DENVER ’76

The Sniktau Snafu:

The 1976 Denver Winter olympic Games That Weren't

By Jay Fell

"Colorado voters sent the 1976 Olympics in search of a new home Tuesday," wrote a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News a few days after the November elections in 1972. "Anti-Olympic forces viewed the vote as the beginning of a new era in which politicians will be more attuned to limiting population growth and rendering priorities for spending tax funds." And just days later, Denver officially ended its bid to host the 1976 Games, the only time in history that a city awarded an Olympiad has ever relinquished them. But that in effect was the decision of Colorado's voters in an election with powerful environmental concerns that shaped the state for decades to come.

The official logo of the 1976 Denver Winter Olympics. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

The Quest e idea of holding the Winter Olympics in Colorado had begun years before, when the postwar ski industry took hold as a major force in recreation, tourism, and the Colorado economy. ough downhill and crosscountry skiing stretched back to territorial days, it was the advent of new techniques and technology that created a huge boom in downhill skiing along the new I-70 corridor west of Denver. While the Loveland and Arapahoe Basin areas preceded World War II, as did the ski jumping center of Steamboat Springs, the postwar boom accelerated development, and downhill skiing became the prestige winter sport of the af uent new baby boomers. Keystone, Breckenridge, and Vail leapt into being as destination resorts. And the construction of I-70 farther west of them made access to Aspen far easier than ever before and accentuated the advent of the so-called Aspen Renaissance launched by Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke just after World War II. is remarkable boom inevitably led to the quest to land the Winter Olympic Games. Serious e orts to that end began in Denver through the work of the Denver Organizing Committee in the mid-tolate 1960s. eir goal—the 1976 Winter Games. e proponents were well-connected, and beginning about 1967, they began to hold a series of essentially secret meetings to plan their strategy. e plan that evolved was to use existing facilities in Denver for the skating events, lands around Evergreen for the Nordic or cross-country events, and either Vail or a new resort west of Vail for the alpine competition. e University of Denver would host the skating events and the Olympic Village. But the organizers ran afoul of Olympic rules. Since all the events had to be held within 45 miles of Denver, the committee selected Evergreen as the locale of the cross-country events; the Denver mountain parks near there for the sledding competitions; and Loveland Basin and Mount Sniktau for the alpine events. is plan was badly awed. Even members of the committee would later acknowledge this. And compounding these problems was the committee’s approach to its work. It met mostly in secret, which contributed to bad public relations, an in-yourface attitude and contempt for the general public. But the committee, too, would run into forces beyond its control—the Denver/ anti-Denver split in state politics, the growing environmental movement, opposition to rampant growth, and Colorado’s penchant for scal austerity. ose issues were not apparent as the committee members presented their case, rst for the United

States Olympic Committee and then to the International Olympic Committee, backed by $475,000 in funds voted for by the Colorado legislature.

In uential business and political leaders had long sought the Games. In 1969, then governor John Love stated frankly that “Hosting the Winter Olympics has been a goal of Denver for many years. . . . Denver has been watching, waiting, and grooming itself” to host the event, and the e ort was “strongly backed . . . by its people.” And seeking the Games had widespread support. Newspapers supported the e ort, letters to the editor lauded the idea, and even future opponents, such as Colorado Mountain Club member and then State Representative Dick Lamm of Denver (later the most prominent opponent of the Games), voted with a unanimous House of Representatives to support Denver’s bid.

But there were already signs of dissent. e rst key opponent was Vance R. Dittman, Jr., a retired professor of law at the University of Denver He supported the Games, but not the planned schedule of Nordic events around Evergreen, where he lived. He found out that the organizers, working mostly in secret, had planned for the cross-country events to cross his property and that of his neighbors. e DOC failed to reply to his queries or evaded direct questions. And so in 1968, he began to organize opposition to the Evergreen site, even before Denver received the award. He and several colleagues also did research that revealed that the temperatures in February would be too warm for the Nordic events— temperatures were generally above freezing. Other groups, such as the Hill and Dale Society, followed up. And still more opponents cited the economic and environmental costs, but they were all drowned out by those who saw the Games as a triumph for Colorado, its ski industry, and continued strong growth in housing along the Front Range and in the foothills.

Growth of the anti-olympics movement is early opposition notwithstanding, in May 1970, the International Olympic Committee awarded Denver the Games.

Once Denver had the Games, opposition to them began to mount. In August, Dittman organized the rst entity to oppose the Games, Protect Our Mountain Environment, or POME, as it came to be known. And the prominent columnist for the Denver Post, Joanne Ditmer, wrote that she feared a “solid line of phony alpine motels and condominiums” running “from Denver to Loveland Ski Basin.” Her column linked the Olympics to Colorado’s booming growth, which was fast becoming a public issue. e environmental community in Colorado was new and split over the Games. Some like the Rocky Mountain Center for the Environment actually favored the Games, because it would be another six years that would allow for careful planning to address concerns such as road construction, parking, and new trail development. e Colorado Open Space Council said nothing on the subject at all. And this left small organizations like POME swinging in the wind.

But the burgeoning issue in the state at that time was uncontrolled growth, particularly the housing boom that saw new communities sprawling onto the plains. ere was growing concern among many Coloradans that developers and other progrowth elements had become too large and too in uential. It was said that they owned some communities and city councils. Many older residents who had lived through hard times during the Great Depression welcomed growth. So, too, did miners in the coal elds around Denver who found better jobs in construction and new industries as the mines closed after World War II; small business people who sought to sell everything to new homeowners in town; and farmers who wanted to sell agricultural lands and water rights at huge pro ts. But arrayed against them were the growing environmental groups concerned about unregulated growth and interested in wilderness areas, especially the new baby boomers coming into Colorado with better jobs and a di erent social, economic, and environmental commitment than many older people. e growth of the anti-Olympics movement was in some measure a generational con ict. ey feared that the Olympics would stimulate faster, uncontrolled growth that might destroy the good life they had come here to enjoy.

As debate over the award intensi ed, it increasingly focused itself along a progrowth/anti-growth narrative and so stumbled into the larger, statewide pro-growth/ anti-growth debate.

Debates over growth and the environment aside, the Games needed public moneys if they were to be held. Here the Denver Organizing Committee had miscalculated badly. When it made its rst proposal to the United States Olympic Committee in 1968 and then to the International Olympic Committee in 1970, the group had grossly underestimated the costs of holding the event. e proponents claimed that Denver already had about 80 percent of the facilities in place and that the city needed

Painted by Michelle Shappelle, a 10-year-old student in Colorado, this image depicting the skating events became a Christmas card used by the Denver Organizing Committee to secure and promote the proposed games. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

This annotated depiction of Mount Sniktau, near Loveland Pass, appeared in a promotional tract to show the proposed men’s and women’s downhill at the games. Based on a photograph taken in mid-to-late March 1969, the image clearly reveals the lack of snow on the lower two-thirds of both courses. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

only a modest $14 million more for the remaining facilities. ey would be low-cost, low-key Games that tted into the existing urban footprint. With the Games awarded, however, the cost estimates surged almost overnight to $25 million. Critics pointed out that Grenoble, France, had spent some $250 million for the 1968 Games, and it appeared that Sapporo, Japan, was about to spend somewhere between $750 million and $1.3 billion for the 1972 event. By 1972, the DOC had to concede that the projected cost of the Denver Olympiad had risen to $65 million. Later in the year, it had to increase that gure to somewhere between $81 million and $91 million. It was obvious to many that cost estimates were rising exponentially with no end in sight, and the critics chimed in with new bumper stickers that read: “Olympics—$100 million snow job.”

In June 1970, the DOC and opponents in the Evergreen area, the upscale home to some of Denver’s most prosperous business leaders, met at Evergreen High School to try to iron out their di erences over the site of the Nordic events. Some 600 people led into the building. It was a stressful meeting. Pro-Olympic speakers were often shouted down. e DOC, however, apparently failed to take such vociferous opposition seriously. Even Governor Love tried to reassure the Dittmans and others that the DOC would review the selection of these Front Range sites, although the DOC stated that it would make no explicit promise to move the Nordic events. Basically, the DOC was engaged in an e ort to stonewall the people around Evergreen with platitudes, while pushing ahead with its original intentions. is became blatantly apparent as time passed. When a reporter for Sports Illustrated investigated the growing imbroglio in February 1971, one member of the DOC told him that if the International Olympic Committee would not countenance moving the Nordic events to another locale, “Evergreen is just going to have to eat it.”

Despite growing opposition centered in Evergreen, the DOC still controlled the destiny of the Games. What the opponents mostly wanted was moving the Games out of the foothills of the Rockies—and even some supporters of the Olympics, such as Lieutenant Governor John Vanderhoof, thought that a good idea. But general opposition was clearly growing, fueled in part by the Sports Illustrated article and other factors. For the rst time, Dick Lamm and Representative Robert Jackson thought about the possibility of moving the Games elsewhere, though Jackson ran into a buzz saw of opposition when he raised the issue in his district. And as opposition grew, the Dittman group released its research that the foothills of the Front Range were too warm and had too little snow for the Nordic events—less than ve inches of snow had fallen annually since 1963. e DOC had little retort for that except to suggest creating arti cial snow.

Citizens for Colorado's future and the November 1972 election By the end of 1971, Lamm, Jackson, Dittman of POME, and others met in Denver to see what actually might be done about the Olympics and the plans of the DOC. is led to the organization of Citizens for Colorado’s Future, which overnight became the center of opposition to the Games. It rst began to advertise to counteract the of cial press releases of the DOC. It sought to gauge public sentiment more fully. And it soon took a political position. Lamm came out in opposition, calling the Games “rich man’s games paid for by poor man’s taxes.” is opposition, however, had led to internal changes at the DOC and an effort to relocate the Nordic and ski events of the Games. By 1971, the DOC nally admitted that Mount Sniktau with its high winds and lack of snow would not work for the alpine events—the Sniktau Snafu, the writer for Sports Illustrated called it. And so, the committee decided to shift the downhill events to Vail’s new proposed ski area, Beaver Creek, and the Nordic events to Steamboat Springs (both outside the 45-mile radius of Denver, as required by the Olympic Committee), but only to nd those communities lukewarm to the ideas.

Opposition to the Games was now growing powerfully. Citizens for Colorado’s Future obtained thousands of signatures opposing the Games and in 1972 stormed

the Sapporo meeting of the International Olympic Committee to present them, until police intervened. Overwhelmed, the IOC withdrew its invitation for Denver to host the Games. It was stunning news, but the Denver Organizing Committee moved quickly to secure an endorsement from President Richard M. Nixon and a Congressional Resolution sponsored by Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton to the e ect that the federal government would provide nancial support. e Games were back on. ough taken aback, Citizens for Colorado’s Future now went directly to the people. During the next few months, it obtained more than 77,000 signatures to put on the ballot a measure forbidding both state and city funding of the Games. Governor Love and Mayor of Denver Bill McNichols came out strongly against the measure. But the anti-Olympic movement had now garnered widespread support from groups concerned about the environment, the creation of wilderness areas, restricting unbridled growth, and curtailing the power of developers. Growth and cost now intertwined as the central issue as to whether the city and state would provide the moneys to fund the Olympic Games—a paltry $5 million—far less than the moneys actually needed. In the newsletter for Citizens for Colorado’s Future, Lamm wrote that the solution to Colorado’s growth issues was not to “build a wall around Colorado,” but to have stronger land use controls. “One of the rst things we do is stop ‘selling’ Colorado . . . Stop the mindless promotion and the Chamber of Commerce boosterism, exempli ed by the Olympics, which has so characterized our past policies.” e Olympics had come to be seen as symbolic of uncontrolled, unbridled growth.

In November 1972, the voters made their choice. By small margins statewide and in the City of Denver, they prohibited the public funding of the 1976 Olympic Games. at did them in. On November 9, the Denver Olympic Organizing Committee formally declined the Games and disbanded. e International Olympic Committee soon shifted the Games to Innsbruck, Austria, where in 1976, the Austrian Franz Klammer won one of the most celebrated downhill runs in history and the American Dorothy Hamill captured the gold medal in women’s gure skating. And it was just as well that the Olympics had not come to Denver and other towns in Colorado. e year 1976 was dry—there was hardly any snow at all. e campaign against the Denver Olympics, however, was a watershed event in Colorado. Opposition to the Games united many disparate groups and various environmental organizations into an important coalition that had a profound impact on Colorado’s development and political landscape during the years to come. Many pro-growth advocates who had supported the Games fell by the political wayside in the 1972 and 1974 elections, and CMC-member Dick Lamm got elected to the rst of his three terms as Governor of Colorado. Growth in the Centennial State certainly did not come to an end, but for the rst time, at least in part owing to the imbroglio over the Olympic Games, environmental concerns became a centerpiece of public, private, and political concern. △

A billboard advertisement in the fall of 1972 urging voters to reject the proposal to deny public funding for the Olympic Games. Courtesy Denver Public Library.

This annotated image depicting the proposed bobsled and luge events at Indian Hills, Colorado, appeared in a promotional tract used by the Denver Organizing Committee to promote the games. Courtesy Denver Public Library.