Team USA sent a record-breaking 300 athletes to Italy for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics and Paralympics in February and March.

Utah seemingly sent nearly at least half that many delegates as Olympic observers. An official count wasn’t kept, but state and local officials, Utah 2034 organizers and venue managers flocked to the Games in the hope of gleaning ideas and information they could apply to make Utah 2034 the most successful Winter Olympics yet.

“There is a little bit of a false narrative that when you work for the Olympic movement, or you work for the organizing committee, you go to Italy and you just go to sporting events all day,” Brad Wilson, the CEO of Utah 2034, said Wednesday. “That’s actually not what happened. We were in meetings most of the day.”

So, did they learn anything? Definitely, said Wilson and others. Here are five key takeaways:

Transportation moves people

Italy’s Games sprawled across four clusters and more than 500 miles. Little of it was connected by train. So, people spent a lot of time on buses.

Jim Harvey, a Weber County Commissioner, compared it to having to travel highway 89 between Bear Lake and Logan to get anywhere. Jennifer Wesselhoff, the president and CEO of Visit Park City, said “transportation and transit was an emotional experience.”

Most of Utah’s venues are connected by multi-lane highways, so Wilson said he doesn’t expect spectators to be boarding a struggle bus to get between them. One place where that currently isn’t the case, though, is the four-lane stretch of State Route 224 between Kimball Junction — site of the Utah Olympic Park (bobsled, skeleton, luge, ski jumping and potentially several ski or snowboard events) — and Park City Mountain, likely the host of halfpipe and slopestyle events.

A plan that will help address that chokepoint is already in the works, however. A rapid-transit corridor between those two areas will include dedicated bus lanes and is expected to be completed by 2028. An expansion of the park-and-ride and transit center in Kimball Junction has also been proposed.

“What we’re really thinking about,” Wesselhoff said, “is using the games as a catalyst to advance some of the infrastructure priorities that we have as a county, as a community, long-term related to transit and transportation: bus rapid transit, park and rides, aerial transit, all of these ways that we want to elevate the visitor experience.”

Olympic luger Ashley Farquharson, who won a bronze medal in Italy, said she hopes Utah 2034 organizers will look at details beyond routes.

“The thing that the luge team struggles with the most in every Olympics I’ve been to is transportation issues,” Farquharson said. “It’s hard to understand and read [the signage]. And we usually don’t have any accommodations for our sleds, so we have to go with them, which is not just an inconvenience for us, but also everyone else who’s trying to get on the bus.”

Utah can weather bad weather

This winter has driven home the reality that, unlike Amazon, nature does not deliver on demand. A few timely storms kept the weather from being a major topic of the Olympics in Italy, but heat took its toll on the Paralympics, leading to changes in practice times and course designs.

Utah 2034 organizers and venue managers are heeding the warning and experimenting with various ways to create and store snow. That includes upgrading snowmaking systems to ones that require less water and finding ways to stash away snow — potentially for an entire year.

“We don’t have to build any new facilities, but I think improvements and enhancements to those facilities are going to be critical, especially as we look at this season in a stingy snow year,” Park City’s Wesselhoff said. “What does your technology look like in terms of snowmaking and snow farming and moving snow around? So, we’re thinking a lot about that.”

Soldier Hollow, with a base elevation of 6,000 feet, is probably the most at-risk venue in Utah. Still, it kept winter operations through Sunday — more than a week after the closing ceremony for the 2026 Paralympics. And that was without digging into the mansion-sized hill of snow that has been piled into a ravine by the cross-country area’s operators. The pile is part of an experiment to see if thermal blankets can keep most of the snow through the summer. After a week of 65-degree temperatures, it appeared to be working.

“We’re going to try to adapt,” Wilson said. “If we had a winter in ’34 like we have now, we absolutely could host the Games in every event and every way, including the Paralympics.

“Would it be challenging? Are we prepared if it happens? Absolutely.”

Success revolves around three experiences

Boil it down to its nuts and bolts, and any Olympics — not just Utah 2034 — offers three major windows to the world: the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony and the athlete experience. Therefore, said Scott Doughman, the University of Utah’s director of Olympic Planning, it’s imperative to get those right.

“You mess any one of those up, even just marginally,” Doughman said, “and, unfortunately, it becomes a headline.”

Tokyo’s Summer Games in 2021, for example, took at least as much criticism for its cardboard bed frames as for its sponsorship and contract scandal.

The University of Utah will be central to all three of those opportunities in 2034. Rice Eccles Stadium will host the opening and closing ceremonies for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The campus will also be the site of the Athlete Village as well as athlete family housing — a new initiative being spearheaded by Utah 2034 and, especially, Park City-based skier Lindsey Vonn.

Doughman said his team is looking at “experience architecture” when it comes to accommodations. It addresses anything from spaces for athletes to meet with sponsors to storage for athlete’s team gear in their Athlete Village apartments.

Sports will take center stage long before the Olympics

If you’re someone who could have watched another three weeks of Olympic events, then you live in the right place. As part of the lead-up to the 2034 Winter Games, the state plans to host lots and lots of competitions.

It’s already begun.

This week, the World Curling Championships are taking place in Ogden. Earlier this month, Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns hosted the national championships in synchronized skating — one of several events being bandied about as a potential addition to the 2034 program. And more events are in the works, from elite international showdowns to junior and amateur tournaments.

Colin Hilton is the president and CEO of the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation, which oversees many of the venues built for the 2002 Olympics. He said in addition to helping train volunteers, hosting events at various competition levels helps young athletes from both the U.S. and abroad assimilate to the state.

“Our conscious effort to also not just do the major events, but the next tier down,” he said, “… gives these athletes from other countries a familiarity with Utah.”

The goal is to get each venue to run as smoothly as the Antholz-Anterselva Biathlon Arena did for the 2026 biathlon events. Numerous members of Utah’s delegation to Italy held it up as an example of how a well-run event can transform the spectator experience.

“The fact that that arena and that organizing committee has an event there every year, things just ran really well,” said Jack Gierhart, the CEO of U.S. Biathlon. “… So, I think a takeaway there is: However you can prep and do test events as much as possible to prepare is really important.”

Team USA expects to be its strongest yet

Historically, Italy has not been a powerhouse in the Winter Olympics. It typically finishes around 10th in the medal count, including a ninth-place finish when it hosted the Turin 2006 Games.

This year, however, it finished fourth — tying its best historical finish and claiming a country-record 30 medals. And it’s clear the American sports leaders are envious of that performance.

“That home-field advantage was real,” said Sophie Goldschmidt, president and CEO of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. “I mean, it was the same in Beijing: The Chinese made a huge jump [and] they sort of got back in the game.

“So, we would absolutely like to take the same opportunity with home-field advantage. I think some of that is just to do with the crowd support. [But] some of it is the investment that goes into the athletes and their careers — and investment does lead to performance and medals.”

Hilton said the governing bodies of winter sports have already held meetings to strategize about how to boost Team USA’s performance in 2034. It doesn’t come down to just developing athletes, U.S. Biathlon’s Gierhart said, but to developing the infrastructure around them. That might look like more athlete housing or better sport medicine programs.

“For me, seeing that the Italians did well,” Hilton said, “there was a lot of effort for them to get to that point, and we need to do the same in support of all of our winter sport organizations.”