Fraser Bullock, who is in charge of the bid whose objective is to bring the Winter Olympics back to Salt Lake City in Utah, seems very confident of achieving this.
Posted at 9:48 a.m.
“We will organize the Olympics. The question is when,” he said in a television interview last week.
Will it be in 2030, from the first opening available on the IOC calendar? Or will the IOC make a double award, naming at the same time the city which will organize the 2034 Winter Olympics?
After having obtained two solid candidatures for obtaining the Summer Olympics four and a half years ago, the IOC chose Paris for those of 2024 and Los Angeles for those of 2028.
The IOC, however, refuses to come forward. An announcement should be made early next year, and several Salt Lake City media even specify that the decision will be announced in May 2023.
“I’ve got my fingers crossed for the 2030 Olympics, but no matter when, we’ll be ready,” Bullock told the ‘Deseret News’ in Utah.
Bullock was No. 2 on the organizing committee for the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, behind Mitt Romney.
Under the new bidding process, the IOC appears to want to analyze a maximum of four Candidate Cities. Three of them have already hosted Winter Olympics before: Sapporo (1972), Salt Lake (2002) and Vancouver (2010). Barcelona would also have shown interest, after having organized the 1992 Summer Olympics and having considered a joint candidacy with the regions of the Pyrenees.
The IOC’s “technical team” visited Salt Lake City last week and inspected its facilities, and will do the same this week in Vancouver. A similar visit to Spain, however, would have been postponed.
Vancouver City Council last month refused to add a referendum on an Olympic bid to the ballots for the upcoming municipal elections, which will be held in October. Vancouver’s bid bills itself as the first “First Nations-led” bid in Canada, and First Nations are soon to commission a feasibility study.