CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Here, Park City’s municipal leadership has been doing as the locals do.
They’ve been waiting for the bus, standing in long restroom lines, shuffling through slushy walkways and getting lost on shuttle buses. They’ve watched and suffered with the crowds waiting to cross narrow pedestrian bridges and laughed when the wrong bus pulled up — again.
For Mayor Ryan Dickey and City Councilor Tana Toly, the education of hosting the 2034 Winter Olympics has not come only from high level observation sessions and meetings, but also through experiencing the Games as any fan would, absorbing what works, what doesn’t and how small details shape the overall experience.
“The experience has been awesome,” Dickey said. “It’s great to see the contrast. To see the Games as an American, and see the Games knowing we’re going to have our own Olympics in Park City and Salt Lake. What are we going to do differently? What are we going to do the same?”
Dickey arrived in the Italian ski town on Feb. 11 as part of the official observer program, joined by Toly, Acting City Manager Jodi Emery, Utah Olympic Park General Manager Jamie Kimball, Park City Chamber/Bureau CEO Jennifer Wesselhoff and leadership from organizations in Ogden and Salt Lake City. City Councilor Bill Ciraco is also attending the Games, though not in an official capacity.
Their days have been divided among venue walk-throughs, behind-the-scenes operational briefings and in the stands with other fans. The goal is to better understand what the public experiences and what makes it work behind the curtain.
One of the most valuable lessons so far has been identifying who controls which decisions, and how to build and better those relationships in time for the smoothest possible collaboration during the Games, they said.
As a future host city, Park City will share the stage with Salt Lake City and other Utah communities, meaning coordination across jurisdictions will define the event’s success. Watching Cortina d’Ampezzo navigate regional and national layers of authority has sharpened the delegation’s focus on governance.
“It’s really complex,” Dickey said. “There’s the town, the region, the country, the IOC and who controls what. They’ve had a lot of difficulty coordinating regionally in a way that I think in Utah, we won’t, given the way we function and collaborate already together.”
Traveling with their regional counterparts in Salt Lake City and Ogden, the same agencies that will divide venue oversight, transportation planning and public safety responsibilities in 2034 are sharing shuttle benches and handwarmers in Italy, and that is already making a big step toward 2034, said Dickey.
“These shared experiences that we have, waiting on a bus — it’s a bonding experience,” Dickey said. “We’re all going to know each other, and then we’re all going to have to work together on this.”
The bathroom lines have provided their own lessons. At several venues, limited facilities have backups that ripple into the crowd’s mood and movement. Access to water stations has been challenging, beyond the typical European method of dehydration.
And while much of it hasn’t been glamorous, the crew has still taken in some once-in-a-lifetime experiences, as observers and as fans, to bring home to Park City.
For Toly, seeing the work that goes into putting on a single event for biathlon made for “one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”
On Saturday, Toly and the group headed up the mountain to Antholz-Anterselva for a day of biathlon. What Toly found was 3,000 fans wearing their national colors and costumes of every kind dancing on tables to live music while waiting for athletes to shoot and ski through the course.
“It was like being at Oktoberfest,” Toly said. “Everyone was dressed up in their team colors and cheering on their favorite athletes. I think the Nordic fans are some of the best in the world.”
Even with light snow and fog drifting across the stadium, the party never slowed, she said. The race event may have been the focus of the course, but the Olympic experience extended far beyond it. But as the sun set, the energy of the city dipped with it, which Toly said she found surprising.
“I expected to see more massive nighttime parties than we are. In 2002, we had fireworks every night, and we had athletes walking down Main Street and meeting people. My family sold pizza and green jello in our booth,” she said.
She said she hopes to see the level of activation amplified in Park City in 2034 with a more coordinated push to involve small businesses and nonprofits, remembering the festivities on Main Street at every time of day and the displays in all the business windows.
At Antholz-Anterselva, they walked through security checkpoints, broadcast compounds and athlete areas to see how they all actually run. It was a reminder that even one Olympic event takes an enormous amount of temporary setup, said Toly.
The group visited the secure rifle and ammunition storage area. They toured the broadcast compound, where 300 people operated 77 cameras just to cover the one event and learned that venue buildout began only in October 2025.
Even with one road in and one road out, similar to Park City, the site is designed to handle 19,000 spectators, just 2,000 to 3,000 more than Soldier Hollow’s capacity during the 2002 Games, said Toly.
Between watching the fun of the Olympic spectators in Antholz-Anterselva and Cortina d’Ampezzo, the leaders said there has been a lot to learn from the challenges Italy has experienced in the past week.
Dickey said Cortina d’Ampezzo has offered a reminder that hosting the Olympics is a cultural project, too. A recent mayoral election, campaigning with a residents-first, Olympic-last mentality, turned the tide toward more local enthusiasm.
“Park City, we’re really enthusiastic about the Olympics. I don’t have those concerns, but you have got to bring people along. Keep the spirit up. This experience is so positive being here, but most of our residents likely haven’t been to a Games to see that themselves, and we are keeping that in mind,” said Dickey.
“Another thing is starting early,” he said. “There are several big infrastructure projects here that just did not get completed on time. There’s always this sort of race to the finish, and it seems like things typically always sort of work out. Here, there’s just big projects that didn’t.”
Still eight years ahead of lighting the cauldron to open the Utah 2034 Games, Dickey said Park City is already working to avoid that race to the finish he has seen in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
The Park City Council has advanced Bus Rapid Transit as the locally preferred alternative along S.R. 248, he said. And beyond transit, he said the lesson applies to broader coordination and public space planning. Conversations are already happening about how Main Street will function, where large public gatherings can be accommodated and how to ensure the town does not feel overbuilt or overwhelmed during the Games, he said.
For Toly, volunteer culture stands out as a defining difference between the two towns. Cortina d’Ampezzo is supported by roughly 18,000 volunteers across Italy’s Games, compared with the 25,000 to 26,000 who volunteered in Utah in 2002.
Utah’s reputation for volunteerism gives her confidence, but like Dickey, she said she aims to encourage and cultivate the culture to support residents and volunteers with the Olympic project.
“What I’m excited about is spending the next eight years figuring out how all of our stakeholders and nonprofits and businesses and even just community members can put their own mark on the Olympics,” Toly said.
Still, for these leaders, this remains the experience of a lifetime within all the learning and planning. Toly, co-owner of Red Banjo, joked that her first move when she got off the plane was to find a good pizza.
“Growing up, we loved the Winter Olympics and we watched the Winter Olympics as if we knew anything about these sports,” joked Dickey. “I never envisioned, as a kid growing up in central Florida watching the Winter Olympics, that I would be here at the Winter Olympics.”
Standing in the finish area in Cortina d’Ampezzo, surrounded by flags and cowbells, Dickey said he feels both the weight of what Park City is preparing to host and the simple joy of finally seeing the Games up close. For all the logistics and lessons, he said, it still feels special just to be there.