Editor’s note • This story, republished now as Salt Lake City wins a second bid for the Winter Olympic Games, first appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on Feb. 2, 2002.
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.
“If we hadn’t gotten the nod from the USOC [the U.S. Olympic Committee] in ‘65, I don’t think we’d be holding the Olympics today,” observed Walker Wallace, a member of the original, seven-man Olympics for Utah committee in the mid-1960s. “I think that’s what has clearly led up to holding the Olympics in Utah. If we hadn’t done it in ‘65, it would not be happening.”
While that assertion can never be proved, Utah’s official relationship with the Olympics, and with the International Olympic Committee, had to start somewhere. And it started with those pioneers in the 1960s who began to espouse Utah’s unique advantage over other cities in staging a Winter Olympics: the proximity of the mountains and skiing venues to a large urban population center.
They weren’t the first to notice Utah’s gifts of nature. In fact, the pairing of “Salt Lake City” and “Olympics” in the same sentence goes back to the 1920s, the decade when the Winter Olympics began. On the eve of the second Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland, a sports headline in the Feb. 10, 1928, edition of The Salt Lake Tribune blared, “Salt Lake Warms Up to Possibility of Obtaining Winter Olympics for 1932.”
(Screengrab from Utah Digital Newspapers) 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.
Below the headline was a speculative story based on comments by H.C. Mortensen, the Intermountain delegate to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). He said he had spoken to AAU President Murray Hulbert at a recent convention and Hulbert “was mightily impressed with the natural advantages of the section for the sports.” But nothing formal arose from the chatter and Salt Lake City did not bid for the 1932 Winter Games, which went to Lake Placid, N.Y.
Utah’s serious Olympic bid history did not begin until decades later. It neatly falls into two chapters: the eight-year period of 1965-73, when Salt Lake City attempted to land the 1972 and 1976 Games, and the decade of 1985-95, when a new group of bidders, after suffering a couple more defeats, finally won the 2002 Games.
As Wallace suggested, it was the earlier group that had laid the groundwork.
Calvin Rampton was Utah’s governor, and he remembers the genesis of the Olympic idea: a get-together in early 1965 with Max Rich, then the executive vice president of the Salt Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, and John W. Gallivan, then the publisher of The Tribune. Rich broached the idea of bidding for the 1972 Olympics as a way of generating free publicity for Utah’s ski industry.
(Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune) From left, Jack Gallivan, Calvin Rampton and M. Walker Wallace at the Alta Club in Salt Lake City Feb. 1, 2002. Forty years earlier, they had been part of a small group that tried to bring the Winter Olympics to Utah.
“And so we decided to go ahead with the bid, not dreaming that we would get it,” Rampton recalled.
Host of bids
The governor announced the Olympic intentions publicly in February 1965 and named seven men to the bid committee: Rich, Gallivan, Wallace, F.C. Koziol, Glen Adams, Gene Donovan and one-time Olympic skier Dev Jennings. Rich became chairman, Jennings secretary and Donovan treasurer, and in March, the group informed the USOC that it was bidding for the 1972 Winter Olympics.
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.”
The need didn’t arise, of course, and so the Utah bidders kept focusing on the ‘72 Olympics. Some of their early venue plans, which changed along the way, included: speed skating at the University of Utah football stadium, which would have expanded to 60,000 seats and have a “pneumatic ceiling to be installed for the Games”, Alpine skiing at Gad Valley (now Snowbird), and a Nordic center at Mountain Dell, with a bobsled-luge run just across Interstate 80 from there.
The most triumphant day for the bidders was Jan. 15, 1966, when they went to Chicago and won the USOC designation as the U.S. city to bid for the 1972 Games. It was a rout: 36 votes for Salt Lake City, 6 for Lake Placid, and 0 for Anchorage, Alaska. The boosters were energized.
The problem, though, was that Salt Lake City now had only three months to prepare for the IOC decision in Rome in April. Their international opposition there would come from Sapporo, Japan, which had been awarded the 1940 Games that were aborted by war; Banff, Canada, which had lost by only three votes to Grenoble for the ‘68 Games; and Lahti, Finland, a long shot, given that it was siting its Alpine events in Norway.
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.
“We had not seen a member of the International Olympic Committee,” recalled Rampton. “We had not been visited by anybody. We were told that we were not to contact them. We would be given an opportunity to put on a party over there, a reception one evening.”
The IOC membership was more dominated by European royalty than than it is now. Wallace described them as “pretty aloof” and recalled that Brundage “required great deference on the part of bid cities.” The first mix of Utah’s bidders with IOC nobility had its awkward moments.
“I can remember Donovan, at one of the receptions we attended, cozying up to a French member of the IOC, who was also a nobleman, and in good old Rotary Club manner, Donovan, who was about 6-foot-6, puts his arms around the guy,” recounted Gallivan. “The guy takes his arm and says, “Do not touch my person.’”
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. Oui had turned to non, but the Utah delegation wasn’t exactly crushed.
“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. I knew we could raise that much, but I didn’t know where we could raise any more.”
Back for more
Nonetheless, the group decided to come back and bid for the 1976 Olympics, and it wouldn’t have to wait a quadrennial period to do so. The USOC, realizing that Salt Lake City had been at a disadvantage with only three months between the USOC and IOC decisions, expanded the window, because it wanted an American Olympics in ‘76 to mark the bicentennial. So it would name its candidate city much earlier, in 1967.
Denver, which had been shooting for the ‘76 Games all along, was the favorite over Salt Lake City, Lake Placid and Seattle. And on Dec. 17, 1967, Denver indeed became America’s candidate city for 1976, beating Lake Placid, 26-17 in the final round. Salt Lake City had fallen out a round earlier. For this group of Utah bidders, the fun was over, after nearly three years of trying.
Denver went on to win the IOC designation in 1970, as expected, but then the unexpected happened. In a 1972 referendum, Denver and Colorado voters refused to commit public money to the Olympics, and the city gave back the Games. The USOC, hoping to salvage a bicentennial Olympics, contacted other U.S. cities, asking them to reapply. Salt Lake City did.
On Jan. 4, 1973, the USOC, meeting in New York, selected Salt Lake City over Lake Placid and two Lake Tahoe area sites as its candidate city for the ‘76 Games. But Mayor Jake Garn made it clear that Salt Lake City would undertake the effort only if the federal government would pick up the $30 million tab. He reasoned that Utahns had already paid for existing facilities, like the Salt Palace.
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.”
In February 1973, Ball took that message to the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, to unfavorable reviews: “They were not just angry, they were furious with Colorado. You don’t get that bid and then say, ‘Hey, we don’t want it.’ And they were so mad at Denver, they were mad at the United States. And I was told at that meeting that not only would Salt Lake City or any American city not do ‘76, no American city would ever host the Games again, ever.”
Thus ended the first chapter of Salt Lake City’s bid history — three attempts, three rejections. But the principals from that first bid effort feel they succeeded in their original intention — to promote Utah skiing, even if they didn’t get the Olympics.
“We got millions and millions of dollars worth of publicity out of that,” Rampton said. “That really gave Utah skiing the biggest boost that it had since Alf Engen came here.”
Wallace concurs that Utah has already gained enough from its Olympic adventure, saying, “I kind of wish we didn’t have to go through the torture of actually putting on the Games, because I think we’ve gotten all we’re going to get out of hosting the Games already.”
Likewise, Gallivan says of these Olympics: “I consider this the frosting on the cake, the cake being Park City before and after. We don’t need it. Utah ski resorts don’t need it for the purpose that we originally sought the Games.”
But the Games are here, and Rampton, Gallivan and Wallace will finally see the fruits of the efforts they and their now-deceased colleagues made 35 years ago to bring the Winter Olympics to Utah.
“I hope it’s successful,” said Rampton, now 88.
“As far as I can see, the planning and work on it has been faultless. I think it’s fine. As a citizen, I’m going to watch it from home because, well, I’m getting old. I can’t climb those hills.”
Editor’s note • Former Gov. Calvin Rampton died in 2007; former publisher of The Tribune John W. Gallivan died in 2012; business leader Walker Wallace died in 2021. Correction • The 1966 photo of Utah leaders in Rome was taken by The Tribune’s Robert H. Woody; an earlier version of this story had an incorrect photo credit.