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2002 Salt Lake City Olympics ramps up security

The Olympics brings together large crowds and a huge international audience to the world stage — an irresistible opportunity for anyone wanting to make a public statement. Terrorism was first visited on the Olympics at Munich in 1972 and fears it would happen again escalated after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Today, security measures include bomb squads, surveillance cameras, metal detectors and armed guards, to name but a few.

It hasn't even been a year since the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 as Salt Lake City prepares to host the 2002 Winter Olympics, and no price seems too high to prevent an attack at the Games. As of the date of this report, Feb. 5, 2002, $300 million has been spent, and the spending is not over. In these two back-to-back CBC-TV items, reporter Ian Hanomansing takes a tour through the Olympic venues showing car checks, soldiers, police, electric fences, a radar station and biological warfare remedies, followed by Peter Mansbridge's interview with Olympic Security Chief Robert Flowers.
• At $300 million, the Salt Lake City Olympics had already almost tripled the security budget of the Atlanta Summer Games, held six years earlier, which came in at $108 million. Winter Olympics are much smaller than Summer Olympics, making this statistic even more startling. But Salt Lake City was only the first step in a trend that was to explode with the 2004 Games in Athens, where the cost of security rose to $1.5 billion.
  • In 1956, at the Melbourne Olympic Games, Hungary was chafing under its forceful occupation by the Soviet Union. In that case, the political tension was expressed in a bloody water polo match.

• Because it was seen as a potential target for terrorists, the U.S. Office of Homeland Security designated the 2002 Olympics a National Special Security Event. This designation put the U.S. Secret Service in charge of security and the FBI in charge of law enforcement.

• According to this report, 16,000 security personnel were used at the 2002 Games, including more than 2,000 members of the National Guard and over 10,000 police officers.

Medium: Television
Program: The National
Broadcast Date: Feb. 6, 2002
Guest(s): Robert Flowers, Don Johnson, Jim Thorne, Chris Thorpe
Host: Peter Mansbridge
Reporter: Ian Hanomansing
Duration: 6:52

Last updated: February 15, 2012

Page consulted on April 2, 2013

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