The eyes of the world — or at least the NBC prime-time audience — are on Vancouver as that Canadian city hosts the Winter Olympics.
For Coloradans, it’s a reminder of our state’s peculiar status as the only world’s only place that was awarded the Winter Olympics, but turned them down .
Denver was awarded the games by the International Olympic Committee in 1970.
The event venues would stretch clear to Steamboat Springs, 160 miles away. The proposed biathlon course (which involves cross-country skiing and target shooting) passed right by an elementary school in Evergreen. Arenas for ice-skating events would have to be built; the cost over-runs for Squaw Valley, Calif., which hosted the 1960 winter games, had run into the millions.
And who knew what the crowds and construction would do to the state’s environment, Plus, the Olympic exposure might encourage more growth in a state whose population was already rising rapidly.
At first, the anti-Olympic campaign looked hopeless, since just about everyone who mattered, from Gov. John Love and Denver Mayor Bill McNichols to nearly all the state’s newspapers and chambers of commerce, were in favor of hosting the games.
Leading the opposition was Richard Lamm, a young state legislator. Petitions were circulated to put an amendment to the state constitution on the ballot.
It did not forbid Colorado from hosting the Olympics. Instead, it forbade the expenditure of tax money to host the games. And the ballot proposal was worded so that a “Yes” vote (for the amendment) meant a “No” on funding the games.
It passed by a 3-2 margin in 1972 general election — the first time I could vote, and I was part of the majority on that issue. Coloradans didn’t exactly refuse to host the Olympics; we just voted not to spend any tax money on the games. The International Olympic Committee responded by yanking the 1976 games from Denver and giving them to Innsbruck, Austria.
Lamm went on to run for governor in 1974 and serve three terms, although he’s the first to concede that killing the Olympics didn’t stop Colorado’s rampant growth, or even channel the growth in more sensible patterns.
The idea of using public money to subsidize the Olympics remains in play. Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city, has some major budget problems on account of decreased sales-tax revenue. In response, the city has turned off a third of its street lights and will cut back on watering its parks this summer. The list goes on — police positions not filled, recreation facilities closed, etc. — but somehow the strapped city found a way to provide a $56 million subsidy to keep the United States Olympic Committee’s headquarters in town.
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