The answer to the question of who’s going to be in charge of the 2034 Winter Games in Utah has been delayed.
U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee leaders said Monday that the organizing committee for Utah’s next Winter Games won’t be announced until early next year despite a Christmas Eve deadline spelled out in the host contract with the International Olympic Committee.
“We are on track with the preparation,” Sarah Hirshland, the CEO of the Colorado Springs-based USOPC, said during a media call. “I think an announcement will come early in the year. We’re in active conversations ... with the Utah community and the IOC.”
But Hirshland said they’re waiting for the IOC to review “a number of documents,” so the organizing committee won’t meet the Dec. 24 deadline. Both she and USOPC Chair Gene Sykes said there’s no rush to name the entity responsible or what will add up to a $4 billion event intended to be staged entirely with privately raised funds.
“As you look towards the formation of an organizing committee, obviously in this case there’s a long ... runway,” Hirshland said. “You want to be very thoughtful about engaging all the parties that really need to contribute to the ultimate execution of delivering.”
Fraser Bullock, president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games behind the state’s successful bid to host a second Olympics and Paralympics, later told the Deseret News the IOC has extended the deadline the host contract “into the first quarter” of the new year.
Bullock said all of the required details for the organizing committee were submitted to the IOC in early December. The delay, he said, is due to the deadline coming during the Christmas holidays. The IOC awarded the 2034 Games on July 24, Utah’s Pioneer Day, during a meeting held before the start of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
“We’ve been working diligently with our political leaders here, our business leaders and with the USOPC. We’ve made tremendous progress and came to alignment on all of the required documents. We submitted those to the IOC and we’ve been in dialogue with them,” Bullock said. “But they are shutting down for the holidays.”'
He said the IOC requested “to be able to pick this up in January and we, of course, agreed to that. We have plenty of time, being nine years out. And we look forward to their feedback in January. We plan on getting the organizing committee formed after the first of the year.”
The IOC has been “incredibly busy,” Bullock said, and deserve a break.
“We support that completely,” he said. “They’re not worried about this at all because we’re in very good shape.”
Earlier this month, IOC President Thomas Bach said he was not concerned that an organizing committee for the 2034 Games was not yet in place. Bach told the Deseret News, “if I would start to be concerned about an organizing committee maybe formed a month later,” there wouldn’t be enough time “to address any other issues, I think. There would be so many. No, no concern.”
Bullock declined to comment on the structure and leadership proposed for the organizing committee, including whether there’s a role for the leader of Utah’s first Olympics, in 2002, retiring U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney. But Bullock did confirm his own continued involvement.
The bid committee is expected to hold its final meeting on Wednesday.