By Rory Carroll
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Salt Lake City’s bid to host the 2030 Winter Games is in “very good shape” ahead of upcoming meetings with International Olympic Committee members, officials from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) said on Monday.
Utah’s capital city, which hosted the Games in 2002, is expected to be up against Japan’s Sapporo, Canada’s Vancouver and Spain’s Catalonia and Aragon regions for hosting rights.
Members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) technical committee will visit Utah to evaluate the plan next month, Susanne Lyons, USOPC Chair, told reporters following the first USOPC board meeting of the year.
Lyons along with USOPC Chair Sarah Hirshland and members of the Salt Lake committee will then travel to Switzerland in June to “give them a more robust presentation on the meat and bones of what is part of the whole plan of the bid, which is in very, very good shape,” she said.
She said no decision is expected from the IOC until their general session next summer, but that the USOPC expected to have an idea of who the “leading contenders” are before the end of the year.
Los Angeles has already been selected to host the 2028 Summer Games and Lyons said that while the U.S. hosting two Games so close together could prove “a little bit complicated,” it also provides opportunities.
“There’s actually some very interesting things you could do with the notion of a bundle of packages, two Games in the U.S. that you are offering to our commercial partners,” she said.
“So there’s a lot of discussions ongoing and a lot of analysis that’s underway.”
Salt Lake City and the USOPC have left the door open to bidding on the 2034 Games if they are not selected for 2030.
(Reporting by Rory Carroll in Los Angeles; Editing by Stephen Coates)
