Columnist Dean Juipe: Salt Lake temporarily disabled

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, June 7, 2000 | 10:05 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Miles and miles of freeway are under construction and seem to be an inescapable mess.

The road repairs appear endlessly incapacitating and require hopping from one detour to another to reach your destination.

Cranes peak in the distance, a sign of buildings yet to come.

Las Vegas?

No, Salt Lake City.

Having passed through the city last weekend, it became apparent that it has a good deal of work to do before 2002 and the Winter Olympics. In fact, even 30 months out, you could glance at Salt Lake City and say it won't make it.

It probably will, of course. Yet given the disarray of the roads and having seen how little actually has been built as the city constructs an assortment of venues for Olympic competition, it can at least be argued the project is so huge (and expensive) that it may not actually be worthwhile -- regardless of the pride involved in hosting this glamorous, worldwide sports spectacle.

Salt Lake City is enduring an all-out assault on its infrastructure and sensibilities for something of an intangible reward.

As it is, right now its residents are suffering with the growing pains brought on by the demands of an accelerated construction process that is negatively impacting everyday life. Luckily, the Utes are patient people.

But the International Olympic Committee isn't a particularly patient organization, and while it hasn't publicly belittled Salt Lake City's current situation, it has issued a warning to Athens, Greece, which is the site of the 2004 Summer Olympics.

Athens, apparently, is a little too far behind schedule to suit the IOC, which has told the city it may yank the Olympics and hold them, instead, in Seoul, Korea, which hosted the 1988 Games. The chief of Athens' organizing committee was replaced by edict of the IOC, which was dismayed to recently learn that five Olympic venues in the city have yet to pass beyond the exploratory stage.

A newspaper there called the situation a "national disgrace."

The point is, a city or country interested in hosting an Olympics is taking a tremendous responsibility and an immense financial risk. While construction has been ahead of schedule for this fall's Olympics in Sydney, Australia, it has come with an estimated price tag of $1.92 billion.

Will Australia get its money's worth? If a new opinion poll is correct, even the Australians themselves have second thoughts about the Olympics as only 49 percent of those surveyed indicated a desire to see an Olympic event in person. That was down a stunning 17 percent from a similar survey taken earlier in the year.

Also impacting the Australians' point of view are the very real threats of transportation strikes and the like, including Aboriginal protests which could lead to violence, brought on almost exclusively by the presence of the Olympic Games.

Salt Lake City may have the strength of community it takes to avoid those type of internal problems, yet it is making a calculated investment that comes without guarantees. The typical resident of the city could say all that effort and money going toward Olympic construction is frivolous to an extreme.

At least that's a thought that came to an outsider as he plodded through the debris.