The biggest security event in the history of the United States and the biggest Winter Games in the history of the Olympics open Friday in Salt Lake City, which Brigham Young declared to be “the place” when he and his Mormon followers arrived 155 years ago.
In the last three years, Salt Lake City has become known as the place that threatened the future of the Olympics, the place where zeal to be Olympic host and easily corruptible International Olympic Committee members led to bribery of such scandalous proportions.
Now it is the place that will serve as host for the largest global gathering since Sept. 11, when terrorist attacks on the United States made planning for future events more unpredictable and uncertain than ever.
“There was too much invested by the athletes not to go forward,” said Mitt Romney, CEO of the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee. “You simply climb the next mountain.”
The largest number of Winter Olympic athletes, 2,531, from the largest number of entered nations, 77, will compete in the largest number of ice-and-snow events, 78, in the 78-year history of the Winter Games. Those record statistics are dwarfed by a security force of 12,000 for the 17-day event.
“I’ve never felt safer in my life,” said five-time Olympian Amy Peterson, the Minnesotan who will carry the flag at the head of the 211-member U.S. team.
Security was only the latest challenge to confront Romney, the Mormon businessman who took over the organizing committee three years ago when its previous leaders were forced out by the revelations of the scandal.
Then the biggest mountain seemed to be convincing skeptical sponsors to ante up the revenue that would balance a $1.27 billion operating budget. That was accomplished last year, leaving Romney to feel confident everything was in order for a successful Games.
Without the events of Sept. 11, Romney said, the final preparations would have been “a cakewalk.”
Instead athletes, organizers and Olympic officials have been left to walk on eggshells between then and the end of February, when the last competitors, spectators and officials will leave Utah.
“The big threats to great Games are terrible weather and external interference,” Romney said, the latter a reference to terrorism. “What has happened since 9-11 has caused me to certify in my mind that every possible threat has been addressed. Were there a problem of some kind that hadn’t been considered, it would be inadequate for me to say, `Not my problem. Secret Service.”‘
These 19th Winter Olympics have been labeled the Mormon Games, the Scandal Games and now America’s Games. Like all such gross generalizations, they have varying degrees of accuracy.
They are the fourth Olympics–two summer, two winter–to take place in the United States in the last 22 years, the same number as this country had been host to in the previous 84 years since the modern Olympics began in 1896.
They are likely to be the last Olympics in the United States for at least another 22 years, especially if IOC President Jacques Rogge succeeds in cutting the size of the Games to make it manageable for Third World nations to have them and if spectators in Utah show an America-first-last-and-only-attitude that rankles the rest of the world.
Displays of patriotism that are appreciated in the post-Sept. 11 atmosphere of the United States could make foreign athletes feel less than welcome.
What skier Picabo Street will wear atop her head may look over the top. Street, one of the most recognizable U.S. Olympians, will race in a helmet painted with an American flag and bald eagle on the front, F-16 fighter jets on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. Street, a 1998 gold medalist, told the artist to make the design as “absolutely patriotic as you possibly can.”
“Expression of patriotism is the prerogative of any nation that hosts the Games,” said Lloyd Ward, CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “But the pride must be expressed as part of the world community. Take pride in who you are and understand and respect those around you.”
One of the strongest Winter Olympic teams in U.S. history likely will break its previous record for Winter Games medals, 13, giving the home fans plenty of chances for flag-waving and “USA! USA!” chanting. Although every Olympic host country is unabashedly nationalistic, the United States is the one sometimes perceived as a gloating bully.
“We want a warm, supporting public,” Rogge said. “Americans are [given to] fair play. Of course they will cheer loudly for their athletes. I know they will also cheer other athletes. I am absolutely not concerned for bias or jingoism or excessive nationalism.”
After lengthy negotiations with the USOC and Salt Lake organizing committee, the IOC was forced to back off its insistence on following past protocol and allow U.S. athletes to bring the flag found in the rubble of the World Trade Center into Rice-Eccles Arena at the start of the Opening Ceremony.
“It’s very difficult to draw the line,” said luge racer Mark Grimmette, one of the eight U.S. athletes chosen to carry the Ground Zero flag. “We hope this action [with the flag] will be seen as recognizing what happened to the world on Sept. 11.”
Since the attacks U.S. lugers have put stickers on their sleds that read “We remember the innocent victims of Sept. 11.” Grimmette said athletes from “just about all the nations in the world” had also put those stickers on their sleds by the final luge World Cup of the season in January.
The emotionally charged World Trade Center flag will not be raised because of its delicate condition. President Bush is expected to acknowledge the flag at the Opening Ceremony, where his official role is limited to the 16-word declaration that opens the Games.
“That flag is part of each and every American now,” said Peterson, who will carry by herself the American flag in front of the team. “It is part of who we are.”
NBC, which paid $545 million for U.S. rights to these Olympics, undoubtedly is counting on patriotic fervor and the lack of significant time difference for a boost in its TV ratings. At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, where the time difference to Chicago was 16 hours, the ratings were well below what had been promised advertisers.
Austrian skier Stephan Eberharter, German speedskater Anni Friesinger, Polish ski jumper Adam Malysz, Russian skaters Evgeny Plushenko and Alexei Yagudin and husband-wife biathletes Raphael Poiree of France and Liv-Grete Skjelbreid Poiree of Norway are among the international stars whose efforts figure to eclipse those of U.S. athletes.
This is, coincidentally, the second straight Winter Olympics in the United States to take place under the shadow of events in Afghanistan. At the time of the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., the U.S. government was expressing its displeasure with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Carter administration later decided to have the U.S. boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games as retaliation for that invasion.
Afghanistan never has sent a team to the Winter Olympics and will not have any representatives in Salt Lake. There will be two athletes from Iran, a nation that Bush said was part of an “axis of evil” in his recent State of the Union address.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is expected to join Bush at the Opening Ceremony. It is to include elements of Native American and Utah culture while emphasizing the Salt Lake Olympic motto “to light the fire within.”
Robbie Robertson, the former lead guitarist of the Band and a Canadian Indian who coordinated the Native American elements of the ceremony, said he was struck at the dress rehearsal by “a strong sense of worldwide unity. This is really people holding out their arms to the world.”
Salt Lake City boosters have hoped the global TV coverage would expose its stunning mountain vistas, making the world expand its impression of the place as only a haven for Olympic scandal dominated by a theocracy.
The weather has not cooperated. Salt Lake City has spent the last week under an air inversion, a combination of fog and smog, that has obscured the view of the mountains and triggered bans on burning wood and coal.
The Friday forecast is a mixed blessing, with winds that are expected to clear the air in the Wasatch Valley but may be so strong they make it impossible to use some of the props planned for the Opening Ceremony.
Rogge did his part for Salt Lake image cleansing during his speech at Sunday’s opening of the IOC session, or general assembly. He said the IOC crisis that followed revelations of the bribery crisis “did not originate in Salt Lake City alone. Inappropriate structures and human weakness on both sides were the roots of an evil that would have come to light here or somewhere else.”
But this was the place.
