WINTER MOVEMENT

The Utah Olympic Oval has become a cavernous refrigerated warehouse. The chirps of spring songbirds have replaced cheers that echoed off the mountainside at the Utah Olympic Park.

These sleeping Olympic venues will awaken again, though, because of $70 million in support funds that guarantee Utah’s role as a winter sports training and competition center for decades.

“We’re going to continue growing winter sports in Utah,” said Randy Dryer, chairman of the Utah Athletic Foundation. “History tells you that the growth of sport is directly related to accessibility to facilities.”

Three months after the 2002 Winter Olympics, the festive decorations and crowded streets are memories, and Salt Lake City is back to the relatively quiet city it was before the games.

But two mammoth facilities--built for speedskaters, bobsledders and ski jumpers--aren’t going anywhere. To the U.S. Olympic Committee, each venue is golden.

Not only did American athletes haul many of their Winter Olympics-record 34 medals from the oval and the frozen track, but both will be used as training sites.

Facilities exist in Lake Placid, N.Y., site of the 1980 Winter Games, but that’s a five-hour drive from New York City. The nearest airports are Albany, N.Y., and Montreal, each about two hours away.

By contrast, the Utah venues are in the middle of an urban area with a population of 1.7 million. Salt Lake City offers the conveniences of any large American city.

“To have the facilities near a city such as Salt Lake, with good universities and a big airport in such close proximity, it gives us an opportunity we’ve never had,” USOC President Sandy Baldwin said.

“We hope this will allow us to become a winter sports power for years to come,” she added.

The Olympic oval is located in suburban Kearns, and the Olympic park, near Park City, is 30 minutes from Salt Lake City. Both venues are booked for World Cup and national races in coming years, including the 2005 luge world championships.

“We have an informal agreement with Lake Placid to alternate U.S. nationals in various disciplines,” Dryer said. “There will always be at least one national championship in Utah each year.”

The venues also have begun youth programs to cultivate aspiring speedskaters, figure skaters, hockey players, lugers, bobsledders, ski jumpers, aerialists and mogul skiers.

The expectation is that more Utah residents will take roles on future U.S. Olympic teams.

Yukio Griffall fits the bill perfectly. Born in Salt Lake City, the 17-year-old played football, baseball and soccer when he was younger but tried luge after Utah won the bid for the Olympics in 1995.

“If it wasn’t for this park, I probably never would have gotten involved in luge,” Griffall said. “After I started luge, it kind of took me over. Since then I haven’t really played any team sports.”

The trade-off was worth it to Griffall. Last season he and his partner, Dan Joye of Carmel, N.Y., won the doubles junior world championship.

“One of the two tracks in the U.S. is right in my back yard,” Griffall said. “It only takes half an hour to get up there and slide. A lot of athletes wouldn’t get that opportunity, to be up there six days a week.”

Eric Bergoust knows building good facilities can produce medals. He won the gold in men’s aerials at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, part of an American sweep along with women’s champion Nikki Stone.

Bergoust credits practices at the Utah Olympic Park jump pool, where in midsummer tourists often snap photos as Olympians soar off ramps and splash into the training pool.

“There is a direct link between our facilities and our results,” Bergoust said. “It’s by far the best summer aerials facility in the world, and I can get there from my house in less than five minutes on my motorcycle.”

Grand as they are, Bergoust feels the speedskating oval and the bobsled-luge-skeleton run and ski jumps in Utah are good starting points.

“Our sport needs more small facilities,” said Bergoust, a two-time World Cup champion. “Put a small ramp into a lake, where kids could get started. It would go over great in a ski town, maybe 5 to 10 ramps, small cheap ones.”

The oval and park are financed by a $40 million endowment, overseen by the Utah Athletic Foundation. It was built into the Salt Lake Organizing Committee’s budget to assure no state money was needed for a post-Olympic bailout.

The news got better last month when the Olympics turned a $56 million profit, generating another $26 million for the foundation. Then the International Olympic Committee donated its $4 million share of the surplus.

The outlay: $70 million to operate the venues.

“It didn’t fall from the sky,” Dryer said. “As a result of a lot of good work and planning by SLOC management and through the generosity of the IOC, it’s enough to ensure the financial future of the park and the oval.”

The foundation, however, faces an economic dilemma. The two venues are projected to cost $4 million more to operate next year than the $3 million both are expected to generate from site rentals and other user fees.

“We’re not going to ask the state for more money, and we have adopted a policy not to raid the (fund principal),” Dryer said.

The only choices, he said, are to raise money through corporate sponsorships, find additional revenues or rely on interest earned by the endowment.

Meanwhile, officials are considering a USOC request to extend the foundation’s umbrella to include Soldier Hollow, the bucolic venue where Olympic biathlon and cross-country skiing races were staged.

“Soldier Hollow is a very important venue in terms of developing winter sports,” Dryer said. “We need to find a way to make sure it is sustainable. How is uncertain right now.”

The park and oval each costs about $3.5 million a year to operate. Dryer doesn’t know if the foundation can take on the extra $680,000 needed annually for Soldier Hollow.

“Operations don’t begin until winter,” Dryer said. “We still have time to address this issue.”