Monday is a big day at the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and leaders of Utah’s 2034 Winter Games will be there.
A new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe, is set to take office in a handover ceremony Monday. Coventry was elected by her fellow IOC members in March to succeed the president for the past 12 years, Thomas Bach of Germany.
June 23 is also celebrated as Olympic Day worldwide. In Utah, a group of Olympic and Paralympic athletes will be visiting young patients of Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital in Lehi to mark the anniversary of the 1894 founding of the IOC.
But officials from what’s formally known as the Organizing Committee for the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games are headed to Switzerland for the handover ceremony and receptions that follow, as well as meetings with IOC staff.
Fraser Bullock, the organizing committee’s president and executive chair, said he’s making his first trip to Olympic House in Switzerland since the bid award last July to recognize Bach’s legacy as well as to welcome Coventry, the first woman and first African to lead the IOC.
“We will have an opportunity to thank him for the work he has done, but also to turn to the future and be there for when Kirsty takes the reins for at least the next eight years, and show our support for her,” Bullock said.
Under IOC rules, Coventry will be eligible to seek a second, four-year term in 2033. That means there’s what Bullock called a “high probability” she’ll be leading the IOC during Utah’s second Olympics.
What the IOC will hear about Utah’s 2034 Games
Although the IOC Executive Board is scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday, Utah’s organizing committee isn’t scheduled to make a report on the 2034 Games. But Bullock said there will be planning meetings with IOC staff Tuesday and possibly part of the day Wednesday.
The meetings are expected to cover the work that’s already underway, including launching a “listening tour” of venue communities and announcing a big increase in the amount of money being sought from donors to pay for the privately funded, $4 billion event.
Organizers will also be looking for ways to partner with the IOC in areas such as boosting the number of international athletes who come to Utah to train and providing more Games-time assistance to the families of athletes, Bullock said.
He’ll be joined in Switzerland by Brad Wilson, the former Utah House speaker named CEO of the organizing committee in February, and Darren Hughes, an organizing committee vice president who served as bid lead under Bullock.
It’s Wilson’s first trip to the IOC’s Swiss headquarters, although he’s been talking with international Olympic officials for months and even met a few in person, including IOC Olympic Games Executive Director Christophe Dubi, who was in Salt Lake City in February.
“There’s some work that I think has to be done face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball. There’s going to be a Games delivery operation out of Switzerland. These are going to be the people that are going to help us deliver 2034,” Wilson said.
“We’ve got to have a high degree of trust. We’ve got to have a high degree of candor with each other and all be singing from the sheet of music, coming from the same page,” he said. “There’s just some things you have to do in person and so we’ll be going there.”
Will the new IOC president visit Utah?
Many of the same IOC officials that will be sitting down with Utah organizers in Switzerland are finalizing plans to visit to Utah this fall, Wilson said, adding he’s confident that Coventry will be coming soon, too.
In fact, the message Utah organizers will deliver to the new IOC president is to “first and foremost, extend a formal invitation to her to come preview the 2034 Games,” he said, so she can “experience our amazing hospitality and our amazing venues.”
That chance to “showcase our exceptionally high readiness to host the Games” should spark conversations in the coming year with Coventry about how organizers “can take the Games to a new level,” Wilson said.
America’s four IOC members will also be in Switzerland next week, including Gene Sykes, chair of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and a member of Utah’s Olympic organizers’ powerful executive committee.
“We are thrilled to welcome President Kirsty Coventry and offer her our support as she works to carry forward the momentum of a fantastic Paris 2024 Games through the next decade and beyond,” Sykes told reporters earlier this week.
U.S. Olympic officials are looking forward to hosting both the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles and Utah’s next Winter Games in 2034, what Sykes said promises to be “an amazing decade of sport.”
Sykes said he got to know Coventry as the leader of L.A.’s Olympic bid, when she was on the IOC’s athletes commission. “I’ve seen her evolve to become obviously a great leader of the IOC,” Sykes said. “I’m incredibly impressed with her.”
Besides Sykes, elected to the IOC last July, the other U.S. members are Anita DeFrantz, a member since 1986 and a former IOC vice president; David Haggerty, International Tennis Federation president; and Allyson Felix, the most decorated track and field athlete in history.