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- A top International Olympic Committee executive will visit Utah to plan the 2034 Winter Games.
- The visit will focus on strategic planning and learning from Italy's 2026 Winter Games.
SALT LAKE CITY — Next week, a top International Olympic Committee executive will be in Utah to kick off planning for the 2034 Winter Games.
The organizers of Utah's next Olympics are in "a very unusual situation," International committee Olympic Games Executive Director Christophe Dubi told the Deseret News Tuesday in a virtual interview from the organization's Swiss headquarters.
"We have a 10 years' lifespan. We have very little to do on the fundamentals for the Games, that is, the venues," since the facilities from the 2002 Winter Games are set to be used again. "We have what you know is a perfect situation."
So what's there to talk about during his two-day visit that follows a stop in Los Angeles, the host of the 2028 Summer Games?
Plenty, it turns out.
Utah has yet to announce an organizing committee for the Olympic Games, even though the host contract signed by Gov. Spencer Cox after last year's July 24 IOC vote set a Christmas Eve deadline for putting what's known as an Organizing Committees of the Olympic Games in place.
That's coming "pretty soon," Dubi said. "We're having now regular conversations in every shape and form."
But he also wants to know how Utah will use the time it's been given under the new, less formal bid process to organize another Winter Games. Previously, organizers had just seven years to get ready for one of the world's largest sporting events.
There needs to be a decision "on the priorities in what is the land of opportunity," Dubi said. "What are the first programs we're going to tackle and deliver, so that we start involving the communities and kids in particular?"
Detailed planning, he said, can wait.
"It's urgent to wait with respect to Games organization," Dubi said, the same advice he offered nearly a year ago during an inspection tour of Utah's Olympic venues, citing the advances to come in artificial intelligence and other technology.
What Utah's Olympic organizers can learn from Italy's 2026 Winter Games
He said preparation also needs to get underway to ensure Utah's Olympic organizers get the most out of the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy, just a year away. That includes figuring out who needs to go, Dubi said.
"It sounds a long time, a year, except that we are operating over a very large territory. The plans have to be extremely well designed" for the Utah observers in Italy, he said. "It has to be planned now."
Unlike Utah's compact Olympics, where every venue is within an hour of the athlete housing at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the Milan-Cortina Games are spread across a wide swath of Italy.
That means the lessons there for Utah organizers won't be about logistics like transporting athletes from Point A to Point B, Dubi said.
"The geographical distribution is so different that this is absolutely not what they're going to be looking at," he said. Instead, Dubi suggested Utahns focus instead on what Italians are bringing to the Olympics.
"It's the way the Italians will deliver in each and every venue," he said, bringing the spirit of the Games to the streets just as Paris' 2024 Summer Games did. "It's the experience you can deliver if you are generous enough to have not only the venues hosting the best sport."
Closing streets, providing gathering places for the public and "offering the best possible hospitality outside of the best possible field of play. This is where Italians will be really, really good," Dubi said. "You have to be part of the best of what winter sports can offer."
In Utah, he said, "it will have a different flavor, different color, different music, different everything. But what you're looking for as a participant is that warmth, and that feeling of being part of something very special."
Whether felt as an athlete, a volunteer or a spectator, that's "a once in a lifetime experience."
What's happening with the 2034 Winter Games in Utah?
Fraser Bullock, president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games that was behind the bid, said he's looking forward to the visit by Dubi and his team, calling the IOC executive "a great friend going back to our partnership together in 2002."
Bullock said they'll "begin the early phase of outlining our integrated planning process. They have deep knowledge in many areas that will help us ensure we put on the best Games possible."
He stopped short of saying the organizing committee will be announced during Dubi's visit, set for Feb. 13 and 14. Bullock, who's 69, is expected to be named the leader of the organizing committees while setting up a successor.
A new bill introduced this session at the Utah Legislature would require the governor and legislative leaders to sign off on the head of the organizing committee. Utah taxpayers are the guarantor of the privately funded Games expected to cost a total of $4 billion.
"I really like the way that is being approached," Dubi said, since "an organizing committee is always a public-private partnership" that needs the "consent of those backing and those that will support the Games."
