Brigham Young University graduate Kelsey Berg confessed she wasn’t comfortable wearing a bright red Team USA shirt for a recent tour of the “Today” show set in New York City with other similarly outfitted officials from Utah’s 2034 Winter Games.
So the Washington, D.C., veteran, now the director of government relations for the 2034 organizing committee, used a team parka that was mostly white and blue to discreetly cover up the color associated with BYU’s rival, the University of Utah.
Berg, 36, is used to finding ways to stand with what she believes matters, to herself as well as to the politicians and organizations she’s represented during more than a decade in the political world.
That’s especially true when it comes to Berg’s small-town Utah roots that she can trace back seven generations to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who settled Midway.
Even though the Organizing Committee for the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games offices are in downtown Salt Lake City, Berg still lives in Wasatch County, around the corner from her parents’ seven-acre spread in Center Creek, a place she calls Center Crick.
“She’s a rural girl,” former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney told the Deseret News.
Romney said Berg, his senatorial campaign’s political director and deputy chief of staff in Washington, D.C., once told him that although she’d grown up in Heber City, it had become too much of a “metropolis” for her.
How Berg got the job with Olympic organizers
Her knowledge of the state beyond its urban areas impressed Romney during their first meeting as the former GOP presidential nominee was planning his 2018 run to replace Utah’s longest serving senator, Orrin Hatch.
“She knows her way around Utah, every county,” Romney said. “Every county commissioner, most mayors and most sheriffs know her and that suggests a determination and a doggedness that would be helpful.”
It was while working for the one-term senator, who back in 1999 had taken over the then-troubled 2002 Winter Games at the urging of Utah leaders, that Berg became interested in the Olympics.
Romney talked about being at the helm of Utah’s first Winter Games “all the time,” Berg said. “He would highlight the good parts of Utah, the volunteers, just the Olympic spirit of everything ... how folks step up.”
Before those conversations, often occurring during their long drives to meet with Utahns around the state, Berg’s memories from 2002 were largely limited to seeing the Olympic torch relay pass by Heber City’s Rocky Mountain Middle School as a teen.
Through Romney, she met Fraser Bullock, president and executive chair of the Utah organizing committee. Bullock had worked with Romney in Boston and helped him run the 2002 Winter Games, then spent more than two decades working to bring the Olympics back to Utah.
When Romney started pressing Berg about how she saw her future, a role in Utah’s next Olympics utilizing her connections in Washington, D.C., as well as throughout the state emerged as a new goal.
“He’s a good mentor, someone to run ideas past,” Berg said, adding, “We would talk about that and he would give those suggestions. And he’s been great with Fraser. Fraser and I would have quarterly, biannual lunches just to catch up and check in.”
Keeping in touch with Bullock about Utah’s Olympic bid, she said, was a way “to always keep the door open. I mean, I learned that from Jason (Chaffetz, the former Utah congressman), of always having the opportunity, and to be able to be the one to decide if you take it or not.”
Chaffetz, now a Fox News contributor, became Berg’s first boss in Washington, D.C., after offering to hire her once she graduated college. There were other jobs before and after Romney, including as vice president of government relations for the Larry H. Miller Company.
Just don’t ask Berg for a copy of her resume.
“I don’t know that I have a legit resume,” she said. “I never actually needed one.”
Romney said Berg is “a good fit” for the organizing committee.
“Anybody who gets a chance to work in the Olympics comes away saying it was, if not the best, one of the best experiences of their professional life. So I’m sure she’ll get a lot out of it,” he said. “She has the career experience and background to, I think, make a real contribution.”
The role of the 2034 Games government relations director
A lot of what she’ll do, Romney said, will center around securing likely several billion dollars from Washington, D.C., for two key elements of the 2034 Winter Games, security and a spectator transportation system that utilizes buses and drivers from around the country.
He recalled realizing during the run-up to the 2002 Winter Games that the White House and Congress would have to be pushed to provide federal funding, calling it “a revelation to me what it takes to get something in the budget.”
The effort, which also required hired lobbyists in the nation’s capital, had stalled but support immediately surfaced after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, said Romney, who was in Washington, D.C., seeking funding that deadly day.
“Someone has to get the money,” Romney said. “That’s going to be her job.”
Bullock sees the role of government relations director a little differently, at least for now.
“It’s our commitment to staying closely connected with our state,” Bullock said. “We’re working on trying to focus our connection to long-term planning efforts in certain areas that are affected by state government ... and making sure we’re part of that loop.”
The long lead time on transportation and other state projects dictated filling the government relations post in the organizing committee’s first year, he said, adding Berg is charged with “staying close to our political leaders.”
This time around, the state is taking the lead on the Olympics, not Salt Lake City.
The host contract with the International Olympic Committee was signed by Gov. Spencer Cox, and he and other state officials have made it clear they expect Utah values to be showcased, not what they saw during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
Although Cox, along with Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, and Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, selected the organizing committee leadership announced in February, Bullock said they didn’t ask for a liaison to be put in place right away.
“They didn’t request it,” but the organizing committee’s CEO, former Utah House speaker Brad Wilson “knew that this was going to be an opportunity,” Bullock said. “Brad and I talked about this early on and said, ‘Yes, this is really important.’”
The state is the financial guarantor of the privately funded, $4 billion Winter Games “and we owe it to them to have robust communication both at the very senior level as well as at the staff level,” he said. “So we need to stay close to them.”
‘Telling the Utah story’
Berg seems to understand the expectations.
“I care about Utah. I care about what we look like after 2034, the legacy,” she said. “So if I can play a small role in helping make it a benefit for everyone and having everyone in the state ... feel a part of it, that’s what I want to be able to do.”
The way to make that happen, Berg said, is by “telling the Utah story. I think that’s the key we can do. One thing I’m really excited about is sharing the goodness and the values of Utah that make us so successful.”
She said that means highlighting what make Utah unique, including being more welcoming toward immigrants and refugees than other Republican-dominated states as well as speaking more languages due to the Church of Jesus Christ’s missionary program.
“What we’re so proud of, I think, is what we want to make sure and share with the world,” Berg said, describing Utahns as willing to show up for their neighbors regardless of whether they’re “of the dominant religion or the dominant political party.”
Utah’s athletes family initiative to provide accommodations and other support for relatives of 2034 competitors is an example of how organizers will “highlight the best of Utahns” by celebrating families, she said.
At the same time, she also has to make sure state leaders are happy with the Games.
“Of course it’s my job,” she said, adding, “If we’re successful in having every Utahn feel like they have a part and can be involved and can touch and can show up, I think state leaders will be happy. Everyone just wants to put on the best show.”