Photo courtesy of Utah Athletic Foundation/Utah Winter Games
The Utah Winter Games had a tough fight to stay alive over the years as sponsorship
money dried up and that famed Olympic Spirit faded slightly after 2002.

 

Hold on tight

Utahns keep Olympic dreams alive through state winter Games

By Melissa Fields

“There’s no practice tee, no bunny slope,” said Tom Jordan, describing his experience at a Utah Winter Games’s skeleton clinic three years ago. “Once you start down that track you’re going as fast as the Olympians do. So, don’t let go.”
          
Imagine hurtling down an ice tunnel at 60 mph, stomach-down on a sled with your face only inches from the hard, frigid surface. Some might quit before ever starting. Others would try it once and never do it again. But 63-year-old Jordan, like the more than 100,000 Utahns who have participated in Utah Winter Games’s clinics and competitions since the mid-1980s, was hooked.

“In the beginning, skiing was all I participated in, with the thought that it would be a great way to improve,” said Jordan, who has taken part in the Games for nearly 15 years. “I also like the idea that I was skiing on the same runs where athletes like Picabo Street were training and where the Olympics were to be held in 2002.”

The 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games are the reason why the Utah Winter Games—arguably the oldest and largest amateur winter sports organization in the country—were created. But it hasn’t always been a smooth ride. Twice since the 2002 Olympics, the Games have come dangerously close to derailing. Twice Utahns have persevered to save them. And despite the many twists and turns, the athletes have maintained a steady grip on the Games as their opportunity to harbor Olympic-sized dreams.

In 1984, Governor Scott M. Matheson and Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson formed a committee to study the feasibility of Salt Lake bidding on and hosting the Olympic Winter Games. To be in contention with other Olympic-hopeful cities like Sion, Switzerland; Ostersund, Sweden; and Quebec City, Canada, Utahns needed to demonstrate they could stage several winter sports events simultaneously using entirely volunteer labor. Encouraged by the state’s cultural spirit of volunteerism and its strong depth of Olympic-hopeful athletes, Governor Norm Bangerter launched the Utah Winter Games in 1986.

The Games’s first events looked and felt a lot like they do today: low-key winter sports competitions—filled with participants ages 3 to 93—presented on the basis of doing rather than winning. The ski resorts were the natural first sites for those early races: ragtag events displaying all skiing levels, from expert to those who likely were enjoying their first season on snow. After Salt Lake was awarded the 2002 Olympic Games, the venues started popping up. The event roster for the Utah Winter Games expanded from alpine skiing to include cross-country skiing, luge, curling, speed skating and, of course, skeleton, at venues like the Utah Olympic Park in Park City, the Weber County Ice Sheet in Ogden, Soldier Hollow in Midway, and the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns. 

Organizers quickly realized that to get Utahns to participate in the events they were presenting, the Utah Winter Games needed to include an educational component as well as competition. Clinics in every one of the event sports are now offered at little or no cost to participants at the beginning of each winter season, many of which are led by former or aspiring Olympians. “We had both (Olympians) Lincoln DeWitt and Jim Shea hanging around the track during my skeleton clinic,” Jordan said. “And during a ski clinic I took at Deer Valley, Stein Eriksen took a few runs with our group, which pretty much floored a couple from California.” Eriksen is a 1950s Olympic alpine medalist from Norway and is considered one of the pioneers of freestyle skiing.     
           
Though most other similar games are sponsored by the state, the Utah Winter Games has always relied on sponsorships, grants, and private donations. KTVX ABC Channel 4 was the Games’s first and arguably most defining sponsor, providing a hefty chunk of the annual operating budget as well as featuring the Games in regular time slots during the station’s evening and nightly newscasts.

The Utah Winter Games grew at an exponential rate through the 1990s. A full-time director was brought on board as well as a public relations staff person. Utahns came out in droves to take advantage of Utah Winter Games’s opportunities and to experience the venues before the Olympics came to town. The organization’s founding intent seemed to have exceeded well beyond expectations.

Then in 2002 two significant events caused the Utah Winter Games to stumble and nearly slide off the winter sports map forever: the Salt Lake Olympic Winter Games culminated the Games’s original purpose; and KTVX was sold to Clear Channel Television (KTVX has since been sold again to Newport Television), terminating the Games’ long-standing sponsorship. “The business model, based on the premise of creating excitement and preparing Utahns for the Olympics, was now obsolete. Then, when KTVX pulled out, many of the other sponsors did as well,” said Heidi Hughes, former Utah Winter Games’s director. 

The Games began a downward spiral. Enthusiasm that had spurred the clinics and competitions leading up to the Olympics was dissolving. Money to run the clinics and competitions was almost gone. Utahns were letting slip away an organization that for two decades had helped define the state’s determination and love of hosting and participating in winter sports.

Then in 2004, Ski Utah, the marketing arm of the Utah Ski and Snowboard Association, threw the organization a lifeline. Hughes was hired as director and thanks to stalwart volunteers like Jordan, who also came on board as public relations director (now a Utah Winter Games’s board member), the Games experienced a mild revival. During the 2006-07 winter season, 5,500 people took part in 20 competitions in 15 sports and 32 instructional clinics. Changes to transform the Games from an Olympic ramp up to an Olympic legacy organization included tightening the competition schedule and creating WinterFit, a competitive fitness accrual program modeled after the national Lighten Up America program.

But by fall 2007 the Games were running on fumes. Sponsorship dollars had dried up—again.

Perhaps it was the leftover Olympic Spirit everyone talked about that still resonated in the hearts of Utah volunteers. Maybe it was the athletes and their determination to hold tight to their dreams. Whatever it was, it worked to once again save the Games.

The Utah Athletic Foundation (UAF), the state-designated caretaker of Utah Olympic Park and the Olympic Oval since May 2002, had serendipitously been working on a plan to take an increased role in sport development and saw the Utah Winter Games as an ideal venue for identifying possible Olympic potential in athletes as well as carrying on the Olympic legacy. 

“Bottom line, if the Utah Athletic Foundation hadn’t stepped in, the Utah Winter Games would’ve probably just gone away,” said Colin Hilton, UAF president and CEO. “By consolidating the Utah Winter Games and organizations like it under the Utah Olympic Foundation, we can let the people who love these sports attract more participants and pass along their love for winter sports while we worry about the nuts and bolts of running the organizations.”

The Utah Winter Games’s first season operating under the auspices of the UAF looked and felt a lot like the Games of the past: Volunteers handed out competition bibs and took stats; both Olympic veterans and hopefuls continued to staff the popular low- and no-cost early-season clinics; and beginners and experts took to the snow or ice to test their skills at a new sport, renewed their interest in a sport they may have abandoned, or went at it just for bragging rights.

The UAF has streamlined and expanded the 2008-09 Utah Winter Games’s season. Through February, monthly introductory super clinics are offered in the core winter sports including alpine skiing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, curling, figure skating, freestyle skiing, hockey, Nordic ski jumping, luge, skeleton, speed skating and more. Participating athletes will then have the opportunity to show off their skills and compete in a weekend of competition in the Utah Winter Games Festival, set for mid-March 2009.

Whatever form the Utah Winter Games takes in the future, Tom Jordan certainly will be out there. “How often do you get to stand in the starting gate where Bode Miller stood or skate on the track where Apolo Anton Ohno won gold? The Games are an amazing opportunity for people to experience first hand what the entire state was so wrapped up in for so long.”

And joining Jordan will be countless other athletes holding on and feeling—even if for a moment—what it’s like to be an Olympian and to dream big.

Melissa Fields is a freelance writer and mom who skis Utah’s winter resorts every chance she gets. She’s written for Utah Style & Design, Park City Magazine, and Sunset.

 

 

 

 

 

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