For Utahns who missed out when the state last hosted the Olympics and Paralympics more than two decades ago, the 2034 Winter Games are being seen as offering a second chance to welcome the world.
“I didn’t really engage as much as I wanted to,” Dallin Koecher, executive director of the Heber Valley Chamber of Commerce, admitted during a panel discussion on the Olympics Monday at the Wasatch Back Economic Summit.
Of course, Koecher was just 17 years old when the 2002 Winter Games brought around 100,000 visitors to the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center near Midway for cross-country skiing events. This time around, he doesn’t want to see his Wasatch Back neighbors make the same mistake.
“Engage,” was his advice for the audience gathered for the summit held at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley hotel, part of the ski resort’s new east village, even though he acknowledged it may be “very tempting” to rent out their homes and get away during the Games.
But after experiencing Italy’s 2026 Winter Games earlier this year as one of the Utahns participating in an observer program that took them behind the scenes, Koecher said he sees what a “big missed opportunity” that would be for Wasatch Back residents.
Staying put, they’ll be able to help show off what he said makes the area and its open spaces special, including cultural values like treating neighbors with kindness and the environment with respect.
“In 2002, it was more like the Olympics happened to us,” Koecher said. “Now, we want to be a part of this.”
For Park City Mayor Ryan Dickey, spending time with his counterpart in Cortina, Italy, during the Games was “a little bit of a cautionary tale” since the Cortina mayor had campaigned on a slogan of “Cortina first, Olympics last” before coming around.
The atmosphere in the Italian ski resort town was “electric,” Dickey said, but there were a few frustrations attributable to the time it took local leaders to embrace their role. The lesson he said he learned was “if you’re going to have the Games, you want to go all in.”
Unlike the 2026 Winter Games, which were spread across a wide swath of northern Italy, Dickey said Utah has the advantage of a compact footprint, with all of the venues located within an hour of a single athletes village at the University of Utah, just as they were in 2002.
“Here, we know we can crush the operations,” he said, giving communities the chance to focus on what they want from hosting again. “We have permission as planners to think about how do we take this next Olympics well beyond what we’ve already done, well beyond any Olympics ever.”
Much of that planning will be around transportation, although he also suggested there could be a “sustainability board” during Utah’s Games to track reductions in carbon emissions and other environmental efforts, comparing it to a medals count.
Callum Clark, chief operating officer of the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation that operates several venues including Soldier Hollow, pitched a rail connection to the nordic venue as a “big vision item” worth considering.
Kelsey Berg, director of government relations for the privately funded Organizing Committee for the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, said there will be some new challenges for the area thanks to a 40% increase in the size of the event.
That means trying to get more people in and out of venues more frequently along the Wasatch Back, including the Deer Valley and Park City ski areas and the Utah Olympic Park near I-80, she said.
“It will be a challenge, but we’ll get there,” said Berg, who grew up in Heber City and still lives in Wasatch County. A sixth-grader during the 2002 Winter Games, she said a new generation is feeling the pride that resulted from “knowing we could host big events and come together.”