The Utah Olympic Park Spence Eccles Olympic Freestyle Pool will close on July 15 to undergo renovations.
The park will be upgrading the pool’s locker rooms, spectator viewing areas, water treatment technologies and interior. The construction will be completed by the park’s pool engineers and contractors.
The last time the pool underwent renovations was in 2015 — $1.5 million was put into the jump ramps. Much of the pool, like the interior and filtration system, has not been touched since its original build in 1992. Utah Olympic Park General Manager Jamie Kimball said the plaster of such pools typically has a 10-20 year lifespan.
Kimball said he expects the closure to last up to 70 days, ending the summer training season for the freestyle and freeski skiers and other athletes who rely on the pool to practice their jumps safely in the summer. This construction will coincide with the construction of the park’s new hotel at the site of the current Legacy Center, which houses the Park City Ski and Snowboard Club’s offices, set to begin in April.
The coinciding timing of both builds has sparked concerns, especially within the freestyle and freeski community in Park City, that the pool construction is due to that of the hotel.
“We needed this summer to get everything done to keep people safe,” Kimball said. “We were able to really narrow that window that we needed down. … It’s more of an early closure right now.”
Kimball said Utah Olympic Park would have preferred not closing the pool at all, but staff don’t want to put off the construction and run into further issues down the road. Lake Placid used to have a similar training facility in the Olympic Jumping Complex, which closed last spring due to untenable conditions and necessary repairs.
“Everything is focused now on those key things that we need to do,” Kimball added. “And, to make sure that we get them done in a really short amount of time, so we can impact the pool closure the least. … Make sure that we’re set up for the future so that we don’t have unforeseen closures or issues down the road that could have other impacts to training, and then nobody has any chance to respond to them.”
The park anticipates the most disruptive part of construction will be the teardown of the Legacy Center this spring. They believe they can successfully operate the pool through the other hotel construction by closing certain areas off.
The pool will likely open as usual at the beginning of May. The water is not heated, so it would take warmer-than-usual temperatures or athletes willing to brave the cold to extend its available training days on the front end this year.
Utah Olympic Park officials believe 2026 would be a good year to renovate the pool because elite athletes will be recovering from the Olympic season.
Olympic aerialist Tasia Tanner said there’s never a great time for a training disruption, as the summer training is essential to aerialists’ safety on jumps when they translate them to the snow in the winter. Tanner knows elite and youth athletes will have to scramble to find training opportunities elsewhere, and she believes not everyone will return to Park City.
“It’s a tough blow to us,” Tanner said. “A lot of my teammates have moved out to Park City to train, and we’ve kind of built our lives around being in Park City. Not having the pool there anymore has forced us to look at other countries and places to go to train.”
Tanner said U.S. Ski Team aerialists typically train in the pool five or six days a week in the summer. She believes that if this had happened when she was first getting into aerials — she started skiing in alpine racing — it would have deterred her from pursuing the sport.
Park City Ski and Snowboard Club Action Sports Director Chris “Hatch” Haslock said the club is looking into alternative summer training plans as well. He understands that the renovations are a necessary thorn in the side.
“The best scenario would be that we don’t have any interruptions,” Haslock said. “Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic. … We know we’re going to have some changes, but now that we know what the timelines are, we can schedule some camps in August out of state or maybe even out of the country to be able to continue to train.”
Haslock said the pool must be open for the first half of the season because of a huge influx of aerialists in the club. He also mentioned Youth Sports Alliance and Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation scholarships that will likely come into play for some skiers and their families if they have to travel in the summer to train. Haslock compared the time away from the park’s pool to suffering an injury in a career, when you’d have to take weeks to months off from training.
“Yes, it’s not convenient,” Haslock said. “It’s going to probably be a little bit costly. … These things happen in sport; it’s just going to be happening to a lot of people at the same time.”