aren’t competing in the market.
Utah 2034 and the USOPC have yet to finalize what that looks like, but it’s clear that it will be different than the joint venture the USOPC has with LA28, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Properties.
That deal saw the USOPC turn over commercial sales and control of Team USA assets to LA28 with a $488 million guarantee for the USOPC through 2028.
USOPC leaders are looking at more of a shared entity with Utah 2034 that will create a commercial organization that lives on beyond those Olympics and Paralympics.
“We’ve decided the Team USA concept is the everlasting concept,” said USOPC chairman Gene Sykes. “What we need to do is develop something which is the marketing organization, the commercial organization, a little bit like what the USOPP is, but not something that is designed to go out of business.”
With whatever structure the sales entity for Utah 2034 takes on, it will go to market at the start of 2027 with renewal discussions for existing USOPP sponsors.
Wilson said the organizing committee is in talks with some venues about updating them. Many of them have been in regular operation since the 2002 Games, and Utah has hosted more than 12,000 national or international events in the years since.
With many of the same leaders involved in this effort as led the Games two decades ago, including Executive Chair and President Fraser Bullock, organizers will think about a people legacy as well.
“We need to make sure we’ve got people that have experience in Games delivery,” Wilson said. “We need to have people that don’t so we’re building the next generation of leaders. … We’ve got a little time to think about this, but our team will start to really grow right after the L.A. Games.”
