The selection of Salt Lake City this week as host of the 2002 international Winter Olympics is a well-earned and richly-deserved triumph for all of Utah. And it offers large opportunities as well as posing huge challenges in the years ahead.
Though it was the clear favorite going in, Salt Lake City was still an unexpectedly quick and easy winner over Ostersund, Sweden, Sion, Switzerland, and Quebec, Canada.The victory by a wide margin on the very first ballot by International Olympic Committee members was the ultimate validation of the hard work and painstaking preparation by the Salt Lake City Bid Committee for the past decade.
Even the most confident supporters of the Salt Lake bid had expected two or even three ballots would be necessary to attain the 47 votes for an absolute majority. But the IOC members - clearly impressed with the excellence of the Salt Lake bid - gave the city 54 votes on the first try.
Tension was palpable as thousands of Utahns were glued to television sets awaiting the verdict. When the announcement was made by IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, cheers went up, including the delegation in Budapest, Hungary, and among thousands at the Salt Lake City-County building where preliminary celebrations had begun the day before.
The sense of relief was particularly sharp since the city had made unsuccessful bids for the 1972, 1976, 1992 and 1998 Winter Games. The 1998 rebuff was especially disheartening because Salt Lake City had the best technical bid and was considered the favorite, only to lose to Nagano, Japan. If the 2002 attempt had failed, the city would have given up on future bids.
By winning the 2002 Games, Salt Lake City - and by extension all of Utah - has been thrust into the international limelight. And the scrutiny will become more intense as the date for the Games nears.
In February 2002, the world will be flowing to Utah's doorstep for the two-week event. Among the visitors will be thousands of journalists. Millions of people around the globe will watch on television.
The Winter Olympics in 2002 will be the first time in 22 years that the Winter Games will be held in the United States. The last U.S. Winter Olympics was in Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980.
Aside from timing and geography, the Salt Lake bid was simply the best. Nearly all the Olympic venues are built or under construction. The area containing the venues is relatively compact and the metropolitan area has the airline capacity, more hotel rooms than any other city that has hosted the Games, and major highway access to all the venues. Utah also probably has more people who can speak foreign languages and who have lived abroad than any comparable community.
The venues have been built with a small sales tax expected to raise $59 million over a decade. Winter Olympic backers expect to recover enough money from the Games to repay that state investment and have money left over to operate the winter sports facilities.
The cost of Salt Lake City's most recent bid was $7 million, nearly all of it raised from private sources.
The success of the 2002 bid must be credited in large part to the tireless efforts of Tom Welch and members of the Olympic Bid Committee who have labored for years to get the state ready, to gain public support, to raise money, to woo IOC members and to make the final presentation this week in Budapest.
But all of that is merely preliminary. Now comes the challenge of preparing for the Games themselves, putting on the Games within the $798 million budget, and hosting and housing an avalanche of foreign visitors as well as all the athletes themselves.
To get the job done in a way that reflects well on Utah, its citizens will have to put aside past differences over the bid and work together as enthusiastic partners in a gigantic venture. In the end, such sharing and cooperation may be the most lasting legacy for Utahns from the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Now let's get to work. Seven years is not a long time for such a project.