On Feb. 4, 1976, an expectant crowd packed shoulder to shoulder into a chilly open-air stadium for the opening ceremony of the XII Olympic Winter Games. Performers and dignitaries alike took the stage against a backdrop of majestic, snowy mountains, and runners clad in red and white sprinted up a long flight of stairs, touching torches to massive cauldrons and setting them ablaze with the Olympic flame. Country by country, athletes marched in the parade of nations — that moment of glory guaranteed to every Olympian before dreams are fulfilled, or dashed — the Greek athletes first by tradition, and those from the host nation last.
Those final athletes were Austrian, but they were supposed to have been American. And the stadium — Bergisel, near Innsbruck — should have been Mile High, home of the Broncos. Six years earlier, the International Olympic Committee had welcomed Denver, Colorado, into the exclusive fraternity of Olympic hosts, but in the end Denver gained an entirely different distinction: It became the only city in the history of the modern Olympic era to win the Games and then give them up.
The story begins in the 1960s, when a coalition of Denver’s business and civic leaders began preparing a bid to bring the Olympics to town. Colorado’s then-governor, Republican John Love, lent his enthusiastic support to the effort, appointing skiing trailblazer Merrill Hastings as the state’s Olympic coordinator. Operating as the Denver Olympic Organizing Committee (DOOC), the group spent the better part of the decade devising a $14 million plan to transform the city into the kind of winter-sports mecca capable of hosting an Olympic competition.
On May 13, 1970, at the 70th IOC Session in Amsterdam, the committee convinced the IOC of the validity of its plan. The Mile High City was officially anointed the site of the 1976 Winter Games, and seemingly the entire state of Colorado greeted the news with a wave of boosterism and civic pride.
Then it all began to fall apart.
The first flaw in the plan should have been the most obvious: Denver is not, strictly speaking, located in the mountains. It lies on the eastern slope of the Continental Divide, to the east of even the foothills of the Rockies. Yes, it sits at 5,280 feet, but what the city has in altitude it lacks in terrain and, more importantly, snow. But in its quest to convince the IOC that Denver was an ideal choice, the DOOC had placed all of the sporting venues — none of which actually existed at that point — within less than an hour’s drive of the city.
Among the sites was Mount Sniktau, the proposed site for the alpine events, which is not a skier’s mountain, and doesn’t have reliable snow cover. (In fact, the DOOC had to have snow airbrushed on the mountain in the picture of Sniktau that accompanied the pitch to the IOC.) In the nearby community of Evergreen, where the Nordic events were to be staged, residents learned that the competitions would literally run through their backyards (and the grounds of at least one school), and formed an organization called Protect Our Mountain Environment in protest.
As the complaints mounted, the DOOC recalibrated. The alpine events headed west to Vail, which had abundant snowfall and a desire to host, but was still a relatively young resort. The Nordic events were moved even farther to Steamboat Springs, where there was, at least, a ski jump already in place.
This solution became a new problem. From Denver it takes nearly two hours to drive the 100 miles to Vail; the trip to Steamboat Springs, 156 miles away, takes a minimum of three hours. The promised hour-long jaunt to fully half of the events — and the sexy ones, at that — had ballooned into an unmanageable commute over mountain roads and passes not designed to handle a great volume of traffic.
Colorado’s ski industry was still in its infancy at the time — Vail was only entering its 10th year of operation — and the idea of promoting the largely unsullied Rockies as a winter playground for the world triggered another round of environmental angst, along with a new fear: Once you invite the hordes in, it’s hard to keep them out. The sprawling Olympics seemed to herald the onslaught of unchecked development across the state.
But for all the hand-wringing over environmental concerns, the mushroom cloud of questions looming over Denver’s Olympics centered on “how,” not “if.” After all, no city had ever turned down a chance to host the Games. It simply wasn’t done.
Enter Dick Lamm, who wasn’t familiar with that particular rule of international etiquette. Elected to the state legislature in 1967, Lamm sat on the committee charged with auditing the state’s finances. When the issue of the Colorado taxpayers’ share of the Olympic tab — $5 million — came up, that committee began asking questions. The original $14 million total budget had gone the way of the 60-minute drive, more than doubling to $35 million — and that wasafter the bobsled events had been jettisoned as a cost-cutting measure. And Lamm had noticed something even more troubling: No city had ever made money on the Olympics, and in fact most had been left with a sizable debt. “The first thing on my mind was the financial vulnerability,” he recalls. “Look, if a city in Japan hosts the Olympics they’ve got the whole financial structure of the country to support that, but Colorado was a small state.”
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