This book deftly excavates a singular moment in Olympic history when, after the International Olympic Committee allocated the games to Denver, locals rose up and just said no. Adam Berg’s engaging narrative spotlights how wealthy businesspeople attempted to use the Olympics as a trampoline for their own pro-growth interests and how concerned denizens forged a spirited, strategic coalition to stop them. Berg meticulously demonstrates how the private interests that drove the Olympic bid process not only pilfered the public purse but also issued fantastical fabrications about the glories the games would bring. But Coloradans were not fooled. In a moment when fewer and fewer cities are game to host the Olympic Games, this book is timely and essential reading.
— Jules Boykoff, Pacific University, author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics
The Olympics That Never Happened highlights the disingenuousness surrounding mega–sport events. In the leadup to the 1976 Denver Winter Games, pro-Olympic supporters and anti-Olympic advocates alike used the event to advance different ideas about the future of Colorado. Adam Berg deftly illustrates the false promises of growth used to deliver the games, as well as the over-aggrandized claims for social justice deployed to halt them. Although those opposed to the Olympics forced their removal from Denver, Berg shows that the campaign was the zenith, not the genesis, of resistance to mega–sporting events. The Olympics may not have happened in Denver, but the power remained in the hands of state and Olympic power brokers.
— Lindsay Parks Pieper, University of Lynchburg, author of Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports
Adam Berg offers a highly engaging and deeply thoughtful telling of Colorado voters' rejection of the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. Tracing the confluence of middle-class environmentalism, state taxpayers' revolts, and the civil rights movement, he explores how opposition to Denver’s Olympic dreams merged the powerful social and economic forces redefining the state. It is a must read for those concerned about the all too often hollow promises of the Olympic Games, environmental justice, and the future of urban growth.
— Michael W. Childers, Colorado State University, author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement
The Olympics that Never Happened maps Denver’s unique place in Olympic history with overwhelming detail...Berg’s historiography is complicated...but it explains the appetite driving initiatives that seem to help communities, especially when they are wrapped as patriotic gifts devoid of community scrutiny, until the community acts.
— Sport Literature Association
[A] solidly put together study...this book is going to be relevant for scholars in several fields of history but also in urban planning and public policy.
— History: Reviews of New Books
The Olympics That Never Happened: Denver ‘76 and the Politics of Growth should appeal to a wide audience given the variety of topics covered. The book would serve as a solid secondary text on a course on the Olympics or politics in sport, as well as a useful supplemental text in any number of sport management courses, including courses on mega-events, economic impact, governance, ethics, sport history, sport in society, sport tourism, or sport ecology. The result of Berg’s considerable effort is a book that leaves the reader feeling as if no stone has been left unturned in explaining how the Denver ‘76 Winter Olympic Games never happened.
— Human Kinetics Journals: Journal of Sport Management
The research underpinning this study is broad, thorough, and impressive, including interviews with many of the key actors in the story. Herein lies the value of this book. More than simply filling in a gap in Olympic scholarship, it offers an engagingly written snapshot of how a diversity of Americans understood the social role of government at the very moment that globalization began forcing the state into retreat. Berg's monograph will hold interest for Olympic specialists and generalists alike.
— Journal of Sport History
Adam Berg's The Olympics That Never Happened is now the definitive account of this fascinating story, one that should interest a range of readers with interests in the history of the American West, post–World War II urban history, and social activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. . . . Berg's excellent book makes a strong case that the most deserving example on that list—at least in terms of highlighting important themes in twentieth-century U.S. history—is the one historians and popular readers have long forgotten: Denver '76.
— Journal of American History