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“Almost everything that happens in Utah usually has a church spin on it. And the church has never been able to do anything with a small bit of a light touch.
STEVE PACE
health-care consultant
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These will be the Mo-lympics, says Steve Pace, a Salt Lake health-care consultant, Olympics critic and lapsed member of the church. Almost everything that happens in Utah usually has a church spin on it. And the church has never been able to do anything with a small bit of a light touch.
The Mormons say the Games are not a proselytizing opportunity but a public-relations mission. Church officials scoff at Pace and others who presume that street-corner conversions, demands for temperance and a defense of the long-rejected practice of polygamy will dominate the Games, a $1.3 billion production staged by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC). Instead, says Michael Otterson, the churchs chief spokesman and a member of its Olympics coordinating committee, the LDSs fundamental goals are to use the Olympics to show that the people of Utah70 percent of whom are church memberscan be good hosts and to correct misperceptions. Otterson adds: The Games have been awarded to Salt Lake City, not to the church.
Sometimes, separating the two is difficult. Founded on the belief that God, Jesus and an angel came to founder Joseph Smith Jr. 180 years ago in a grove of trees in upstate New York, the Mormon Church is booming, with 11 million members worldwide, half in the United States. In addition, the church is wealthywith holdings worth some $30 billionand experienced at savvy, pinpoint marketing.
Months ago, the Mormons beat the multitude of official Olympic sponsorsknown for sending message-filled trinkets to the mediato the publicity punch. Last fall, hundreds of journalists received tiny, finely detailed, attaché cases. Inside the four-inch-wide briefcases were panels of LDS-related story ideas. Later, a lush calendar of Mormon events was sent. During the Olympics, the church will host its own posh media center. And itll stage lavish shows in its new 21,000-seat Conference Center, a building seven times the size of New Yorks Metropolitan Opera House. Church officials are hush-hush about the details of the expected Olympic offerings at the conference center. But high-tech theater and music will surely be part of the religiously themed extravaganzas that are expected to be open to the public.
When Salt Lake first bid for the Winter Olympics, church-linked businesses chipped in $211,000. Weeks before allegations emerged that SLOC officials had bribed members of the International Olympic Committeea federal trial of two former SLOC members is scheduled for this summerLDS president Gordon B. Hinckley publicly urged his flock to volunteer for SLOC.
And once W. Mitt Romney, a Mormon himself, was brought in to run SLOC and the scandal dust began to settle, the church again pitched in. It pledged $5 million in cash, the temporary use of 160 acres for Olympic parking lots, 16 more acres to help build roads and a prime block of downtown Salt Lake City to be used for the nightly medals ceremony. I go for help, Romney says of SLOCs relationship with the LDS. And sometimes the church says no. For instance, it declined to share its vast pool of translators with SLOC, reserving them instead for curious touristsand potential church membersset to swarm Temple Square.
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