New York governor Kathy Hochul will today (Monday) launch an 88-person exploratory committee to report on the feasibility and challenges of a formal bid to host the Winter Olympic Games, according to people with knowledge of the announcement who spoke anonymously as they were not authorized to do so publicly.
The potential bid would see New York City and Lake Placid partner to host the 2042 edition.
Earlier this year, Gov. Hochul told The Athletic that “significant” meetings had taken place as she seeks to return the Winter Olympics to New York state for the first time since 1980, which is best remembered for the Miracle on Ice when the U.S. hockey team defeated the Soviet Union. Gov. Hochul, while announcing the committee today, will also announce a $2.5 million funding commitment to create a monument in Lake Placid in honor of the Miracle on Ice team.
The Lake Placid-New York City Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games Exploratory Committee will have an eight-strong leadership group, which will include Ashley Walden, the president and CEO of the Olympic Regional Development Authority, as well as representation from the offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (both Democrats), sources said. It will also include Julie Su, appointed deputy mayor for economic justice of New York City by mayor Zohran Mamdani, as well as Hope Knight, the president of Empire State Development, the New York state economic development arm.
There is a 16-member sub-committee on finance, which includes John Collins, co-owner and operating partner of the New York Islanders, and Josh Cohen, the son of New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, who works as the team’s vice president of business development. Randy Levine, the owner of the New York Yankees, is one of 12 members of a legal sub-committee, which also includes Robert Landau, the executive vice-president of NBC Universal, the long-time broadcaster of the Olympics in the United States.
There are also 18 senior advisers, as well as 16 members of the games operations subcommittee, which includes Laura Pegula, the minority owner of the Buffalo Bills and daughter of majority owner, her father Terry Pegula. Alex Lasry, who ran New York and New Jersey’s FIFA World Cup host committee and whose father Marc Lasry formerly owned the Milwaukee Bucks, has also joined the operations subcommittee.
There is also an 18-strong community engagement subcommittee, which includes Gary Gertzog, the president of business affairs at Fanatics. The committees also include representation from the tourism, lodging and media industries, as well as community-led organisations.
All committee members are working on the project on a voluntary basis, except where it naturally overlaps with their existing day job, Walden told The Athletic in a telephone interview on Sunday. She said the committee is aiming to report back to New York state leadership within a year from now.
The committee is largely working towards the 2042 games, she added, with France already locked in to host 2030 and Salt Lake City to host the 2034 edition. Switzerland has been in exclusive dialogue with the International Olympic Committee to land 2038.
She said that such a broad committee was required to cover representation from both upstate and downstate, as well as the right “level of expertise across each of the committees”.
There are, however, plenty of questions about the logistics of a joint bid between New York City and Lake Placid, which are both located within New York state but just under 300 miles apart. That draws parallels to the most recent Winter Olympics, which were hosted jointly by Milan and Cortina in Italy, despite being around 250 miles apart.
Robert C. Carroll, a member of the New York State Assembly and a member of this new exploratory leadership group, has previously said that venues such as Madison Square Garden, Barclays Center and UBS Arena could stage indoor ice events, while also suggesting Big Air at Citi Field or Yankee Stadium, and a cross-country sprint through Central Park. Lake Placid, which hosted in 1932 and 1980, could host many of the events associated with the Winter Olympics.
Walden said that a key focus is to utilize existing facilities and minimise any additional infrastructure spend on event spaces where possible.
One of the big challenges will be transport, particularly in the winter months between New York City and Lake Placid. Current train routes would unlikely to be deemed adequate. There may also be lessons to learn from the World Cup, where the public costs of hosting eventually led to a furious row between New Jersey Transit and FIFA when the transit agency multiplied its usual ticket for travel to MetLife Stadium by more than seven times, causing great cost to the traveling sports fan.
“We will hear key takeaways from other sporting events that have happened within New York, whether it be very, very recent, like the World Cup or previously,” Walden said. “The committee will take a look at identifying where those issues and challenges could be so that when this report is done, those items are flagged as areas of concern. Currently, there is no easy and frequent way for people to get from Lake Placid to New York City. Some of those main challenges we know we’re gonna see are transportation, overall accessibility, lodging capacity in some of the areas … that is work that will be looked at by the committee and identified as challenges.”
Walden cautioned that the exploratory committee is “the first step in the process to do our research and our homework around whether this is something that should be looked at for the future.”
“This is stage one. .. and there may or may not be other steps after this,” she added.
Gov. Hochul was more emphatic, saying in a statement: “New York is an Olympic State. We have the history, we have the venues, and we have a passion for sports that’s second to none.
“Today, I’ve assembled a team of the best and the brightest in sports, government, business and community leadership from all corners of the state to ensure we are in the best position possible to build a roadmap to bring the Olympic flame back to New York.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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