A general view as the United States delegation enters the stadium during the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at Beijing National Stadium. Harrison Hill-USA TODAY Sports

Salt Lake City likely to host 2034 Winter Olympics

By Jason Clinkscales | Last updated 11/30/23

The Winter Olympics plans on going back to the future.

On Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee announced that France and Salt Lake City are the preferred hosts for the 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics. The upcoming 2026 edition of the Winter Games will take place in Milan and Contina in Italy.

In a statement posted by Reuters, the IOC said that it's moving forward with those locations towards advanced talks:

"The IOC Executive Board today invited the French National Olympic Committee and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee into targeted dialogues towards hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in the French Alps and the 2034 edition in Salt Lake City-Utah," the IOC said in a statement.
"We will start more detailed discussions with the interested parties," Karl Stoss, head of the IOC's Future Host commission, told a press conference.

The IOC said that Salt Lake City would use the same venues as it had in 2002, with some upgrades to make them current by the time the Olympic flame arrives in Utah. This selection process is similar to how the Summer Olympics were awarded to multiple cities back in 2017 when Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028) were chosen.

For Salt Lake City, this bid so far appears to lack the controversy of what it allegedly took to land the 2002 games. The city had pushed to host the games several times in the past, but when Japan was awarded the 1998 event in Nagano, members of Salt Lake City's bidding committee believed that IOC officials were effectively bribed by their Japanese counterparts to select Nagano over Salt Lake City. The Utah group spent upwards of $16M to convince the IOC to grant it the 2002 event, but bribery allegations started circling around the committee in late 1998.

The IOC, the United States Olympic Committee and Salt Lake City's own committee began to investigate, but it was the involvement of the U.S. Department of Justice that broke the scandal wide open, leading to the resignation of several members of the city's team and the expulsion of 10 members of the IOC. Soon-to-retire U.S. senator Mitt Romney, the one-time presidential nominee who also served as governor of Massachusetts, was hired to reorganize Salt Lake's bid.

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