(ATR) Utah’s governor and the mayor of Salt Lake City are ready to declare a bid for a second Winter Games.
Governor Gary Herbert and Mayor Erin Mendenhall are scheduled to make an announcement Feb. 12 in the state capitol.
A release from the Utah Sports Commission says the government leaders will reveal "the next steps towards an Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games".
Host of the 2002 Winter Olympics, Salt Lake City has been working on an encore for the past five years. In 2018 the U.S. Olympic Committee designated the Utah capital city over Denver as its choice for the next winter bid from the U.S., year to be determined.
The notice of the bid announcement fails to mention a date but 2030 may not be the first choice.
While the 2030 Winter Games are the next to be chosen, the U.S. hosts the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. That could be a complicating issue for a 2030 Salt Lake City Olympics, especially with overlap for the LA 2028 marketing plan.
So far, Sapporo, Japan is the only city to formally declare its interest in 2030, with the backing of the Japanese Olympic Committee. Like Salt Lake City, bid backers in Sapporo have been at work for a few years preparing for an encore to its 1972 Winter Olympics. Plans for a 2026 bid were dropped due to government commitments for other big projects, such as recovery from the 2011 Great Eastern earthquake.
In January, Sapporo leaders met with IOC President Thomas Bach and Octavian Morariu, the IOC member who heads the newly formed permanent commission on selecting Winter Olympic hosts.
The capital of Hokkaido prefecture in northern Japan has curried great favor with the IOC by quickly agreeing in September to hosting the marathon and race walk events instead of Tokyo. Despite six years of planning for those events in Tokyo, the IOC called for the last minute switch to avoid heat related problems.
Sapporo will be a few degrees cooler than Tokyo for the athletics road races in August. But more importantly for the winter Games, the weather in February and March is reliably cold and snowy.
With two strong contenders to host Winter Olympics, a perfect storm could be building on the IOC to select Sapporo and Salt Lake City at the same time, as was the case with Paris for the 2024 Summer Games and Los Angeles for 2028.
Such a combination is possible under the IOC’s new process for selecting Olympic hosts. In a move to eliminate the stratospheric costs of a competitive bid campaign among several cities, the IOC has adopted a consultative approach with prospective host cities.
Eliminating formal deadlines, production of documents and endless travels by bid promoters, the IOC hopes to make bidding for the Games a far more simple and less costly exercise.
Sapporo and Salt Lake City are head and shoulders above any other possible contender for the next Winter Olympics at this stage. One for 2030, another for 2034?
Salt Lake City will show its cards this week.
Reported by Ed Hula.