BEAR HOLLOW, Summit County — The 2002 Winter Games are long over, but the state's premier Olympic facilities continue to be dependent on the U.S. Olympic Committee for funding.
There's likely to be some good news for the financially strapped facilities today, when Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is expected to announce that U.S. Speedskating is relocating from just outside Cleveland to Utah.
The move by the sport's national governing body may well help boost the bottom line for the Utah Athletic Foundation that took over the ski jumps and bobsled run near Park City and the speed-skating oval in Kearns after the Games.
At least two speedskating officials will transfer to the new headquarters, and it's anticipated additional staff will be hired. The American speedskating team, however, will likely continue training at sites around the country as well as on the Kearns ice.
For the past four years, the foundation has counted on receiving $200,000 in support annually from the Colorado-based USOC to help chip away at the $5.5 million shortfall the facilities run each year.
Now, negotiations are under way to increase the amount of support to a minimum of $1 million over a four-year contract — plus additional help from both the USOC and the national governing bodies of various winter sports to cover other expenses.
The deal could also result in the pair of facilities being named official Olympic training sites by the USOC, a designation that would permit the foundation to use the Olympic name and five rings logo.
But even with the additional money — and the promotional benefits of being able to tap the Olympic brand — the foundation is expected to continue to run in the red, spending more to operate the facilities than it can earn.
Colin Hilton, who took over earlier this year as the foundation's president and CEO, said more than four years after the Olympics left behind an $80 million surplus for the facilities, they're nowhere close to breaking even.
"We're still not there yet," Hilton said. "So this new agreement with the USOC is quite critical." His goal is to reduce the red ink by about $1.5 million by the time the deal is finalized at the end of the year.
The USOC does not have a similar arrangement with the last American city to host an Olympics before the Salt Lake Games — Atlanta, where only limited reminders of the 1996 Summer Games remain.
"From our standpoint, we certainly learned a lesson a little bit from Atlanta," said Steve Roush, USOC chief of sports performance. "Our presence needs to be there to ensure there is a legacy left after the Games."
Roush, who spoke to the Deseret Morning News recently from Beijing, where he had traveled to see firsthand the preparations for the 2008 Summer Games, said the USOC is always focused on future Olympics.
"For us, sadly, we move on to the next Games," Roush said. That's really what the organization's interest in Utah's Olympic facilities is about — maintaining competition and training sites to ready teams for future Winter Games.
But the foundation has a broader charge. Its facilities were built with taxpayer dollars even before the state was awarded the 2002 Games and have always been intended for use by the public as well as by elite athletes.
That stretches the foundation's resources tight enough that there have been some conflicts, including how soon to make ice available on the oval this summer. Typically, the USOC comes up with some $75,000 a month between July and September for oval ice.
This year, though, the USOC balked. There were questions about how prepared U.S. Speedskating, then in the midst of a reorganization, was to use the ice. Hilton said eventually ice was made in time for an August community event.
The incident helped move along the discussions between the foundation and the USOC, and U.S. Speedskating's decision to make the move. The delay in getting ice this year, Roush said, "may have been a little bit of a shock and surprise" to all involved.
It's very clear, he said, that the USOC has to step up with additional help.
"If this legacy is going to live on, they need to live within the means of what their endowment and fund-raising efforts can support," Roush said. "We can't, in a good partner role, simply say, 'You pay for it."'
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