An international dispute is complicating a decade-long effort in Colorado to lure the 2022 Winter Olympic Games to Denver.
Just last week, the U.S. Olympic Committee pulled out of bidding for future Games over a revenue-sharing dispute.
“We aren’t at this point considering bidding for any Games,” said USOC spokesman Patrick Sandusky.
The conflict comes at a sensitive time for Denver boosters who for the past 10 years have been laying the groundwork for a bid.
The next two years are critical to making a pitch to the USOC, which would have to submit the country’s bid to the International Olympic Committee by late 2013, Sandusky said.
The IOC is to make the final selection in 2015.
Despite the dispute, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Denver Mayor Michael Hancock are beginning to have informal conversations about how to bring the Games to the Mile High City in 2022.
Support building
Nearly 40 years ago, Colorado voters spurned the 1976 Games from coming to the state. But the newfound interest in hosting the Games is building support.
“This may be just coming up on people’s radar screens now, but we are not starting from scratch,” said Rob Cohen, founder and chairman emeritus of the Denver Metro Sports Commission, a nonprofit that is leading the bid effort.
“Our goal for the last couple of years is to put Denver in consideration,” he said. “I think we have definitely done that. Now it’s up to the governor and mayor and community as a whole.”
For now, however, the USOC is embroiled in a revenue-sharing dispute with the IOC, which wants a larger cut of the United States’ global sponsorship revenues and the U.S. broadcast rights.
“We would be an ideal candidate,” said Sue Baldwin, the Denver Metro Sports Commission’s events and marketing director. “With the mountains, our winter psychology, we are the best city and state to never have hosted.”
“We have been building relationships with key international players and hosting events that raise Denver’s profile,” she said.
The region has hosted several national and international events, including the annual Winter X Games in Aspen, World Cup ski races in Beaver Creek and Olympic curling trials in Broomfield.
In January, a ski- and snowboard-jumping competition took place at Denver’s Civic Center. Also, the success of the recent USA Pro Cycling Challenge, which concluded Sunday in Denver, affirms what the city can do, Baldwin said.
Some believe nabbing the Olympics could help Colorado with needed infrastructure improvements — specifically, bringing in federal aid to help rebuild highway systems, similar to what Atlanta and Salt Lake City did around their Games.
Salt Lake City, for example, received $1 billion in federal aid to expedite construction of light rail and rebuild the city’s main freeway in preparation for the 2002 Winter Games.
“Powerful incentive”
In an interview Saturday, Hickenlooper said the Olympics in Denver could be a “powerful incentive to find a solution to solve the challenge of Interstate 70 getting up to mountains on the weekend.”
But former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, who has experience when it comes to Colorado and the Olympics, is telling civic leaders to be cautious.
In 1972, Lamm led an effort to block Denver from hosting the 1976 Winter Games — the only time an Olympics city has done that. Nearly 60 percent of Colorado voters agreed to reject the Games, which had been awarded to the city 2 1/2 years earlier. Voters had feared taxpayers would be stuck paying for skyrocketing costs and wary of the environmental damages caused by hordes of spectators.
Lamm said today’s politicians should pay attention to lessons from past Olympics.
“The history of the Winter Olympics has been soaked in red ink,” he said. “But I know that those five . . . rings are so glittery that they can distort people’s judgment.”
Staff writer Caitlin Gibbons and researcher Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.