PARIS — International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach has something to remember Utah by.
After being awarded the 2034 Winter Games, the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games presented the IOC leader with a small-scale replica of the 43.3 foot-tall Golden Spike Monument due to be installed at a new state park in Brigham City later this year. The big spike was displayed on a flatbed truck at the Utah Capitol last fall.
The gift was given during Wednesday night’s private celebration at USA House, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s gathering place for Team USA’s supporters during the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. The IOC voted 83-6 to give Utah another Olympics after more than a decade of bidding.
“This is the first and only gift we’ve given,” Steve Price, the bid’s chair of the cultural Olympiad. Price said all kinds of Utah art was considered, including historic pieces, but the spike replica was settled on because it tells an “incredible story of human ingenuity and tenacity” that it took to complete the transcontinental railroad with the driving of the final spike in Utah.
The “work and accomplishment against all odds” is also what it takes to get to the Olympics, Price said. “It’s like an athlete. For an athlete to make it at the Olympic level, is very difficult....You train to be an Olympic athlete because of your own ingenuity.”
The spike replica captures what Price said are the faces of the people that made the railroad possible, the workers who came to America from China and other parts of the world, the engineers and other technical experts, and the financiers.
It’s No. 1 of 25 made, he said, with the rest going to the major donors that helped pay for the $2 million monument art and the $3 million land purchase for the state park. Bach’s replica was on a base fashioned from an original train trestle, Price said. The piece is expected to be displayed in the Olympic Museum, located at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.