When the party’s over, the Olympic cauldron is extinguished and the world returns home, Olympic host cities are left with an important question.
What now?
For some, the Olympic legacy falls apart. Venues specifically built for the Games are abandoned, fall into disrepair or are demolished. In some cases, the Olympics are a black mark on a city’s history, not a high point.
Twenty years later, however, Park City has done its best to take advantage of its opportunity to welcome the world and keep the spirit from the 2002 Winter Olympics alive long after the flame itself has gone out.
For one, many venues in Park City are still used to this day. The Utah Olympic Park simultaneously welcomes visitors to walk around and view perhaps the most iconic remnant of the Games while hosting athletes to train year-round at the park’s facilities. Just this past year, the park hosted international bobsled and skeleton competitions, and its ski jumping hills were used for national championship events in ski jumping and Nordic combined.
Deer Valley Resort continues to hold World Cup events on its Champion and White Owl runs, while Park City Mountain Resort will be the site of this year’s NCAA skiing national championships.
But more importantly, Park City’s Olympic legacy has carried over into the youth who have grown up in the town in the 20 years since the Games. Athletes like alpine skier Ted Ligety, ski jumper Sarah Hendrickson, cross-country skier Rosie Brennan and moguls skier Nick Page all benefited from getting to see the Olympics up close, using the Olympic-level facilities in town or experiencing what the Olympic spirit was like in person.
Ligety is arguably Park City’s most notable Olympian, taking home two gold medals across four Olympics between 2006 and 2018. Ligety was a teenager when the 2002 Olympics rolled into town, and he participated in the Games in a way. He served as a forerunner for the men’s slalom event at Deer Valley — Ligety likened it to being a guinea pig who makes sure the course is safe — and credited that experience for helping him develop as a skier.
“I think having the Olympics in Park City, whether it was the World Cups in the years leading up to it so I was exposed to the highest levels of skiing every year and having Olympics, there’s so much more resources put into the area and just opened up a lot more opportunities,” said Ligety, who retired in 2021. “Knowing the hills you grew up skiing on were going to be used at the highest stage was a really cool feeling. And then to be able to spectate for a few of the events — basically all the alpine events, actually, and then a handful of other events, too — was such a cool way to experience the Games.”
Ligety’s experience as a forerunner and then a backup forerunner for giant slalom let him see his heroes up close and personal. He had the opportunity to watch them prepare and how they handled themselves. For a long time, they were just images on a screen for Ligety, but then he had the chance to see who they really were: people.
“You have it in your head that they’re like these special, really robotic figures that can just perform under pressure,” Ligety said. “I was hanging out with those guys in between runs and at the start and seeing that they pretty much acted like my friends and I did at the start of a race. It was a big eye-opener, and it opened my eyes to that I didn’t have to be some machine or robot to be able to compete with the best.”
For many kids in Park City, the Olympics were an escape from school, as the Park City School District opted to not hold classes during the Games. That gave students like Hendrickson plenty of opportunities to attend events. She was introduced to ski jumping by her brother, who was also a ski jumper, and got her start on small hills at the then-Canyons Resort because the landings at UOP’s smaller hills were being used to hold media trailers.
“I am basically a result of the 2002 Olympics,” Hendrickson said. “It was such a fun experience to go up and watch the men compete and just be around the Olympic community.”
Hendrickson also benefited from living in Park City after the Games. Having the ski jumping hills at the UOP gave her opportunities that other kids in the U.S. might not have had. Without the 2002 Olympics, Hendrickson believes that she wouldn’t have been an Olympic ski jumper.
“It’s given so many kids an opportunity to try these sports and just give them the opportunity to use their backyard as a playground,” she said. “I know for ski jumping, they made it super affordable. That’s one of the reasons why our family gravitated toward it. We could never afford alpine skiing. Ski jumping was very affordable, it was a great community sport. And yeah, they kept the facilities up and running, and it’s just left such a great, positive impact on the community.”
Hendrickson, who retired last year, went on to become a world champion and two-time Olympian. Twelve years after watching ski jumping when the Olympics were in her hometown and only men competed, Hendrickson had the honor of being the first woman to jump at the Olympics.
Brennan, who went to the Olympics in 2018 and will compete in Beijing, was also a student who had time off from school for the Games, as she was in the seventh grade at the time. She and her brother would take the bus to Main Street, attempt to get autographs from athletes and watch events on the large screen that was set up there. Brennan had the opportunity to watch events ranging from alpine skiing to cross-country skiing to ski jumping to the opening ceremony.
“I think it was more just exciting to just be immersed in the whole kind of event itself,” Brennan said. “It was kind of like having a three-week party. There’s just so much going on, always exciting things happening.”
Brennan was already cross-country skiing at the time, but that didn’t really stick until after the Games. Once the Olympics left town, that meant that there were plenty of state-of-the-art facilities that needed to be used and opportunities to be had for up-and-coming athletes like Brennan.
“Just being immersed in that event for that period of time, it just made me really love the Olympic spirit and the Olympic movement and want to be part of it in some way,” Brennan said. “I obviously didn’t know what sport, but I certainly felt inspired to try all the sports. And that was maybe the coolest part of the whole thing is when the Games left, we were left with so many programs for all the kids in the area to try all the sports.”
From her travels around the world for competitions, Brennan knows that not every town is as fortunate as Park City in terms of resources. It can be easy to take that for granted.
“Just having the opportunity to try so many winter sports is something that, you know, there’s very few towns in the U.S. that can try as many sports as we can,” she said.
Page is part of a new generation of Park City athletes who are too young to know what it was like to be in Park City during the Games. Born a few months after the closing ceremony, Page grew up skiing the same moguls run at Deer Valley that was used for the Games. And even someone as young as he is can recognize how important the Olympics were in Park City and their lasting impact today. Now, he’s making his Olympic debut in Beijing.
“I think being in the atmosphere of Park City, I always saw Olympic rings everywhere I went,” Page said. “I’d be at the Olympic Park training, and you see those rings. You’d be at Deer Valley or down in Soldier Hollow, and you see them everywhere. And you just feel that kind of spirit of the Olympics just pumping through our town and our community.”
As Park City celebrates the 20th anniversary of when it welcomed the world for the Olympics, the legacy of the Games is still felt here. The Olympics ushered Park City onto the world stage, but they also helped to foster a love of sport in an entire generation of kids, with plenty more on the way. That doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.
“I think the facilities and just that sporting spirit of everything we have at the UOP is awesome, such a cool opportunity for young kids to kind of try new sports, just infrastructure and all that,” Ligety said. “I have kids now, and they’re 4 and 1 1/2. And to think of all the opportunities they’ll have in this town because of that legacy is really cool.”