Denver Native (Carol)
02-28-2010, 11:42 PM
http://www.denverpost.com/olympics/ci_14485520
VANCOUVER — Dare we say it? The Winter Olympics belong in Denver.
It's more than a crazy dream. Twelve years down the road, a young skier in Colorado now inspired by the thrill of Vail resident Lindsey Vonn winning a gold medal could stand on the victory podium in Denver.
Quietly and without fanfare, Denver is building relationships with Olympic executives and laying the groundwork for a possible bid to be the host city of the 2022 Winter Games.
"We would like to be considered in the discussion," said KieAnn Brownell, president of the Metro Denver Sports Commission.
In recent weeks, during the final preparations for a Winter Olympics that cost Vancouver organizers in excess of $6 billion to stage and after competition began in which Team USA has enjoyed unprecedented success, Brownell said she has spent 14 days on the ground in Canada, taking notes and networking with movers and shakers who will determine where the Games go from here.
Granted, the pursuit of the 2022 Winter Games is in the very preliminary stages, and there are many political hoops to jump through before Denver could be designated by the United States Olympic Committee to make a formal bid.
The first order of business for U.S. Olympic leadership is repairing the fissure with the International Olympic Committee that became evident in October when the effort to bring the 2016 Summer Games to Chicago was rudely rejected.
"We need to fix some things with our relationship with the IOC. We're hard at work doing that and we hope we can make significant progress on that in a relatively short period of time," USOC chairman Larry Probst said as the Winter Games in Vancouver began. "We'll decide at some point and time when we're ready for the next bid."
While 12 years can seem like an eternity in the dreams of an aspiring Olympic athlete, the clock is already ticking for Denver if city residents want to stage the opening ceremony in the football stadium where the Broncos play and hoist beers in LoDo with Dutch skating fanatics come 2022.
When Chicago got the cold shoulder and American jaws in the room hit the floor from the shock, the conventional wisdom was: The Olympics, not staged on U.S. soil since 2002, had never been so far away from America.
Well, here's betting the conventional wisdom was dead wrong. Although there are serious financial issues for Probst to negotiate with the IOC regarding the future division of revenue from television rights and sponsorship deals, the smash TV ratings for NBC from Vancouver show how much the entire Olympic movement benefits from Games that can be played during prime time in New York or Los Angeles.
I will predict an American city will win the next bid submitted by the USOC. Why? It's a simple matter of dollars and good business sense.
So maybe the real question is: Will the next American effort to host the Games be in the summer of 2020, or during the winter two years later?
Denver, as anybody old enough to have worn a Dorothy Hamill haircut remembers all too well, rejected the 1976 Winter Games. The snub from the Rocky Mountains would no longer be a serious issue. As a longtime U.S. Olympic official told me, most any IOC muckety-muck offended by the decision is now dead.
Staging the Games in Colorado is again destined to be so expensive that screams of protest from fiscally responsible opponents would have to be quelled.
"One of the challenges in a project like the Olympics is you get a lot of self-doubt, a lot of second-guessing, you work in an environment where there's a lot of public debate, some people believe in you and some people don't," said John Furlong, chief executive officer of the Vancouver Organizing Committee.
"You have to look at what you're doing and really have a clear vision about what you want and know going in what you're trying to do."
For all the glitches in transportation at these Winter Games, the tragic death on the luge track and a severe miscalculation regarding Cypress Mountain's ability to deliver a world-class venue for extreme sports, anybody who has seen Vancouver dance to the biggest block party on Earth knows the Games are worth the cost.
Denver is the No. 1 winter sports town in America.
Among the things we need to do before we die:
Invite the world to a Winter Olympics in Colorado.
VANCOUVER — Dare we say it? The Winter Olympics belong in Denver.
It's more than a crazy dream. Twelve years down the road, a young skier in Colorado now inspired by the thrill of Vail resident Lindsey Vonn winning a gold medal could stand on the victory podium in Denver.
Quietly and without fanfare, Denver is building relationships with Olympic executives and laying the groundwork for a possible bid to be the host city of the 2022 Winter Games.
"We would like to be considered in the discussion," said KieAnn Brownell, president of the Metro Denver Sports Commission.
In recent weeks, during the final preparations for a Winter Olympics that cost Vancouver organizers in excess of $6 billion to stage and after competition began in which Team USA has enjoyed unprecedented success, Brownell said she has spent 14 days on the ground in Canada, taking notes and networking with movers and shakers who will determine where the Games go from here.
Granted, the pursuit of the 2022 Winter Games is in the very preliminary stages, and there are many political hoops to jump through before Denver could be designated by the United States Olympic Committee to make a formal bid.
The first order of business for U.S. Olympic leadership is repairing the fissure with the International Olympic Committee that became evident in October when the effort to bring the 2016 Summer Games to Chicago was rudely rejected.
"We need to fix some things with our relationship with the IOC. We're hard at work doing that and we hope we can make significant progress on that in a relatively short period of time," USOC chairman Larry Probst said as the Winter Games in Vancouver began. "We'll decide at some point and time when we're ready for the next bid."
While 12 years can seem like an eternity in the dreams of an aspiring Olympic athlete, the clock is already ticking for Denver if city residents want to stage the opening ceremony in the football stadium where the Broncos play and hoist beers in LoDo with Dutch skating fanatics come 2022.
When Chicago got the cold shoulder and American jaws in the room hit the floor from the shock, the conventional wisdom was: The Olympics, not staged on U.S. soil since 2002, had never been so far away from America.
Well, here's betting the conventional wisdom was dead wrong. Although there are serious financial issues for Probst to negotiate with the IOC regarding the future division of revenue from television rights and sponsorship deals, the smash TV ratings for NBC from Vancouver show how much the entire Olympic movement benefits from Games that can be played during prime time in New York or Los Angeles.
I will predict an American city will win the next bid submitted by the USOC. Why? It's a simple matter of dollars and good business sense.
So maybe the real question is: Will the next American effort to host the Games be in the summer of 2020, or during the winter two years later?
Denver, as anybody old enough to have worn a Dorothy Hamill haircut remembers all too well, rejected the 1976 Winter Games. The snub from the Rocky Mountains would no longer be a serious issue. As a longtime U.S. Olympic official told me, most any IOC muckety-muck offended by the decision is now dead.
Staging the Games in Colorado is again destined to be so expensive that screams of protest from fiscally responsible opponents would have to be quelled.
"One of the challenges in a project like the Olympics is you get a lot of self-doubt, a lot of second-guessing, you work in an environment where there's a lot of public debate, some people believe in you and some people don't," said John Furlong, chief executive officer of the Vancouver Organizing Committee.
"You have to look at what you're doing and really have a clear vision about what you want and know going in what you're trying to do."
For all the glitches in transportation at these Winter Games, the tragic death on the luge track and a severe miscalculation regarding Cypress Mountain's ability to deliver a world-class venue for extreme sports, anybody who has seen Vancouver dance to the biggest block party on Earth knows the Games are worth the cost.
Denver is the No. 1 winter sports town in America.
Among the things we need to do before we die:
Invite the world to a Winter Olympics in Colorado.