FIS World Championships arrive in town this week and can build on Olympic momentum, officials say

Done sifting through the heartbreak of his dream send-off not going according to plan, Nate Holland glanced at the following season’s schedule. The snowboardcross legend did not get to wave goodbye to the sport he helped pioneer at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. So, instead, when he saw what was on the docket in 2018-19, the 40-year-old remembered that the 2019 FIS World Championships were back home:

On American soil, where snowboardcross so rarely gets to compete these days, in a place where he’d spent so much time perfecting his craft. Holland extended his historic career one more season.

“My goal was to make it to worlds to basically have my family and friends come and watch me race on U.S. soil one last time,” Holland said this week. “I’m going to throw it down on that course and see what happens. I’m here to do a couple things: win and then throw a party.”

That’s the draw of Utah, Holland vows. The Olympic aura can still force a man competing against riders half his age to push for one more year, one last go, one more shot at tasting glory. Holland’s story is just a sliver of what the next 10 days will bring as over 1,400 athletes, coaches and officials arrive in Utah for what will be the largest sporting event held in the state since the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. The world championships will feature 28 snowboarding, freestyle and freeskiing events across three different resorts at Solitude, Park City Mountain and Deer Valley.

The timing, those associated with the drive to bring another Olympics back here as early as 2030, couldn’t be better. Salt Lake City was recently chosen by the United States Olympic Committee in December as its bid city for a future Winter Games bid. Having the next-biggest event arrive just in time, some say, will once again prove to the USOC — and they hope the IOC in the coming years — that Salt Lake still has the chops to pull this off, and can do so with ease.

“That was part of our strategy,” said Jeff Robbins, president of the Utah Sports Commission and a co-chair of the Salt Lake Olympic exploratory committee. “Part of our strategy is, you can always welcome the Olympic world back here. We used to say in tennis, let your racquet do the talking.”

These world championships were awarded to Utah in the summer of 2014. Robbins said if Utah can prove that it remains an Olympic global destination for these sort of high-profile events, that just falls in line with everything officials and fans have aimed for in this process of officially getting back on the Olympic radar. At the exploratory committee’s meeting earlier this week, it was made clear that the plan is to get more involved as the seasons go, too. Upwards of $15 million will be asked from the state legislature to allow the sports commission to pursue bringing more events on par with world championships here.

Scott Beck, CEO of Visit Salt Lake, said when he travels around the country and the world, he’s always asked about Utah’s Olympic legacy. Beck calls it “a community ethos that is alive and well.”

“That’s why we are America’s choice for the next bid,” he added. “We have the infrastructure, we keep it alive, and continuing to do that for the foreseeable future is really important from the world perspective.”

Calum Clark, part of the 2019 FIS world championships organizing committee, said the NBC and NBC Sports Network will air a total of 24 hours of coverage of the event starting Friday through Sunday, Feb. 10. The Olympic Channel will be broadcasting events live as well. During the 2017 world championships, the broadcast had over 253 million viewers.

“We want to beat that record,” Clark said.

It all starts Friday at Solitude as men’s and women’s snowboardcross finals will produce the first world championship medals of the next 10 days. These aren’t the Olympics, but when asked about his take on Salt Lake potentially hosting again one day, Holland didn’t hold back.

“It would be awesome to have it here in Salt Lake,” he said. “What a party is the Olympics. I’d be here. I’m not shooting for that as an athlete. I’d be here as a viewer.”