Olympic Valley

Understand

The existence of Olympic Valley as more than a dot on the map is heavily tied to the 1960 Winter Olympics. Wayne Poulsen, president of the Squaw Valley Development Company, convinced then California governor Goodwin Knight to support a bid by Squaw Valley to host the 1960 Winter Olympics and the governor did so, asking his state legislature to appropriate a million dollars for that purpose.

In 1955 the bid was officially submitted to the IOC (at the time led by the American Avery Brundage) who accepted the bid much to the chagrin of established winter sports destinations like Innsbruck Chamonix and St. Moritz which had also bid, but the IOC warned that the hosting rights would be reassigned if the U.S. did not invest further money into local facilities. The California state legislature committed another four million dollars and thus Brundage confirmed the hosting rights for Squaw Valley.

The task now was to turn what was a resort of one chair lift, two rope tows and a fifty room lodge in 1956 into an Olympic class winter sports destination. Local boosters sold this apparent disadvantage as a plus, arguing that this "blank canvas" allowed them to build a resort perfectly in line with the demands of the 1960 Olympics. Just how small a place Squaw Valley was, was underscored when during the 1956 Winter Games in Cortina d'Ampezzo the traditional ceremony of the mayor of the previous host ceremoniously handing over the baton to the mayor of the next host had to use a random IOC member from California to stand in for the - not yet existing - mayor of Squaw Valley.

Ultimately the games cost some eighty million dollars all told (of which a quarter came from the federal government) and Squaw Valley had a lot of state of the art facilities - including the first Olympic Ice Rink to use artificial ice. However, as a cost cutting measure and because only 9 nations wanted to send competitors in that sport, bobsledding was left off the Olympic schedule that year to avoid having to build a venue - bobsledding had been an Olympic event at every prior Winter Games and would remain so into the 21st century. The games were the first to be shown live on U.S. television (the 1956 games had been shown by some European broadcasters) and while the broadcasting rights were sold to CBS for only $50,000, that figure would soon jump tenfold for the same year's Summer Games.

In August 2020, the owners announced their commitment to remove the word "squaw" from the resort's name by summer 2021 as the use of the term is an ethnic and sexual slur, and the resort was renamed "Olympic Valley".

Get in

Olympic Valley is found off California State Route 89, about 12 miles south of Truckee at the intersection of CA-89 and Interstate 80. The closest city with a major airport is Reno, Nevada, about 32 miles east of Truckee on I-80.

Get around

Squaw Valley Road is the main arterial. It runs roughly east-west and feeds into California State Route 89 at its eastern end.

Go next

• Other resorts and parts of Lake Tahoe
• Reno, the closest large city
• Sacramento, the capital of California