Utah’s Olympic quest really began as a 1960s ploy for publicity — and it worked

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Utah’s Olympic quest really began as a 1960s ploy for publicity — and it worked
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The opening of the 2002 Winter Olympics next week will culminate seven years of hard work by Utah organizers. Yet the efforts to stage a Utah Olympics began not in 1995, when Salt Lake City won the 2002 hosting rights, but 30 years earlier, when another generation of Utahns first sought the Games.

Olympic pioneers tried to land the 1972 and 1976 Winter Games touting Utah’s advantage: skiing venues close to a city. “If we hadn’t done it in ‘65,” one bidder said in 2002, “it would not be happening.”

A 1928 headline in The Salt Lake Tribune about an early suggestion to go for the Winter Olympic Games. The first Winter Olympic Games were held in Chamonix, France, in 1924. The earliest modern Games included only summer sports. In April of ‘65, Rich actually made a pitch for the 1968 Games, which were set in Grenoble, France. Because of a question over whether the French would accept visas from members of a team from East Germany, there was some doubt over the Grenoble Games. Rich wrote to IOC President Avery Brundage, “Should the need arise for change of the 1968 site, we offer to place the greatest snow on earth at your service.

Olympic enthusiasm in Utah grew in the first three months of 1966 — Olympics for Utah Inc. sold $27,000 worth of buttons at $1 apiece around the state, according to Gallivan — and the bidders got endorsements from the state and federal legislatures and from President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. In mid-April, the bidders confidently traveled to Rome and got their first introduction to the IOC.

Yes, the Utahns were on unfamiliar turf. And on April 26, 1966, they found out exactly where they stood. On the first ballot the result was: Sapporo 32, Banff 16, Lahti 9, and Salt Lake City 4.“I was relieved, frankly,” said Rampton, who had projected an Olympic budget of about $50 million. “I was very relieved, because I don’t know where we would have gotten the money if we had gone over that $50 million. I had pledges.

But when Garn got word later that month from Utah’s two senators that federal money would not be forthcoming, that spelled doom for the Salt Lake City salvage effort. Fred Ball, then head of the Chamber of Commerce, recalled: “When we didn’t get a commitment for federal funding, that’s when we took out the luge and bobsled. We scaled it down a bit.”

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