Salt Lake City Has Smooth Sledding : Olympics: After a long quest, Utah city is an easy choice by the IOC for the 2002 Winter Games.

After 30 years of trying, Salt Lake City was chosen Friday as host of the Winter Olympics in 2002, sailing through the International Olympic Committee voting on a rare first ballot.

As IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch announced the decision, the mayor of Salt Lake City, the governor of Utah and members of the bid committee leaped to their feet and hugged each other. And in an image beamed by satellite into the room, a crowd of tens of thousands in Salt Lake City cheered and loosed hundreds of balloons into the sky.

“It’s a very, very proud moment for our city and our state,” Mayor Deedee Corradini said at a news conference. “Being selected on the first round of voting--I never thought it would happen. I feel like the climber who’s made it to the top of Mt. Everest.”

The decision will bring the Olympics back to the western United States for the first time since 1984, when Los Angeles held the Summer Games, and it will mark the first Winter Olympics in the country since Lake Placid, N.Y., held the Games in 1980.

“I couldn’t say it before to my fellow IOC members, but I can say it now: Our team in 2002 will have the hometown crowd,” said a grinning Anita DeFrantz, an IOC executive board member and head of the Amateur Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles.

“It continues the tradition of excellence that Los Angeles started with the Summer Games in 1984,” she said. “It says that we can do this without relying on government financing. Los Angeles set the example.”

Salt Lake City, with a population of 1 million, will be the largest city to hold the Winter Games, and it may well be the best prepared. In its fourth appearance as the lone official U.S. candidate, Salt Lake City already has five venues ready for the Games, with four more under construction, and all are within 55 miles of the city center.

For the Salt Lake City bid committee, which had hinted that this would be its last run for the Olympics, the victory was particularly sweet. Although considered the front-runner for the 1996 Games, Salt Lake City had lost by four votes to Nagano, Japan, in the 1991 voting because many IOC members were reluctant to award the Winter Games to the United States after having chosen Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Games.

“The difference last time was that we were bidding not only against three winter sites but also against one summer site,” DeFrantz said. “I think this time the members weren’t thinking of Atlanta; they were only thinking of the four cities bidding. That made it easier.”

On the secret ballot, Salt Lake City received 54 of the 89 official votes, or 61%. Oestersund, Sweden, and Sion, Switzerland, tied for second with 14 apiece, and Quebec City received seven votes.

“I just feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” said Tom Welch, president of the Salt Lake City bid committee. The corporate lawyer, who quit his job to spearhead the effort, said the U.S. bid was successful because Salt Lake City had met all its promises to build facilities for the Games.

“For far too long, too many bidding cities have promised one thing and delivered another,” he said. “This proves that if you want the Games, you’ve got to keep your promises.”

Salt Lake City spent $7 million, which it raised privately, to press its bid over the last two years. But it has also been steadily expanding and improving its winter sports facilities, partly through the diversion of a portion of a state sales tax.

Organizers have estimated the Games budget to be $798 million, most of which will be raised by corporate sponsors and the sale of television rights, and they say the Olympics will pump $687 million into the state economy.

As of Friday night, the bid committee became the Salt Lake City Olympic Organizing Committee, and it already has set Feb. 9-26 as the dates for the 19th Winter Games in 2002.

Among the committee’s first acts, officials said, would be to buy the Winter Sports Park at Bear Hollow, which opened in 1993, and take over operations of the Weber County ice arena and the speedskating oval at the Oquirrh Park Fitness Center. Expected television revenues will be used as collateral.

The University of Utah will be used as the athletes’ village; luge, bobsled and ski jumping competition will take place at the Sports Park and men’s hockey and figure skating will be staged at the Delta Center, home of the NBA’s Utah Jazz. The opening and closing ceremonies will be held at an expanded Rice Stadium at the University of Utah.

Downhill competition has been set for the Snow Basin in Ogden, and slalom events will be at the Park City Ski Area and Deer Valley, 30 miles from Salt Lake.

Backers of the American bid had gone to extraordinary lengths to win host-city status. More than 400 Utah residents traveled to Budapest for the IOC meeting this week, for example. And on Friday, only hours before the voting, about 150 of them turned up--in full cowboy regalia--on a bridge over the Danube River, waving to the busloads of IOC members crossing from their hotel to the convention center.

“I don’t think anybody had any doubt they were from Salt Lake City,” DeFrantz said wryly.

Salt Lake City had played up its frontier image, citing Butch Cassidy and Buffalo Bill in hopes of persuading Olympic committee members that the American West has a unique culture to show visitors to the Games.

Before Friday’s vote, each of the four finalist cities made a one-hour presentation to the Olympic delegates, though most of the delegates had visited the sites earlier this year. The Salt Lake presentation included a slick, 30-minute video, with testimonials from, among others, American speedskating gold medalist Dan Jansen.

Cynthia Ruiz, a young Olympic figure-skating hopeful, appeared at the bid committee’s news conference here as well as in the video, in which she told delegates: “I speak for thousands of children waiting for the chance to compete. All of us hope you will make our dream come true. If you come to Salt Lake City, we will be ready.”

And DeFrantz, in her final appeal, urged her fellow Olympic committee members to accept “the special gift” of an Olympics-ready city.

“The time to prepare for 2002 is now, and the place is Salt Lake City,” she said.

Salt Lake City has held many national and international winter sports competitions, and skiing, for example, is a $500-million annual business in Utah.

In addition to being prepared, Salt Lake City had the advantage of strong local support for the bid, with public opinion polls showing nearly 60% in favor of holding the Olympics. And IOC members said they were impressed by the contingent’s low-pressure lobbying effort.

The bid committee moved quickly earlier this week to counter the suggestion by backers of the Quebec City bid that Salt Lake City, with its large Mormon population, is too sleepy and too conservative a city to host the Olympics. The suggestion, although unspoken, was that beer and wine might be difficult to obtain because Mormons don’t drink alcohol, or even coffee.

Although noting that 49% of Salt Lake City residents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bid officials pointedly served wine in their hospitality suite in Budapest and pointed out to anyone who would listen that alcohol could be served with meals in restaurants and hotels in Utah.

And, turning the religious argument to their benefit, backers noted that former Mormon missionaries in Salt Lake City speak many languages, which, they argued, would make foreign visitors feel more welcome.

Olympic officials were not sure if the first-ballot selection was unprecedented for a vote on the Winter Games, but they said it was certainly rare. In recent years, several ballots have been required to make the selection.

“We were much more of a known quantity this time, and I think the committee felt more confident with us,” said G. Frank Joklik, chairman of the Salt Lake bid committee.

“We know this is just the beginning, of course,” he said. “But, oh, what a beginning!”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Vote

The voting for host of 2002 Winter Olympics. Forty-five votes were required for victory: FIRST BALLOT

Site: Votes

Salt Lake City, Utah: 54

Ostersund, Sweden: 14

Sion, Switzerland: 14

Quebec, Canada: 7