What Utah’s Olympic organizers learned from the Paris Games

Utah’s Olympic organizers saw more than just the expected sights during the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.
Besides the iconic locations that served as backdrops for Olympic events, like the Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and the Grand Palais, the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games’ bid lead, Darren Hughes, toured the free “Clubs 2024″ live site set up in a low-income northeast Paris neighborhood with a large African immigrant population.
Hughes, responsible for pulling together the details of Utah’s successful bid for the 2034 Winter Games, went to the Jardins d’Éole park that’s built on a reclaimed rail yard as part of the International Olympic Committee’s observer program for future Olympic hosts.
More than 400 people participated in the program in Paris, including more than a half-dozen from Utah.
Paris organizers helped the public feel like a part of the Olympics through efforts like the live sites set up throughout France, that Hughes said most impressed during the behind-the-scenes look at running the 2024 Summer Games. It’s something he hopes to replicate in all of Utah’s 29 counties when the state hosts in a decade.
“I think we can definitely learn from the ways that they were activating across the city and bringing the Games to the people,” Hughes said, especially at locations in each of the city’s 20 arrondissements, or administrative districts, where people could watch live coverage of the Games together.
The neighborhood park site he visited had “a festival type environment. Over here was this giant screen, bean bags and lounge chairs. So people were just there during the Games. They also had a stage nearby for really local talent,” along with food vendors and sports activities on a recently completed court built as part of a French government Olympic initiative.
While the site in the 18th arrondissement was open to everyone, security screening was required to enter, Hughes said.
“So it was a safe environment. You saw a lot of families there,” he said, enjoying blues music played by a neighborhood band and Ethiopian food. “Just like a really fun, comfortable environment … a neighborhood-level celebration with the Games as a backdrop. I thought that was really fun, really well done.”
Other sites, such as the one near the Paris City Hall, “had a little more corporate feeling,” Hughes said. “It didn’t quite have that unique character that sort of brought the Games to the neighborhood. See what I mean? It was just one more place where the celebration was going on. It wasn’t bad. It just didn’t have that wow.”
It remains to be seen what live sites there would be during the 2034 Winter Games. When Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Winter Games, the sole official site was in downtown Salt Lake City, where nightly concerts and medals award ceremonies were held on a temporary stage framed by the Hoberman Arch that was recently installed at the Salt Lake City International Airport.
Utah’s free Olympic Square in 2002 was spread over eight blocks and also included a Winter Games superstore selling T-shirts, stuffed toy mascots and other souvenirs as well as corporate sponsor exhibits. Getting in to the area required passing through a security checkpoint.
Next time around, there will be more opportunities for the public to share in the Olympic experience, said Fraser Bullock, the 2034 committee’s president and CEO. Bullock served as the chief operating officer of Utah’s 2002 Winter Games.
With so many live sites, Paris provided plenty of places for “people to come together and rub shoulders. They didn’t always have to go downtown. They could go into a community area and watch the Games,” Bullock said. “They made the Games a very deep experience for the community, not just at the competitions.”
In 2034, he said Olympic organizers want to engage all of Utah, not just the Wasatch Front and Wasatch Back communities where venues are located. Utah’s Winter Games will once again be one of the most compact, with every venue located within an hour of the athlete housing at the University of Utah.
“Ideally, we’d have a live site in each county where people would … be cheering on Team USA or Utah’s athletes together and experiencing the Games even though they don’t have tickets to an event. They can have an elevated experience,” Bullock said. “It follows the notion Paris has of public engagement. How do we take that to the next level?”
That likely means more than just live sites. Paris also held a number of free exhibitions and sports demonstrations, including by local athletes in between Olympic competitions at the temporary skateboarding venue, part of what French organizers called Parc Urban at the Place de la Concorde in the hear of the city.
“They would put on a show. So you get youth sport involved and you get free experiences for the public,” Bullock said.
Paris 2024 also featured a “Marathon for All” along the 26.2-mile Olympic course, between the men’s and women’s marathon races. Among the 22,000 amateur runners joining the nighttime event was state Sen. Mike McKell. The Spanish Fork Republican is co-chairman of the Utah Legislature’s Olympic and Paralympic Games Coordination Committee.
After finishing the marathon, McKell told the Deseret News he’s now focused on answering the question, “how do we best involve the public across the entire state. In a perfect world, that’s going to be all the way from Cache County to Washington County,” where he suggested a potential new Olympic event, outdoor winter cross-country running, could be held.
Bullock called the idea of adding such a race “intriguing” and pitched some possibilities for public participation.
Bullock said Paris’ public marathon was “a brilliant, brilliant idea. Could we do something like that and get some people who want to ski a giant slalom? Or at the cross-country venue? How do we engage the public more broadly and maybe even (have them) experience elements of the Games?”
Another participant in the Olympic observer program in Paris, Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation CEO Colin Hilton, also raised the possibility of holding a public event during the 2034 Games at the cross-country ski course at the Solider Hollow Nordic Center in Wasatch Mountain State Park near Midway.
“Maybe we do a mass participation event at Solider Hollow for cross-country skiing on the last day of Games when there’s no more competition, because we are a busy venue,” Hilton said, “something where there is a large ability of the public to come and see the venue and participate in a race or a fun whatever we call it.”
For Hilton, what “absolutely needs to be something we do in our future Games” was the type of free event at the skateboarding venue.
He said he spotted people heading into the skateboarding venue even though all the Olympic competitions there had ended days earlier. Most were locals who’d gotten free tickets to what turned out to be a skateboarding demonstration by young local athletes while others, like him, wandered in after attending Olympic events at adjacent venues.
“They had a whole production, an announcer and lively entertainers highlighting what the kids were doing as the skated around. And everybody just loved it,” he said. “For me, it allowed maybe folks that couldn’t maybe afford to go to the higher priced ticketed events to actually come see the venue. They didn’t care it was kids. In fact, that actually made it more special.”
Hilton said he immediately realized that was a must for Utah’s Winter Games.
“We need to do this for big air downtown. We need to do this for slope style on Park City Mountain and maybe other venues where we can showcase kids who are in freestyle and snowboard slope style events at a lower level out on the Olympic course,” he said, as a “unique opportunity” for the public.
“I am a big fan of making sure we allow everyone to feel somehow connected,” Hilton said.
It wasn’t just the free public events in Paris that provided inspiration to Utah’s Olympic organizers. They’ve set a lofty goal for ticket sales in what adds up to a $4 billion budget, all anticipated to come from private sources. That means selling some very high-priced seats to events, just like Paris organizers did.
What the French did on a different scale was hospitality. Thanks a new program put in place by the IOC, pricey ticket packages included not just great seats but also champagne, fine dining and one-of-a-kind experiences like watching from a boat in the Seine River as a flotilla of athletes made their way to the opening ceremonies.
Those willing to spend big bucks could enjoy sweeping views of Paris from a hospitality suite in the Eiffel Tower that made it “impossible to ignore the heady sense of being above the fray,” according to The New York Times, while the beach volleyball venue below offered waiter service in a “custom-built two-story wooden chalet” perched above the stadium seating.
“In 2002, hospitality wasn’t really a thing,” Hughes said. Then, hot dogs and similar fare were served in heated tents to top-tier guests to keep costs low. That’s changed, with high-end hospitality becoming a way for Olympic organizers to make money now that they’re the ones selling the ticket packages that can also include five-star hotel stays and hired cars.
“We’re going to count on this because our revenues are going to need it,” Hughes said. But he said that Paris’ “extraordinarily expensive but also very, very exclusive access opportunities” may not be a good fit for Utah. “We saw it happen for the first time in the central model in Paris. There’s a lot to learn. It won’t be the same.”
Nor will the scenery be the same in 2034. The Paris Games, the first to follow the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, utilized the city’s historic buildings and monuments that are unique symbols of France. Some, like the Eiffel Tower, were adorned with the Olympic rings, something the Paris mayor wants to keep in place at least through 2028.
“I don’t think anybody could match Paris. But we have the most beautiful mountains in our backyard,” Bullock said. “Our opportunity is to present our venues in such a way that they display that they display the beauty of Utah in the best way possible. Nobody can copy Paris but we want to bring our own unique flavor, like we did in ‘02.”
Then, downtown Salt Lake City’s buildings bore giant wraps portraying athletes that were illuminated nightly, along with a set of Olympic rings on the Wasatch Mountain foothills that was “absolutely spectacular,” the leader of what will become Utah’s Games organizing committee said.
“We’ll have our own approach that will display Utah at its very best,” he said, acknowledging that Paris raised the bar. “It was incredible.”