The 2002 Winter Games won't have a mascot before early 1999 - a year later than the Salt Lake Organizing Committee originally planned and after the profitable Christmas shopping season.
Just what's being looked at to represent Salt Lake City's Olympics is still top-secret. But SLOC Senior Vice President Dave Johnson said Thursday organizers now don't plan to reveal it until next year."We've made a lot of progress on the mascot," Johnson said, declining to be more specific. "We're looking right now at a timetable to launch at the first of the year."
That's pending approval by both the International Olympic Committee and SLOC's own board of trustees. The IOC is meeting in Seville, Spain, next week and has two additional meetings scheduled this year, including one in December.
At one time, the mascot was expected to be introduced during the closing ceremonies of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. But organizers decided that February was the wrong time of year to try to sell mascot merchandise.
In addition, focus groups in Salt Lake City, Milwaukee and Phoenix - cities chosen for their middle-class values - didn't like the proposed mascot. They said it wasn't Olympic enough.
So organizers decided last fall to wait until this fall to unveil a mascot, giving them time to refine their design and position them to market it to both back-to-school and Christmas shoppers.
It would have been the same time of year the organizing committee's new logo was launched, a bright orange, blue and yellow asymmetrical snowflake inspired by American Indian patterns.
During the Nagano Games, organizing committee officials said they'd have a mascot design ready by the next IOC meeeting in April or the next scheduled get-together in June. Now it won't be before September's meeting.
Johnson has said the mascot is "not just something to sell kids at Christmas." It's not clear how much money organizers had hoped to make from the sale of mascot merchandise this holiday season.
But mascots are big business for Olympic organizers. Atlanta made millions from the sale of merchandise based on its mascot, a bright blue blob named "Izzy."
Although the computer-generated creature was mocked as the "Olympic maggot" or worse by adults, children loved it and made their parents purchase stuffed dolls, T-shirts, backpacks, pins and other Izzy items.
One of the key figures in transforming Atlanta's mascot into a marketing success, Laurie Olsen, former Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games spokeswoman, said Salt Lake organizers shouldn't rush to release a mascot.
"If you're not ready, you're not ready. Get it right," Olsen said in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where she now runs her own public relations company.
Olsen said there was never any question that Atlanta's mascot would make its debut during the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Spain.
"We had been under the impression that there was no option, that that was what you did," she said. So the animated creature, then called "Whatizit," was turned into a three-dimensional character.
Trouble was, no one had given much thought to creating a costume that could embody the personality "Whatizit" conveyed on the computer screen. "It translated very poorly," Olsen acknowledged.
And it was very poorly received by the public. Atlantans had suggested everything from a dog named "Dogwood" to a peach named "Peaches" to various possum, peanut and other creatures for a mascot.
It took a major makeover to turn "Whatizit" into "Izzy," starting with focus groups that suggested Atlanta organizers ignore the adult reaction and focus on making the creature more child-friendly.
Olsen said Salt Lake organizers should focus on children from the start. And, she said, they should avoid feeling pressured to come up with something that represents the city. "That's unrealistic," she said.
Salt Lake could end up with multiple mascots to stretch the appeal further. That was done in Nagano, home of the much-beloved quartet of owl-like creatures dubbed "Snowlets."
The 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, has three mascots. The trio of native beasts, "Olly," "Syd" and "Millie," are all based on indigenous wildlife, including the kookaburra bird.