Olympic Side Trips for Fun, Games

This is where Olympians come to go for the gold, one quarter at a time. It’s where a handful of Asian media stars hang out till dawn before rushing lickety-split back down I-80 to Salt Lake City. It’s where foreign visitors venture to play games in which luck counts more than talent or training.

Welcome to Wendover, a pint-sized border town with five casinos, two strip joints and 24-7 Nevada action. The town is short on culture and tourist attractions, but it’s just 120 miles west of Salt Lake City, making it the unofficial Olympic refuge for athletes and visitors needing a jolt of double-down fun without an overlay of family values.

“So, Becky, what are the things a tourist ought to see here?” Eugene Hsiao, an Olympic visitor from Phoenix, asked a blackjack dealer at the Silver Smith Casino.

“You’re looking at it right now,” she said. “You’re sitting in the middle of it. You want a hit?”

Actually the Winter Games haven’t proved as much of a bonanza as casino executives had hoped. But after a slow start, Wendover has been discovered by enough Olympic visitors to put a blip in the town’s gambling revenues and fill up casinos that might otherwise have been sleepy quiet on weekday nights.

The Russian women’s hockey team showed up in a bus the other night, and what the players lacked in funds they made up for in enthusiasm, wildly cheering each payoff at the slot machines. American bobsledders have been around too, as have two professional players on the Canadian ice hockey team who lost tens of thousands of dollars, one at blackjack, one at craps.

“We’re talking serious money,” said Michael Devine of State Line Casino, which has been pocketing Utah’s gambling dollars since 1926. He declined to identify the players but noted that Canadian hockey official Wayne Gretzky has criticized the performance of his team, which was tied Monday by the underdog Czechs, 3-3. The team rebounded and will play for the gold medal Sunday.

The largest foreign contingent in Wendover is 45 Russian fans--businessmen and their wives from Amur, a Russian gold-mining company--who are staying at the Silver Smith and making the 90-minute trip to Salt Lake every day on a chartered bus to watch the hockey competition. The hotel’s chef had to scurry the other morning to meet his guests’ breakfast request: garlic mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables and fresh strawberries.

“We send a lot of our people to the U.S. on vacation,” said Victor Lopatyuk, Amur’s president. “Traditionally it’s to Hawaii and Las Vegas. This year we just substituted Salt Lake for Las Vegas because of the Olympics. Why Wendover? Because it’s the closest casino. This is a mini-Las Vegas. Very mini.”

It’s also a town that didn’t raise prices to capitalize on Olympic traffic. While Utah gouged mercilessly--the Marriott Courtyard in Provo, for instance, jacked room rates from $99 to $225 a night for the Olympics--Wendover resorts such as State Line held steady. Weekday rooms still go for $19 to $24 a night, a shrimp cocktail for 99 cents and a 12-ounce New York strip steak for $7.95.

“Salt Lake,” Guido Koenen, an Olympic spectator from Holland, said with a pull of the slot handle, “is very nice, very clean, very friendly. My only complaint is smoking. It’s hard to do anywhere, and after a nice meal you’d really like to have just one cigarette. You can’t. You have to stand outside in the cold. That’s terrible.”

Wendover might have enjoyed more high-roller action had it not been for the IOC president, Jacques Rogge, who is trying to clean up the committee’s jet-setting image. He told members that this year they were expected to remain in town and attend Olympic events.

Nonetheless, Executive Limousine in Reno sent four stretch Lincolns to Wendover to shuttle visitors between Wendover and Salt Lake and to meet corporate jets flying into the town’s World War II military base, a popular airport because it is outside the no-fly security zone surrounding the Olympic venue.

Most of Wendover’s 3.5 million annual visitors come from the Salt Lake Valley, where residents are teased with interstate billboards of what awaits across the border: “#1 in hot action,” “Looser slots,” “Hot action, good food.” Because Mormons are asked to abstain from alcohol, nicotine and caffeine and not gamble, the proximity of Wendover has long been an edgy subject, and casino executives remain respectful of the sensitivities since most of their customers are Mormons.

“For instance, I don’t keep any [adult] magazines in the gift shop, as a Vegas casino would,” said Devine, president of State Line Casino. “Everyone knows, of course, that Nevada is different. But we’d like our customers to come out, have a good meal, have fun, maybe put $25 in the slots and not feel they’re doing anything wrong.

“Maybe they’ll feel a little naughty, but we don’t want them to feel guilty.”