1 The Olympics Late on the evening of February 24, 2002, I stood with three of my children in the crystalline air of a Salt Lake City winter, high in the southwest corner of Rice-Eccles Stadium, for the closing ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. The Olympic flame whipped orange hot above the icicle-shaped, glass and steel cauldron at the south end of the stadium. On the foothills to the northeast, the five giant, white Olympic rings placed mountainside above the city electrified the darkness as if they hovered in the air. The Utah Symphony played and the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square sang, interspersed with rock bands and musical acts ranging from Kiss and Bon Jovi to Willie Nelson and Gloria Estefan. Down on the field, hundreds of brightly costumed pageant participants danced and skated to the music, including 780 children in Eskimo parkas carrying lanterns. The millions of television viewers around the world could not have possibly felt the overload of senses experienced by the 45 ,000 people in the stadium, who were on their feet for a fireworks finale like no other. A pyrotechnic barrage erupted from eleven launch sites at canyon entrances and other sites across the city—ten thousand shells in a million-dollar display that lit up the night sky and reverberated across the Salt Lake Valley.
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Olympic Cauldron Park. Photo courtesy of Utah Tourism. Photographer, Steve Greenwood.
