Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall offered a simple suggestion to local government leaders from around the country gathered at the Utah Olympic Park Wednesday for a panel discussion on taking advantage of big events.
Organize a watch party for the community during the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy. Last month, Salt Lake City announced plans for family-friendly watch parties downtown throughout the next Olympics and Paralympics that follow for athletes with disabilities.
“You could at least look at doing an Opening Ceremonies watch party,” Mendenhall urged the nearly 100 attendees of this week’s National League of Cities summit in Salt Lake City who traveled by bus to the Park City site of Utah’s Olympic sliding track and ski jumps.
“I think every American has a fire inside for Team USA. When you watch the Opening Ceremonies, you watch any event with your community members, you start to feel it,” the mayor said, calling it “a very low-cost way” to embrace what’s being called America’s decade of sport.
The decade of major sporting events that concludes with Utah’s next Olympics also includes the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles as well as next year’s World Cup soccer matches in cities around the country as well as in Canada and Mexico.
Such events can bring communities together, she said, citing the thousands of Utahns who came to Washington Square last year in the middle of the night to watch the International Olympic Committee announce from Paris that Utah would host the 2034 Winter Games.
“We really didn’t know if anyone would show up,” Mendenhall said. “It was a roll of the dice.”
For her, the emotional highlight of the IOC’s Pioneer Day decision wasn’t being in the Paris meeting room where it happened. It was being able to hear the cheers of the Utah crowd through headphones.
“Whoo,” she said, tearing up at the memory. Then she spotted a couple of people standing in the back of the room in brightly colored jackets that were part of the volunteer uniform in Utah’s last Olympics in 2002.
“People still wear them. It’s been almost a quarter century. You will see people around town still proudly wearing their 2002 gear. What kind of a party still lasts 25 years later? This one is still alive and well,” Mendenhall said.
And it’s one she hopes won’t end.
“We’re building our legacy right now for the future,” the mayor said, adding, “we all think we really could become a perpetual host of the Olympics and the Paralympics. Because we know how to maintain this enthusiasm and this infrastructure.”
Utahns, including Gov. Spencer Cox, have made it clear they’d like to see the state become part of any rotation of the Winter Games among a set group of hosts. The idea recently resurfaced as part of new IOC President Kirsty Coventry‘s call for reviewing a number of policies.
Four-time Olympic speedskater Catherine Raney Norman, vice president of development and athlete relations for what’s formally known as the Organizing Committee for the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, also had some advice for the local leaders.
While Raney Norman said she’s grateful they were learning about Utah’s “secret sauce” when it comes to hosting, the 2034 Games belong to all Americans. As an Olympian, she said she represented the United States.
“We get to be the canvas for the Games but these are America’s Games,” she said. “So I’m hopeful that you guys can take a little bit of what you hear today back into your communities and help to build up, and lift up, the Olympic and Paralympic movement within your communities.”
Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken, whose California city will host indoor volleyball at the L.A. 2028 Olympics in the Honda Center, home to the Anaheim Ducks hockey team, said she appreciated hearing about involving local residents in the big event.
“I’m most interested in learning from my predecessors that were Olympic host cities in developing community, connecting people that may never have seen an Olympic sport,” Aitken said, so they can “come together and really just root for their country.”
The Olympics, she said, “is such a unique sports event and it truly unifies the entire world. When you’re a kid or you’ve never seen the Olympics before, we can offer you community gathering spaces and town squares” to cheer on athletes.
Liston Bochette III, A Fort Myers, Florida, city councilman who competed for Puerto Rico in multiple Olympics in track and field as well as bobsled, said keeping venues like Utah’s sliding track up and running for decades “is the future of sports.”
Still, Bochette said the Winter Games need to keep being held in new locations.
“The mayor said, ‘We could do these Games over and over and over.’ But you’ve got to move them around the world,” he said. “I think they’ll come back here more often than not. This is a safe place, the economy is good, the people are friendly.”
