It’s written on the sides of the Colorado Springs Police Department’s cars. In the background of Mayor Yemi Mobolade’s news conferences. On signs when you drive into Colorado Springs on Interstate 25 or fly into the airport: Olympic City USA.

For as ubiquitous as Colorado Springs has made the city’s nickname to the public, it was only in February 2016 that the city officially began rolling out the brand highlighting the local connection to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee.

The 10-year anniversary of the brand lines up with the Winter Olympics taking place in Italy. Earlier this month, thousands of people visited Winter Fest at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum to take part in the organized celebration of the games. While hockey and snowboarding highlights played on the outdoor screen, tents for the national governing bodies of summer Olympic sports catered to the crowd.

Laura Fawcett, who worked for USA Figure Skating in the early 2000s and is now the senior digital manager for USA Volleyball, said there has been a concerted effort to make the Olympic bodies more present in Colorado Springs.

“It’s only been in the last few years that we really started appearing like this and meeting with the community,” Fawcett said at USA Volleyball’s tent at Winter Fest. “It does feel different than it did 10, 20 years ago.”

City officials and business leaders hope that some portion of the TV audience who see clips of the Olympic Training Center and glimpses of Garden of the Gods on the team outfits will be turned into visitors between now and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

“Our job here is to make sure they know the Olympic & Paralympic Museum is here and if you’re putting itineraries together, before or after you go to Los Angeles, you know Colorado Springs should be on there,” Visit Colorado Springs President and CEO Doug Price said.

A VALUABLE REBRAND FOR COLORADO SPRINGS

In 1977, the nascent U.S. Olympic Committee agreed to move its headquarters from New York City to the former Ent Air Force Base on the east side of Colorado Springs. City boosters made a strong offer, including $1 million in relocation support from the El Pomar Foundation and a $1 annual cost for rent. Another factor may have been that, according to previous Gazette reports, the only other city that offered to host the committee was Baton Rouge, La.

Over the next few decades, the training side expanded with the Training Center Velodrome, The Broadmoor World Arena Ice Hall and a $23 million expansion of the original training facility in the 1990s.

The city also began hosting the national governing bodies for various sports, which oversee the training programs and nominate athletes to the Olympic teams. Around 25 bodies for different Olympic sports are now based in Colorado Springs.

Rebranding the city was an early project for Mayor John Suthers after he was elected in 2015. The city set up a task force with his wife Janet Suthers, Price and officials from the Olympic Committee.

The previous city brand “Live it up!” launched in 2011 and never gained wide support from residents. Price said Colorado Springs was also looking to bolster its identity after negative national headlines involving budget cuts and high-profile opposition to same-sex marriage.

“We went in not wanting a discussion of what the brand should be,” Janet Suthers said. “The Olympics is one of the most valuable brands in the world, and we have access to it.”

One of the first hires for Mayor Suthers’ new staff was Jamie Fabos, who had been a spokesperson for the USA Swimming and USA Hockey governing bodies for about a decade.

Even though Fabos, now Mobolade’s outgoing chief of staff, lived in Colorado Springs while working with the Olympics, she said there seemed to be a disconnect between the city and the work she’d done with the sports.

“The feeling was that the Olympic Committee was kind of quietly here and certain people might know about the training center, but we didn’t engage with that brand a whole lot,” Fabos said.

Price and Suthers were inspired by a trip to Nashville, Tenn., where they saw how aggressively the city leaned into its identity as Music City, USA. The Sutherses wanted to do the same thing with the Olympics but without spending city funds on naming rights.

Shortly after the task force was launched, city staff discovered that there wouldn’t need to be negotiations over the naming rights. The city found a letter from 2008, when the USOC received $53 million in incentives to remain in Colorado Springs, in which the Olympic Committee agreed that the city was able to call itself the “Official Hometown of the U.S. Olympic Committee.”

The official designation was changed to “America’s Olympic City” at some point after 2008 and eventually revised by the task force to “Olympic City USA.” According to Price, the final tweak was to avoid causing an issue with Central America or South America.

By that point, Colorado Springs had also received $120 million in state sales tax rebates to support four City for Champions projects across the city. The funding boost covered the Air Force Academy Visitor Center and three sports-related facilities, with the capstone being the Olympic & Paralympic Museum.

“We would not have wanted to go this hard if the museum wasn’t a done deal. It was the anchor we needed to say we could call ourselves Olympic City USA,” Janet Suthers said.

‘IT’S A GREAT TAGLINE, BUT IT DOESN’T REPRESENT ALL’

The biggest supporters of the Olympic City brand argue that the name should appeal to anyone who supports the Olympic values: excellence, friendship and respect. Not everyone sees that connection.

Last year, the Colorado Springs Chamber & Economic Development Corp. commissioned a study to work on new promotional campaigns for Colorado Springs. One of the findings it reported was that businesses were not that interested in the Olympic City push.

Dani Bolling, the chamber’s chief operating officer, said there will still be an Olympic angle in the Reimagine Colorado Springs campaign, which rolls out this spring.

“It’s a great tagline, but it doesn’t represent all of what makes Colorado Springs unique. And that’s what we are trying to hone in on when we are meeting those economic development prospects,” Bolling said.

Fabos suggested that the limits on the business side may also relate to the intricacies of the Olympic brand. Colorado Springs has to get permission from the Olympic Committee for any new use of the slogan and those rules were the most restrictive around companies.

“If Coke’s the official sponsor of the Olympics, you can’t have an Olympic City logo next to a Pepsi machine. It’s probably one of the most heavily protected brands in the world,” Fabos said.

The slogan has reached a wide audience within Colorado Springs during the few years it’s been around. A 2024 survey of city residents conducted by Visit COS found that 88% of city residents were aware of the Olympic City USA brand. Of the residents surveyed, 63% said they had pride in that identity.

Price said the push needed to expand to the rest of the United States. In September 2024, Mobolade appeared at the White House for an event honoring the returning athletes from the Summer Olympics in Paris. The mayors of the two upcoming host cities, Los Angeles’ Karen Bass and Salt Lake City’s Erin Mendenhall, were supposedly surprised to see Colorado Springs joining them for the Olympic celebration and wearing Olympic City gear.

Price looked at the story as a successful sell of the Olympic City brand to new collaborators, rather than the initial lack of awareness. Less than a year later, all three mayors were at the Olympic Museum to celebrate the 2025 Hall of Fame induction.

The city plans to remain involved with Los Angeles ahead of the 2028 games. Colorado Springs Sports Corp. President and CEO Megan Leatham said the Sports Corp. was hoping to get the Olympic torch route to stop in Colorado Springs. The city will also host the State Games of America in 2028, potentially at the same time as the Olympics.

“We are able to draw in other outside sporting events because we are Olympic City USA. From a sports tourism standpoint, the brand is absolutely part of our bloodline as a city,” Leatham said.