Before the Paris Games even kick off, Team USA has scored a pretty monumental victory.
For the first time in 32 years, the Winter Olympics will be returning to the United States. On Wednesday morning in Paris, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) made it official and elected to award the 2034 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City-Utah, who hosted the Games back in 2002. Salt Lake City becomes just the fourth city or region to host the Winter Games twice, following St. Moritz in Switzerland (1928, 1948), Lake Placid in New York (1932, 1980), and Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy (1956, and splitting hosting duties with Milan in 2026).
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The IOC also voted to conditionally award the 2030 Winter Games to the French Alps, contingent on the incoming French government providing the necessary financial guarantees based on IOC timelines.
Salt Lake City benefited from a host of factors to secure the Games. First of all, those 2002 Olympics are regarded as a success. A bribery scandal tainted the buildup, but just a few months after 9/11, with security concerns at an all-time high, the United States put on a proper show. Salt Lake City was a compact Games, with mountain events located in close proximity to the city and to ice events like figure skating and short-track speed skating. Such convenience for athletes, spectators, and media has become more rare: in 2026, for example, alpine skiing—and curling!—in Cortina d’Ampezzo will be 250 miles, and a four-and-a-half-hour drive, away from figure skating and hockey in Milan.
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Fewer cities have become interested in bidding for Winter Games, which requires the building of structures like bobsled, luge, and skeleton tracks that aren’t easily reusable for the local communities. (School trip to go 95 m.p.h. on a luge!) Cities like Sapporo, Calgary, and Vancouver all backed out of recent bidding due to cost concerns and lack of public support. The increasingly cost-conscious IOC seems willing to favor cities that can use—or reuse—existing facilities, which is a standout feature of the Salt Lake City-Utah bid.
At the end of the day, Salt Lake City was the last city standing for 2034, making the election at the IOC Session in Paris a mere formality.
It’s still momentous. The United States will now host three of the world’s most prominent sporting events over the next decade: the World Cup in 2026 (which the U.S. is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada, but the final will take place in MetLife Stadium outside New York City), the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, and now Salt Lake City in 2034.
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The plans for 2034 include, for the first time, an athlete family village, near the main Olympic athlete village at the University of Utah. Skiing legend Lindsey Vonn, the three-time Olympic medalist, has overseen this initiative as chief of athlete experience for the Salt Lake City-Utah committee. While it hasn’t been decided how many family members for each athlete will be welcome in the village—second-cousin of the Norwegian biathlete, you’ll likely have to hit up the Hampton Inn—the idea is to enhance family experience.
“We’ll have to put up some limitations or guardrails,” says Vonn. “But we’re giving them an affordable place to stay. We’re helping them get tickets. We’re helping them with transportation. We’ll have translators. We’ll have plenty of volunteers.”
Vonn says she spent too much time worrying about her family’s well-being during her four Olympics. “I had to really work hard to get enough tickets for my family to come, especially in South Korea, where it was next to impossible,” she says. “You don’t get help with accommodations. You don’t get transportation. So we’re trying to change that because I mean, without the families, the athletes don’t exist.”
It’s somewhat fitting that the IOC is awarding Salt Lake City-Utah the Olympics at a moment of great political upheaval in the United States, with the assassination attempt on former President Trump still fresh in people’s minds, and President Joe Biden announcing that he will in fact not seek a second term, meaning Vice President Kamala Harris is to likely face Trump in November. As the U.S. prepares for a contentious election, the memory of Salt Lake City 2002—a time of rare national unity, though borne out of tragedy—and possibilities of 2034 are still worth pondering.
“I don’t know what the environment will be like from a political perspective or the global state of peace,” says Vonn. “But I really have high hopes for how we can come together in Salt Lake. It’s going to be amazing.”
