The Utah Sports Authority is etching out a 120-meter
ski jump on a mountainside near Park City for the 2002 Winter
Olympics, but the project isn’t inspiring Olympic fever. Instead,
it’s raising the ire of local critics, who lament the ugliness of
the scarred slope.
“There was no environmental
input whatsoever, and consequently we’re going to have an eyesore
forever,” says Ann Wechsler of the Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club.
She is critical of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee’s
environmental advisory board for not paying more attention to the
project.
Dean Gillam, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency Olympics coordinator, doesn’t think there was
much the advisory board could have done. “I am not sure there would
have been a lot more mitigation that they could have done had they
come to us first,” he says.
The ski jump is part
of the Utah Winter Sports Park and lies in the scenic, quickly
developing corridor leading into Park City. The Utah Sports
Authority, the state body charged with building the $45.6 million
park, will turn it over to the Salt Lake Organizing Committee this
summer. The ski jump came into the media spotlight when newly
appointed Salt Lake Organizing Committee President Mitt Romney
criticized the appearance of the gash.
According
to Diane Conrad, the organizing committee’s director of
environmental programs, only partial restoration will be possible,
since the slope is mostly rock. But she adds, “I think it’s an
aesthetic problem. I don’t think it’s an environmental problem. The
erosion control there is superb.”
*Tim
Westby
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline An Olympic eyesore?.
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