It’s jarring, at first, to read the Anchorage place names transposed into French:

La Vallée d‘Eagle River. Le Mont Alyeska. La Parc Kincaid.

La population d’Anchorage accorde avec ferveur un bienvenu a la famille olympique. It’s that last bit that offers the clues that these are more than rejected names for a too-big-for-its-britches bistro. Translated, according to the organizers of Anchorage’s bid for the 1994 Winter Olympic Games, it means something like: “The people of Anchorage await the Olympic Family with open arms.”

These little nuggets come from a 51-page brochure in both French and English prepared as part of Anchorage’s bid for first the 1992 games (which went to Albertville, France) and then the 1994 games (Lillehammer, Norway). The brochure comes from the Facebook group “Anchorage, Alaska for the 2022 Olympics.”

If Facebook is any indication, Anchorage has a commanding lead—at least in the race to be the United States’ bid for the twelve-year-away Olympiad. Other contenders mentioned include Bozeman, Montana, Denver, Colorado, the Reno/Lake Tahoe region, and two-time host Lake Placid, New York (perhaps in conjunction with Albany).

The most serious Facebook threat comes from that last one, which despite having hosted the games in 1932 and 1980, boasted a Facebook group that had attracted nearly 1,500 members in a matter of days, by the time of this writing Tuesday night.

Denver’s Facebook group, by contrast had just 21 members. Search for “Bozeman Olympics” and the closest you’ll come is “2009 Beer Olympics.” Tahoe nets a 10-member group with the description “Lets hope that the olympics come to Lake Tahoe CA in 2016.”—confusing because the 2016 games are in the summer, and they’ve been awarded to Rio de Janeiro.

The group in support of Anchorage, by contrast, has more than 6,500 members, a clear—overwhelming, even—majority. And Facebook has demonstrated its abilities as a meme accelerant (google Sarah Palin and “death panels” in case you’ve forgotten).

But winning a bid to host an Olympics is a far, far cry from a Facebook popularity contest. Even those Facebook searches turn up hints that there might be more going on in the early stages of the battle to be America’s choice for the Olympics than those fan tallies suggest. Search for “Reno Olympics” and you get the Facebook face of the Reno-Tahoe Winter Games Coalition, a nonprofit group dedicated to bringing the games there. They may not have the Facebook followers the Anchorage group does (300-something) but they have board members and a pretty official-looking logo, among other trappings of seriousness.

And more than that, they’re being taken seriously elsewhere. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle profiled efforts to bring the games back to that region (the 1960 games were held in Squaw Valley). Similarly, Denver’s interest in being an Olympic host has drawn media attention, too.

And those are just the strong contenders from within the United States. Whichever U.S. city wins would still face stiff competition from a half dozen or more potentially interested cities around the world.

Then there are the obstacles an Anchorage Olympic bid would face at home.

Tuesday evening, on the booster group’s Facebook page—amid the generally upbeat professions of support—there were also cautionary (or downright skeptical) notes sounded too.

Jeremy Sacks, whose profile identifies him as a senior at Bartlett High, chimed in thus:

“Don't want to be a downer, but after looking at what Vancouver just paid to host the Olympics, I just realized that hosting the Olympics here will totally screw our economy. Yes, we may gain a major influx of income in the inital pre olympic buzz [sic] and during the actual games, but hosting the Olympics is tens of millions... minimum. Multiple new stadiums and arenas will need to be built, (because we don't have nearly enough room for all the sports, in spite of what one might think,) which will cost millions to maintain (in addition to their initial cost) for decades to come.”

That prompted a response from one of the pro-games members, which in turn generated its own skeptical response—prefiguring, perhaps, debates to come.

Of course, there are years to go yet before bids are in. And beyond a respectable number of fans and a history of past bids, Anchorage lags behind more organized areas. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how those debates might turn out.

And at a minimum—even if the idea of hosting to the games turns out to be pie-in-the-sky, useless daydreaming—it’s good to know Anchorage still retains a spark of the old pioneer ability to dream big, possibly impractical dreams.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com