If you don’t recall the 1976 Denver Olympics, there’s a good reason: They didn’t occur. In 1970, the International Olympic Committee awarded Denver the right to host the 1976 Winter Games. But two and a half years later, in November 1972, voters in the Centennial State overwhelmingly passed an initiative to block state funding for the Games and, in effect, force Denver Olympic organizers to rescind their offer to host “the youth of the world.” The Winter Games ended up being held in Innsbruck, Austria.
As this year’s Summer Games get underway in Paris, the story of the failed Denver Games is a reminder for public officials and residents alike. Coloradans won and then banished the Olympics. Yet the question at the heart of the “Denver ’76” controversy was not simply whether to host the Games. It was a matter of what the future of Denver and Colorado should be. Sports spectacles such as the Olympics often carry significant implications and political opportunities for local economies.
Much has changed in the past five decades. Still, many of the issues emanating from the Denver Olympics repeatedly crop up for potential host cities. In recent years, at least 10 cities started and halted Olympic bids because of local citizen dissent, including Boston, Munich, Stockholm — and even Innsbruck. As in Denver, excessive public costs, dishonest bid committees, environmental damage and undemocratic processes sparked anti-Olympics fires. As the saying goes, “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
In Colorado, the motivations for leading Olympics proponents went well beyond local pride or admiration for elite sports. Personal and financial goals overwhelmingly drove the Denver Olympic bidders and organizers. They represented a growth machine of utility providers, local banks, tourist-industry investors, local news outlets and politicians. These actors all benefited from expansion and worked together as a governing regime to enact policies to promote growth and safeguard their authority. They proceeded to do whatever it took to win the right to host the Olympics, viewing the event as a promotional bullhorn that would attract public funds and people.
Indeed, the growth promoters behind Denver ’76 provided probably the most disingenuous bid in Olympic history. They underplayed costs, lied about event locations, and offered subtle and not-so-subtle bribes to International Olympic Committee (IOC) voters and event-site inspectors. Denver is a three- to four-hour drive from many suitable Olympic sites; to appease the IOC, the Denver bid team promised events within an hour of the Mile High City at implausible locations. While they planned to make changes once the bid was won, they initially scheduled cross-country and downhill skiing for areas where there literally would not have been enough snow.
On the other hand, many of Denver ’76’s most forceful critics did not at first oppose seeing the Games come to Colorado. They did, however, object to specific designs for the event and recognized they could deploy the Olympics to advance issues they cared about. Mexican American and African American residents in Denver sought to gain access to Olympic planning to address an affordable housing shortage. White middle-class exurbanites in the foothills, meanwhile, balked at the prospect of crowds and new structures ruining the naturalistic aesthetics of their secluded enclaves. Additionally, led by a pair of incoming local legislators, many constituents proffered avowals of unjust “taxation without representation” by questioning the bid team’s cost estimates and drawing attention to the lack of citizen participation. Amid the post-1960s rights revolution, varied Colorado citizens saw the Olympics as a platform to articulate their desires for their state’s future.
In this heated context, a cohort of liberal-minded political operatives turned their attention to the Games. These collaborators carried extensive experience through Vietnam War protesting, environmentalism organizing and assisting progressive political campaigns. They saw Denver ’76 as an issue that could draw together a coalition to challenge Colorado’s political power brokers and, perhaps, usher in a more democratic system of government.
These operatives tactfully worked with sympathetic minoritized Denverites, foothills environmentalists, aligned politicians and other interest groups. They also shrewdly depicted themselves as fighting for everyday citizens in the face of selfish and manipulative power elites. Whereas the pro-Olympics regime worked with media partners to argue that hosting the Games would not cost too much, was the patriotic thing to do and would help promote world peace, the anti-Olympics coalition builders practiced grassroots organizing and sold themselves as the truer Americans, pointing out the deceits of Olympics proponents, gathering signatures to get the anti-Olympics amendment on Colorado ballots and lobbying Colorado citizens to pass it.
Coloradans thus dismantled Denver’s Olympic torch before it could be lit. It was a striking achievement, one that occurred because assorted political players became convinced that they could reach divergent ends through the same means — resisting Denver ’76.
Yet it was a victory that had little long-term impact. The growth machine guiding Denver and Colorado remained intact after the battle over the Winter Games concluded. Without a common antagonist or some other shared issue to unite them, the anti-Olympics coalition did not retain the cohesiveness required to slow the governing regime behind the botched Denver Games.
The story of the Denver Olympics that never happened reveals the propensity of sports mega-events to ignite effective grassroots coordination. Nonetheless, it also indicates the tenuous nature of the kinds of coalitions needed to enact authentic, deep-seated, permanent change.
Adam Berg is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He teaches courses related to the history, sociology and philosophy of sport, exercise and physical activity. He is the author of The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver ’76 and the Politics of Growth.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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