It wasn’t long after Russia hosted the approximately $50 billion Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 — which included a $9 billion high-speed train and road from the seaside city to the ski areas — that former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm did a bit of a 180 on the idea of ever hosting the games.
The late Lamm, who was teaching at the University of Denver at the time, said he wouldn’t be opposed to Colorado bidding on the Winter Olympics if it resulted in a massive scaling back of public spending but brought in federal dollars to fix the Interstate 70 bottleneck between Denver and the state’s mountain resorts.
The reversal was remarkable for a man who, as a state representative in the early 1970s, had led the charge to give the games back after the International Olympic Committee had already awarded Denver the 1976 Winter Olympics, with yet-to-be-built Beaver Creek proposed as a key venue for Alpine ski racing…