A big reason why Utah was awarded the 2034 Winter Olympics is because of its well-maintained venues from the 2002 Games.
Ten of the 2002 venues, including the Utah Olympic Park and Soldier Hollow Nordic Center in the Wasatch Back, will be used again in 2034.
Utah 2034 believes that reusing existing venues will be part of the state’s superpower as hosts. Competitors will have trained and competed at many of the venues, organizers will have experience hosting and youth and other athletes will get to use the venues after the Games, as they have since 2002. Utah 2034 is referring to this advantage as “elevate sport.”
The Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation, which manages the Olympic Park, Soldier Hollow and the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns, organized its first Youth Winter Sport Conference on Thursday at the Hilton Salt Lake City Center. The foundation sees the conference as one in a series dedicated to dissecting how youth sports organizations in Utah can best take advantage of Utah 2034’s believed competitive advantage.
“The purpose of the conference was to gather all of Utah’s youth winter sport program leaders together with Utah 2034, USOPC (the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee), Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation and the winter national governing bodies for sport leadership, which we did,” said Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation Chief of Sport Development Luke Bodensteiner. “We wanted to use the opportunity to collaborate across winter sport programs and provide Utah 2034 with food for thought about how they might approach elevating sport in Utah.”
Bodensteiner said leaders from clubs like Park City Ski & Snowboard and the Park City’s Youth Sport Alliance were present. Panels spoke to attendees and included people such as U.S. Ski and Snowboard President and CEO Sophie Goldschmidt.
Bodensteiner said the major takeaway from the conference was that youth sports need to be made as accessible as possible to fully take advantage of the Games coming back to Utah. Inge Andersen, the former CEO of the Norwegian Olympic Committee and the conference’s keynote speaker, helped drive home that point.
“He said what Norway had done was kind of create a social movement around sport, where kids and families were engaged, part of the process and doing sport as a lifelong activity” Bondensteiner said about Andersen. “(That) is not always the case in the United States.”
Bodensteiner said Utah has strong boys sports participation numbers. They trail in girls sports participation compared to other states, an area where they’d like to improve. They’d also like to see sports participation continue through life, whether athletes become recreational participants, judges or coaches.
“We sort of used winter sport as the start of this process, but certainly Utah 2034 has ambitions to have impact across the entire state and not just limited to winter sport,” Bodensteiner said. “How we can work together to create a social movement that’s highly accessible for kids and families to go and participate in winter sport or whatever sport that they want to choose from.”
Bodensteiner believes there is desire for increased collaboration moving forward from the winter sport groups. Certain park districts and YMCAs were also part of the conference. A date for a second conference has yet to be set.
“Yesterday was really about trying to provoke thinking and collaboration amongst the group and about us really listening,” Bodensteiner said. “And I think now that we’ve gone through that process or exercise, we’ve got some kind of concrete steps we’ll be able to propose next and continue to involve this group of people as we shape things.”