A new baseball stadium and hockey arena aren’t part of Utah’s bid to hold another Winter Games, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic officials said Thursday.
“The bid and and the award doesn’t depend on any of that,” Sarah Hirshland, the CEO of the USOPC, told reporters during a media call following two days of closed-door board meetings that included discussions about Salt Lake City’s efforts to land the 2034 Winter Games.
The multibillion-dollar sports facilities that the Utah Legislature has backed in the hopes of attracting Major League Baseball and National Hockey League teams to Salt Lake City aren’t part of the detailed plan for a 2034 Games that was submitted in February to the International Olympic Committee.
But there’s been enough questions about how the stadium and the arena are connected to the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games bid that IOC officials made a point of spelling out earlier this week that the potential investment in the facilities should not be sold to taxpayers as needed for Salt Lake City to host another Winter Games.
Hirshland echoed that message.
“The submission to the IOC and the contemplation for these Games are not reliant on any of that conversation at all,” she said. “We’re in an incredibly privileged position in Salt Lake and Utah with an incredible set of existing venues from the 2002 Games that have been kept up and invested in.”
Like the IOC, however, Hirshland didn’t preclude using the facilities for an Olympics a decade away.
“I think if there are new buildings built between now and 2034, I’d imagine that the Salt Lake-Utah team will evaluate whether they should be part of the Games or not,” she said. That could include holding nightly medals ceremonies or big air snowboarding competitions added since 2002 in the baseball stadium planned near the Utah State Fairpark.
The IOC named Salt Lake City the “preferred host” for the 2034 late last year under its new, less formal bid process. In April, members of the IOC’s Future Host Commission are scheduled to inspect the venues ahead of their report to the Switzerland-based organization’s leadership in June.
A final vote on the site of 2034 Winter Games is anticipated to come in Paris on July 24, celebrated as Pioneer Day in Utah. At the same meeting prior to the start of the 2024 Summer Games, the full membership is also expected to vote on France’s French Alps bid to host in 2030.
Hirshland and the USOPC’s board chair, Gene Sykes, will be in Utah for the IOC’s April 9-13 visit. Sykes said he and Hirshland have stayed in touch with the IOC members on the Future Host Commission “honestly, for well over a year in preparing for exactly this sort of interaction.”
The Utah bid team “has done an incredible job of preparing all of the work they need to prepare in order to be in a tremendous position to explain the logic of Salt Lake City as a host” for the 2034 Games, he said. “There’s not a more attractive host to the IOC than Salt Lake City.”
Sykes said the “remarkable sports culture within Salt Lake and across the state of Utah is very, very impressive.”
He said “the expectation on the part of the IOC is this will confirm what they already have learned about the Salt Lake City team and the atmosphere within Utah, which is it’s a tremendously supportive culture and a place where the excitement of the Olympic and Paralympic Games can feel very much at home.”