Olympics in Yosemite? It Almost Happened

The first-ever Winter Olympics was held in France in 1924 and the second was in Switzerland in 1928, and the third nearly took place in Yosemite Valley. There were only 14 events at the time, including ski jumping, cross-country skiing, ice hockey, figure skating, speed skating and bobsleigh. The 1932 event had 252 athletes, compared to nearly 3,000 now.

Yosemite Park and Curry Company President Donald Tresidder organised the Yosemite Winter Club in 1928 after a trip to Switzerland hoping to “encourage and develop all forms of winter sports and to advertise and exploit the great advantages, beauties and healthy benefits of winter in the California Sierra to all lovers of outdoor life.” Megan Orpwood-Russell, the current Yosemite Conservancy director of communications recently told the SFGate, “They wanted to establish Yosemite as the ‘Switzerland of the West,’ which is a bold goal.”

The Yosemite Winter Club built Badger Pass Ski Resort and an ice rink in Curry Village that was called the largest in North America. “I don’t think it was that preposterous,” Cory Goehring, Yosemite Conservancy lead naturalist, told SFGate. “Badger Pass was one of the first ski areas in California. Yosemite had a lot of Olympians that were there. The Badger Pass Ski School had all sorts of top competitors in snow sports at that time. Even though it was a small ski hill, basically. It was sort of a premiere destination for the United States before the resorts in Tahoe and Mammoth Mountain.”

In the end, the 1932 Winter Olympics took place in Lake Placid, New York, and Yosemite is the only national park to have submitted a bit to host the event. “I think if we would’ve had the Olympics in a national park, it would’ve set a bad precedent moving forward,” Goehring said. “We understand the national parks are there to preserve this pristine landscape. The idea of the large Olympic facilities, that’s not the idea of the national parks. We were still sort of adapting to this view in the 1930s.”