The US Olympic Museum, near downtown Colorado Springs, just opened last year. It wasn’t on my radar, but my boss chose it as a destination for a department outing. The building it’s in is rather ugly, in my opinion, like someone turned a tissue box upside-down.
We were there on a Friday and had the place pretty much to ourselves. I can only remember seeing 5 or 6 other visitors. They asked a lot of personal information that was connected to a card we wore around our necks. I made up a name and an email address. We were supposed to pick two sports that would be featured on a customized tour. I chose ping-pong and curling and never saw a display about either one of them, so that was fun.
There were some general exhibits of torches, medals, and posters.
But the vast majority of exhibits were either pieces of equipment used by various athletes or reproductions of items connected to Olympic history. For example, here’s Peggy Fleming’s dress which her mother made to match the color of the liqueur made by monks near the ice-skating venue in hopes of influencing the voting. Really, that’s what the sign said.
Here’s the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” hockey scoreboard, frozen at the moment when the broadcaster said, “Do you believe in miracles?” A lot of the exhibits demonstrated this air of overblown historic significance.
I watched the Olympics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the athletes were still amateurs and the Olympics weren’t just a showcase for wokeness. I’ve paid almost no attention since then, so the vast majority of the exhibits were about people and competitions I know nothing about and am not interested in learning.
In one room, there were several interactive opportunities to compete, but they weren’t terribly fun or impressive. Here I am with a coworker racing against a wheelchair sprinter. I came in second.
Another display allowed us to make a “painting” of ourselves in the style of the famous Olympic paintings.
We had four hours to see everything, and I was done in an hour and a half. I walked across the new footbridge to America the Beautiful Park and wandered around. I’ve not gone there before because it’s known as a hangout for the homeless and a good place to get accosted, but it was mostly families and joggers this day.
Water drips down from the top of the ring and the basin becomes a splash pool, but the “fountain” is hard to see even when I was there in person.
The park is named for the song, which Katherine Bates supposedly wrote while standing somewhere near here and looking up at Pikes Peak.
