By Gavin Kentch
Do you know where you’ll be from February 10 to February 26, 2034? You might want to start making plans now: The 2034 Winter Olympics, more officially the XXVII Olympic Winter Games, will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, at that time. The 2034 Winter Paralympics will follow from March 10–19. Official announcements came out earlier Wednesday, although given that Salt Lake was the only city remaining at this point in the bid process its selection was largely a fait accompli.
(There was, however, a catch, linked to what Olympic officials characterized as the need for the U.S. to respect the authority of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA. More on that at the end of this article.)
If you’re reading this site, you’re likely aware that Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002. The U.S. has also previously hosted the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1932, Squaw Valley in 1960, and Lake Placid again in 1980.
The 2034 Games will use nearly all of the infrastructure previously constructed for or used by those 2002 Games; as little as one new venue may need to be built from scratch.
Relevant to this website, cross-country skiing and biathlon will once again occur at Soldier Hollow, a venue whose mailing address is currently 2002 Soldier Hollow Lane (query whether they will update the street number at some point). If you’d like to go down memory lane for a bit, you can review contemporary coverage of those Games by Cory Smith, Torbjørn Karlsen, and Erik Stange. You can find race articles here, and related Olympics features articles here.
Sadly, you can also read articles on the doping scandals that marked those Games. You likely remember that Johann Mühlegg, competing for Spain by way of Germany/West Germany, looked suspiciously superhuman en route to winning three distance races (one of them was the 10km + 10km combined pursuit and American finishers in this race included John Bauer, if this helps date it for you), only to test positive for a form of recombinant EPO and ultimately be stripped of all three medals. You may or may not recall that Larissa Lazutina and Olga Danilova, both of Russia, were also relieved of two medals apiece after testing positive for the same compound.
Oh, and maids cleaning up at the house used by the Austrian nordic team in nearby Midway found used blood transfusion bags, tubes, and needles a week after the Games had ended. Not great.
(While doping is bad, actually, the erstwhile crim defense attorney in me has to point out that neglecting to literally put your blood doping supplies in the garbage and throw it away in a public dumpster with no security cameras on it before checking out is not the smartest move. But also the responding officer could probably have done a little more to assuage chain of custody concerns when he took the evidence and, quote, “stuffed it in a large bag,” so, teaching moments all around here.)
Against this backdrop of historic doping, and the more recent experience of the World Anti-Doping Agency feeling that the U.S. overstepped its boundaries in response to positive doping cases on the Chinese Olympic swimming team in 2021, the New York Times reported that Salt Lake City’s continued hosting status is contingent on the American sporting apparatus aligning with WADA’s policies and respecting the authority of that agency.
In an article headlined “Salt Lake Awarded 2034 Olympics Under I.O.C. Pressure Over Doping Inquiries,” the Times quoted top International Olympic Committee official John Coates as stating that the IOC could still “terminate Olympic host city contracts in cases where the supreme authority of the World Anti-Doping Agency in the fight against doping is not fully respected or if the application of the world antidoping code is hindered or undermined.”
(You can read more about this conflict here (Salt Lake Tribune) or here (Washington Post). For more blatantly political treatments of this issue, here are ranking House Democrats seeking “Chinese Doping Investigation Ahead of Paris Olympics,” while here is the Global Times, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, referring to “the US’ continued defamation and false accusations” in an article headlined, “Chinese swimmers most tested Olympians of 2024.”)
Embed from Getty ImagesFinally, to start some way-too-soon handicapping of who could be there for the American cross-country ski team in a decade’s time, keep in mind that Kikkan Randall famously medaled in Pyeongchang at age 35 (see above), while Rosie Brennan came a Jessie Diggins anchor leg away from medaling in the team sprint in Beijing at age 33.
[Read more: Exclusive: Who’s On the 2024/2025 U.S. Ski Team?]
Judging by that standard, the lion’s share of the current youth-movement national team could plausibly still be contending for spots on the 2034 Olympic team. Gus Schumacher will be 33 when the Games begin, Zanden McMullen 32, Haley Brewster 30, Ava Thurston 30, Sammy Smith 28, Murphy Kimball 27, and so on (you may commence feeling old now). These are all ages at which athletes win medals in World Cup races.
But also note that Randall was just two months past her 19th birthday at her first Olympics in 2002; by that standard, someone who is currently just nine years old could potentially be in the running for the 2034 team. (Yes I know that American skiing is far deeper now than it was in 2002; I’m making a dramatic chronological point here.) Start training, kids.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
