Salt Lake Watching IOC For Clues

By most accounts, Salt Lake is right on schedule for the 2002 Winter Games, building venues for the athletes and training 18,000 volunteers.

In the meantime, Olympics leaders are trying to get through the vote-buying scandal surrounding the city’s successful bid for the games. The International Olympic Committee holds a watershed meeting Wednesday and Thursday in Switzerland to deal with the biggest crisis in its 105-year history.

“This is clearly a pivotal moment in Olympic history,” said Gov. Mike Leavitt, who demanded a housecleaning at the Salt Lake Olympic Committee this winter, restructured the board and wooed Boston venture capitalist Mitt Romney to take over as chief executive.

Regardless of what happens at the IOC meeting, plans for the Winter Olympics are moving forward.

The arenas for bobsledding, women’s downhill, luge, slalom, freestyle skiing, skating and snowboarding are already staging national and international competitions, which the SLOC uses as test events to train staffers and work out bugs.

The ice for men’s hockey in West Valley City and curling in Ogden is in use and the women’s hockey rink in Provo is being completed this month.

The University of Utah stadium, which will hold 56,000 people for the opening and closing ceremonies, has been remodeled. Road work near the mountain venue begins in the spring.

The final projects--a covered speedskating oval in Kearns, ski jumps at the Utah Winter Sports Park, cross-country trails at Wasatch State Park, men’s downhill and super-G runs at Snowbasin and the Olympic Village -- are on schedule to be finished no later than 18 months before the games.

The SLOC has suffered one venue setback. Spectators at last month’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships complained they had trouble seeing the event from some seats at the Delta Center, home of the Utah Jazz. Now the SLOC must decide whether to move figure skating to another ice arena.

One more major task remains for the SLOC, says Romney, the only SLOC official who will travel to the IOC meeting. That’s lining up a computer hardware sponsor and coordinating with Sema, a European company replacing IBM as the information technology provider for four Olympic games beginning in 2002. Romney also wants to cut the $200 million budgeted for information technology.

Just 45 miles north but a world away from the SLOC offices, employees at Snowbasin resort installed safety fences last week at the Olympic women’s downhill course, where the U.S. Alpine Championships will be held March 19-24. The showcase competition also will be staged at Park City Mountain and Deer Valley resorts.

“We’re still focused on what we can do to put on a good race for the athletes,” said Martha Crocker, Snowbasin’s director of racing. “This is a dress rehearsal for us.”

Chad Hart, who moved from Twin Lakes, Wis., last fall to help Crocker get Snowbasin ready, said he hasn’t paid attention to the scandal.

“That stuff, if you bring it on the hill, it clouds up your thinking,” said Hart, taking a break from placing the webbed safety fences along the course. “The only important thing to the racers is the sport.”

Leavitt says such events give Utah residents a much-needed respite.

“There’s a large appetite now for us to move on to more positive things. This state has taken a huge hit,” he said. “There is a deep sense of resolve here to overcome what happened.”