I'm not sure that this is going to be totally coherent, but I did want to write a little bit about the finances of the sliding sports (at least as I understand them) and discuss a little bit of what I think could be done to build, and more importantly, maintain tracks in different places.
First of all, for the reasons
@Fred not Lynn correctly points out, it's very difficult to get the sort of mass participation in say, bobsled, that would make the finances for opening a facility of that sort work. Most tracks now are artificial and refrigerated. If we take the cost of rebuilding Königsee in Bavaria as kind of a starting point of €60 million (about $66 million, give or take), you can immediately see the problem. And that price presumably does not require the acquisition of land, as it's rebuilding a severely damaged track. Germany seems like a decent median for a cost structure in building a track. It probably costs more in the US (where labor costs are higher) and building a track in a place like Sochi, Russia or outside of Beijing, for some recent examples, are probably a lot cheaper. So we kind of have to assume that the construction is going to come as a part of some bigger event, like the Olympics. Nobody is building a track for any other purpose. It's just not gonna happen.
So it's a question about how to keep up with the operating expenses, if you consider the construction as basically a given. And that's going to be harder than it sounds. Again FNL has the right idea, I think, about locating a track near a major metropolitan area. That is important for the economics, but also for the sporting aspect of it as well. If a nation is making that kind of capital investment, it presumably wants to become more successful in the sports to justify that investment. The Korean skeleton program has done and excellent job of this, and the Chinese team has done as well. I was in St. Moritz during an international training week a few years back (before the Beijing Winter Olympics), and I swear that they had 40 new athletes there training in St. Moritz that week. I don't know how they selected them all exactly, and there were a bunch that seemed to have no idea what they were doing really, but you could tell a few of them were naturals. And some of the people I slid with that week are now among the best in the world. No idea what happened to the others haha.
But the reason that is important is having that facility within a relatively close drive from Beijing opens an enormous pool of talent. The facility at Park City is able to do something similar, and Whistler has to be a big attraction for Canadian athletes. Heck, we've even had discussions in Breakfast With Gazza about the US basically focusing on recruiting say, all the best athletes from Southern California as a way to focus its efforts over a massive country. It's the same theory here too. And I also do want to reiterate what FNL said about ORDA. What they do with the population and area that they have to work with, is nothing short of amazing. One of my friends from the sport grew up in that area, and started as a junior luge athlete, and switched to skeleton. But there just aren't enough people there to make that kind of talent mining worthwhile. It does work as a pretty great spot for development athletes though, that they can focus on their sport 100%. But that really doesn't work until they're over 18 and out of high school. So the USBSF tries really hard to get athletes from other sports (mainly track and field, but can be others as well), to give it a try after college. But it's hard to do that and compete against Germans and Latvians that have already have a 5+ year head start.
The track in Lake Placid is usually open longer than any other track in the world. I've been there in early October and slid in 70 degree weather in April (slowly, mind you), but those reps are big. That can't happen in a place like Park City, where the latitude and sunshine are a constant battle -- which is a big part of the reason that I think the USBSF remains headquartered in LP (though PC is considered an "easy" track, while LP is considered difficult - despite my own experiences being the opposite) but probably draws more talent from Utah. That's one of the reasons that Denver has never been a place for a track, even though it would seem to tick a lot of those boxes. If there were a track in Denver for some hypothetical future Olympics there, it would be tough to keep open long enough each year to justify it.
So, if you have the sporting thing covered and the track paid for, it becomes a battle against operating expenses. Now, I honestly have no idea how much it costs to run a track every year. All I know is that it can't be cheap. Next time I'm in St. Moritz, I'll ask Gregor (I think he'd tell me), but it's also the only natural track left, which makes it a very different comparison. I'll get into that more in a minute. But assuming a refrigerated track, your big expenses are going to be electricity #1 (it takes a lot to keep a 1300m ice tube cold), labor (you need people to maintain the track and facilities, drive athletes from the bottom back to the top, run the office, provide taxi rides, and a number of less visible roles). I'm just throwing out a number here, but my guess is a minimum of $5 million a year, and maybe more. Your sources of revenue are those taxi rides, athlete fees, maybe some sponsorships (the Lake Placid track was called the Verizon Sliding Center when I was going there), some visitor fees and merchandise. I can't imagine that the sponsorships are going to be worth all that much...maybe $100,000 of that? Maybe you make another $100,000 or so on merchandise, so you've got $4.8 million to make up on sliding fees. Ouch. I feel like I got charged like $30 run at Lake Placid, and it was cheaper if you were on the national team -- maybe half that. Let's say you've got 50 development athletes across disciplines, each paying $20 per run, going 2x per day for 100 days (and that's a pretty sizable program). So that's $200,000 in athlete fees. $4.6 million to go. Taxi rides earn a lot of money, but they reduce the availability of the track for your athletes. Let's say you can run it 4 hours a day. You could feasibly get in 20 rides an hour, give or take (it would go faster for people who know what they're doing). An average taxi ride is $150 per person (cheaper in some places, more expensive in others). You get three paying passengers, and for ease of math, but also adding in some souvenirs figure $500/ride. If you run that constantly, every one of those 100 days (which is basically impossible, as there are holidays, weather closures, World Cup and other events), you're going to earn $1 million. So now we're down to a $3.6 million deficit, and running out of ideas on how to earn more.
For comparison, I paid CHF30 for every ride from like 2005-2019, and last year I think it had been raised to 40. A taxi ride there is CHF250 a person (last I checked), but...that's St. Moritz.
Obviously, the math is tough here. Expanding participation is dicey. You can't have any schmoe go down the track. They're going to get hurt, and your insurance is going to hate you. Park City did some interesting stuff with opening club sports for locals, and it did well for a while, but then it seems that they've mostly shut that down, though I could be wrong.
I'm sure brighter minds than mine have tried to solve this dilemma, but there isn't an easy answer, and you can quickly see how a country like Italy, with budget concerns quite different from China or even the US has had to close their facilities, and refuses to build a new one.
A quick word about St. Moritz and the natural ice track there. They build again every single year. So every year, it's ever so slightly different (and therefore, track records there are only good for the season), though always following the same path. Most years, there is enough snow around to build it. Some years there isn't, and they need to go higher into the mountains and truck it down. They are basically only able to keep it open from around Christmas until the beginning of March, when Mother Nature, the sun and warmth make it impossible to maintain. I'm guessing that their operating expenses are a bit cheaper there (without the massive electricity usage), but they pay for it by reconstructing the track every single year. That *could* be a model for other places, but St. Moritz is almost unique in a few ways to allow this: it's a massive center for winter tourism, the visitors are almost uniformly wealthy, it's basically the birthplace of the sport, and probably most importantly, they have a labor pool with the experience of doing this extremely specialized task every year. Plus, most of those people are seasonal workers from Italy, that earn much more than they could make doing "unskilled" labor at home, but are paid less than what they typical Swiss worker would earn. And St. Moritz has that pool of talent to draw on in a way that a place like Lake Placid could find extremely difficult, if not impossible. As would many other winter resorts.
So, I certainly haven't solved the problem, but hopefully have shed some light on what those problems are. I'm not sure that it is the most essential use of taxpayer money, if I'm being honest. But I've always loved the Olympics, and perhaps if you stuff it into some kind of "national pride" thing, burning $0.10 for every man, woman and child in the US to maintain a sliding center isn't exactly breaking the bank either.
@Fred not Lynn I can barely skate, but I'm kinda interested to check out the Eisstadion in Wilmersdorf now!
