Maybe it was because the expectations were so low. The bid-city corruption scandal that broke three years ago battered the image of both the Olympics and Salt Lake City and left local organizers wondering if any new sponsors might come forward to fill a $400 million hole in the budget. The previous Olympics in the United States, the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games, had many organizational failures.
The events of Sept. 11 left everyone nervous about what could happen to so visible a target as the Olympics, which had been chosen 30 years ago by Arab terrorists wanting to make a point the world would not miss.
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There was also the issue of how a place as homogenous as Utah, the only state in the nation dominated by followers of a single religion, would deal with visitors from Mongolia to Moldova, Iran to Israel, Kenya to Kyrgyzstan.
For all those reasons and others that cropped up in the 17 Olympic days that began Feb. 8 and ended with Sunday’s Closing Ceremony, the success of the 19th Winter Games was both remarkable and surprising.
Cooperative weather, a lack of any serious security problems, an excellent showing by the home team, history-making performances by athletes from Croatia, Norway and Finland and a buzz generated by a figure skating controversy combined to make the largest Winter Olympics ever into a vintage Olympic Games.
The operations budget even balanced.
“On the organization in general, the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee has done a superb job,” International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said Sunday. “Transport has worked. Technology has been flawless. The Olympic Village was superb. The [competition] venues were great. The crowds were warm and supportive.
“Every time I met an athlete in the village, I would ask, `Are you happy?’ They all said `fantastic,’ so they are all very happy, bar the two or three who feel begrudged by judges. Security was OK, the weather was fine, and we’ve seen absolutely thrilling athletic performance.”
This was Rogge’s first Olympics as IOC president. Though he promised not to compare one Olympics to another at the Closing Ceremony, as the previous IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, had done, Rogge once again used the word “superb” to tell the crowd at Rice-Eccles Stadium and the global TV audience what he thought of these Winter Games.
“Salt Lake City . . . we did it!” exclaimed organizing committee CEO Mitt Romney at the closing, a mix of astonishment and delight in his voice.
Although no U.S. city is likely to be host of another Summer or Winter Olympics until at least 2016, Rogge thought the Salt Lake experience could only help whichever of four contending cities the U.S. Olympic Committee picks to bid against several foreign cities for the 2012 Summer Games.
“The last [U.S.] Games in Atlanta were not good Games,” Rogge said. “This has been corrected here.”
That the final day brought doping disqualifications of three gold-medal-winning cross-country skiers, Spaniard Johann Muehlegg and Russians Larisa Lazutina and Olga Danilova, could be viewed as scandalous or promising. While other medal winners likely beat doping controls with sophisticated subterfuges, that even three were caught is a small victory in the Sisyphean battle against cheaters.
Yet some may remember the Salt Lake City Olympics only as a vintage whine because Russia turned into a sore loser, the IOC rushed to a judgment based largely on the verdict of public opinion and South Korea protested a disqualification in short-track speedskating, a sport in which disqualifications are routine.
“Games provoke always big emotions, and there is nothing more emotional than a decision against your country,” Rogge said.
President Vladimir Putin was among Russians outraged by the decision–unprecedented in an Olympic sport involving subjective judging–to award a second gold medal in pairs figure skating to Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier because of misconduct by a French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne.
Le Gougne’s story has changed several times since the pairs event ended two weeks ago. She claimed and denied pressure from Russian and French figure skating officials, said she gave marks out of “conscience” and wound up blaming it all on pressure on behalf of Canada in an interview with a French newspaper.
Sale and Pelletier carried the Canadian flag in the Closing Ceremony. The Russians kept tweaking the IOC about the decision by asking for second golds in other events.
“I have no regret on the decision,” Rogge said. “It was done according to our rules, rendering true justice.
“I do not see this as a precedent that will dictate our behavior later. We had signed, written statements that results were manipulated.”
The USOC could be proud not only of its athletes’ record-breaking medal haul but also of their unusual verbal restraint. Other than bobsledder Jean Racine, whose means to a gold-medal end made brakemen and friendships dispensable, U.S. athletes took the high ground. Racine finished fifth.
With 34 medals, the U.S. team had one fewer than its total for the three previous Winter Olympics combined and only one fewer than leader Germany in these Olympics. To those who would dismiss the U.S. medal rush as a product of Olympic event inflation and the addition of X Games sports in the last two decades, there is a simple rebuttal: U.S. athletes won 14 medals in events also contested at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, where their total of 12 was the national record until Team USA capitalized on additions to the Olympic program to win 13 medals in 1994 and 1998.
There were a record 78 countries in these Olympics. Its stars included Norwegian biathlete Ole Einar Bjoerndalen, who won four gold medals; Finnish nordic combined athlete Samppa Lajunen, who won three golds; Croatian alpine skier Janica Kostelic, who won three golds and a silver on knees that are a patchwork of surgical scars; and the first ethnic patchwork of winter medalists ever for the United States, a group with Hispanic and Asian-American speedskaters and African-American bobsledders.
The U.S. victories helped turn Salt Lake into a party town for at least two weeks. On sidewalks normally rolled up after nightfall, people caroused into the wee hours, and huge crowds gathered for medal ceremonies and free concerts on land donated by the teetotaling Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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The church’s contribution turned into a plus after years of fear that these would be the Mormon Games. Rogge said Mormon influence was “absolutely invisible,” but he noted the indirect contribution the church’s missions had made in helping welcome the world. Many volunteers were former missionaries whose time in a foreign country had given them language skills.
“I must have been greeted in my mother tongue, Dutch, 20 times,” he said.
The greeting that may have best summed up the 2002 Winter Olympics was delivered in “Canuck” on a sign held by a Canadian fan at Sunday’s scintillating hockey final with the U.S.
“What the heck, eh?” the sign read. “USA/Canada. Thank you, Salt Lake City.”