The race will soon be on. Â
It appears that Salt Lake City is now in a competition for the 2030 Winter Olympics with Sapporo, Japan. The International Olympic Committee will not award the 2030 Games until 2023 but the United States Olympic Committee and Japan’s Olympic Committee are beginning to gear up for the race for the gold, or maybe more appropriately, generations worth of debt and abandoned facilities. The International Olympic Committee barely got any interest for the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympics and has run into problems in getting cities interested in the Winter Olympics. Paris ended up with the 2024 event and Los Angeles, which went after the 2024 Games was given the 2028 Summer Olympics as a consolation prize. Boston was the United States Olympic Committee’s original choice in the bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Boston dropped out because the bid got no support and Los Angeles stepped in. Salt Lake City is going to be nominated by the USOC after people in Denver who wanted the 2030 Games received no local Colorado support.
Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Games. In 2002, Salt Lake City organizers had the money thanks to a bailout from President Bill Clinton’s administration of about a billion dollars after Mitt Romney pleaded with Congressional leaders to get money into Salt Lake City. The original Salt Lake City bid backers had bribed International Olympic Committee delegates to vote for the Utah Olympics. An Olympics bidder needs an incredible amount of government support in the form of billions of dollars of public money. No government wanted to subsidize a 2026 Winter Olympics bid until Italy said yes to financing a Cortina bid. The International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach has declared that the press is the enemy of the IOC and negative stories were the cause of cities pulling out of Olympics bidding.Â
