The last meeting of Utah’s Olympic bid committee felt a little like graduation.On the top floor of the Leonardo Museum, leaders gave inspiring graduation-like talks, and each committee member was bestowed with what looked from a distance something like a certificate, a keepsake signed by IOC President Thomas Bach, and a trophy. Well, encouraged to pick up theirs on the way out.Oh, the good times just past, the crowning success July 24 after so many years of effort, the end, the beginning to come next year of the new organizing committee. All the Park City people who have been intimately involved.“We did it!” cried out Cat Raney Norman, the chair. Let the caps fly, the hugs go ’round, this moment so long in the making last. Winning the 2034 Winter Olympics bid was the culmination of 22 years of more or less patient, persistent effort. As well as the 2002 Games performed against all odds at the time — a late-breaking scandal, 9/11 — the real wonder is it took the IOC this long to see the obvious.But no, not quite yet. First there were last speeches to give. Everyone to be heard: the governor, Salt Lake City’s mayor, the Senate majority leader, the House speaker, the bid committee’s CEO, the head of the U.S. Olympics. This is the way of graduation ceremonies, after all, pomp to mark the achievement. Many people to speak; many more to be thanked.And then back to Raney Norman. This was her night most of all, I think. The Olympic call to youth seems most powerful for her, a four-time Olympian herself, including in 2002. Hope through the quest and the Games themselves for the next generations, that better future for humanity. These observations are only true. This is the meta gift of the Olympics themselves.I vibed with all of it on a mid-December evening, why I’m writing about it now, as one year is about to break into the next, one committee finishing out to form anew. Here is where the leaders of the supermajority red Legislature meet the liberal mayors of Salt Lake City and Park City in common cause. I mean genuine bonding here, those other politics set aside. Another example for a wider world.A week later, I watched the 3rd Congressional District representative-elect, Mike Kennedy, gird himself and launch to the podium last week to face the Park City Council in a packed chambers, a foray into very possibly enemy territory, ready for anything. This was plain in his tone, in overtalking, repeating the word abortion a few times as if striking a match.Of course, I knew better even if he didn’t, yet. Whatever partisan cloaks city and county leaders may wear elsewhere, all that is left at the door to their meeting rooms. Local issues don’t have a whole lot to do with those politics, and certainly not the posturing that plagues state and national governance. Local government has plenty of its own heat, of course, but the issues are practical.Kennedy was among new friends, simple as that. Mayor Nann Worel spoke gently in greeting him, as if with a stray dog or lost cat. He’s neither, of course, as a key liaison for federal Olympic support. In this there is solidarity. He’s as jazzed as anyone to have the Games in Utah, and to make them great.Back in Salt Lake City, a relatively compact body of Olympians, politicians and the hard spine of committee members doing the organizing of the bid and next, the real work of preparations for 2034, basked in a warm moment enjoying the congratulatory speeches and watching videos touching on the why of all this effort: the athletes toeing their starts, the kids working for their moment.But there also was what bid committee CEO Fraser Bullock described as an audible on July 24 during the presentation of the bid in Paris. The time difference had put the last pitch and the International Olympic Committee’s vote into the wee hours in Salt Lake City, around 2:30 a.m.Who would show up then downtown to celebrate the awarding of the bid? In the presentation they had planned and practiced down to each single word, they added an option — either another slide or cut to a live feed.“We thought, well, if we can get 50 or 60 people, we can probably do a live feed from Utah,” Bullock remembered. “And of course, as you know, we had thousands of people, and so we went with a live feed from Utah, and what a moment it was. I just felt this immense emotion in that moment to be connected across the world to our people.”Raney Norman urged the committee and supporters to keep this momentum going. The next decade is both a long time and a fingersnap. Everyone will need to bring their best. The hard work in preparing for the Games is about to begin. And isn’t that just like graduation, too?Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.The post Journalism Matters: An Olympic committee finishes its work and girds for what comes next appeared first on Park Record.