By Brian Gomez, Gazette

COLORADO SPRINGS — If the U.S. Olympic Committee submits a bid for the 2022 Winter Games with Denver as a candidate, the black eye of the Mile High City once returning the Olympics won’t play a factor with International Olympic Committee voters, according to the leader of the IOC.

“There would definitely be no grudge for the fact that Denver abandoned the race,” IOC president Jacques Rogge said this week at The Broadmoor hotel before the end of the IOC international athletes’ forum, a biennial gathering staged in the U.S. for the first time.

The Colorado Ski Museum in Vail talks about the Denver Olympics that never happened. Photo/LTN

The Colorado Springs-based USOC still hasn’t determined whether it will enter the fray for 2022, with Bozeman, Mont., Reno/Lake Tahoe, Nev., and Salt Lake City also in the mix, or throw its weight behind a bid for the 2024 Summer Games, in which possibilities are Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Tulsa, Okla. Bids for 2022 are due in 2013, with the IOC scheduled to pick the winner in 2015.

Denver is the only city to give back the Olympics. The IOC relocated the 1976 Winter Games to Innsbruck, Austria, in 1973 after outcries from Colorado taxpayers over rising costs and environmental effects. It hasn’t reappeared on the Olympic ballot, and since the United States hosted four Olympics – two winter and two summer – from 1980 to 2002, it has lost its past two Olympic bids, faltering with New York for 2012 and with Chicago for 2016.

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