Welcome to Olympic City. Not Paris, where the quadrennial 2024 summer games open July 26. Olympic City USA is Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Fun fact: This is the first time the Olympics will be in Paris since 1924.
We picked up that fun fact and many others at the 60,000-square-foot United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs, the second largest city in Colorado and about an hour south of Denver, that has adopted the moniker “Olympic City.”
Besides the terrific museum, Colorado Springs is home to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center where some 15,000 athletes train every year. The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee is headquartered in Colorado Springs as are more than two dozen national governing bodies and paralympic sport organizations.
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During a tour of the training center campus, led by elite athlete Anne Cover, we watched wrestlers – men and women – train, as well as paralympians, in a massive weight room and also watched shooters practice. “We used to feel like animals in the zoo when people watched us, and now I’m doing the same thing,” said former Olympian Emily Shertzer, who was taking the tour, showing her partner where she had lived and trained for three years before the Beijing Olympics.
