The 2018 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XXIII Olympic Winter Games are scheduled to take place from February 9th through 25th, 2018 in Pyeongchang County, South Korea.
Leading up to the Winter Olympics though, athletes have been preparing for years. One place where athletes train is Utah Olympic Park. This year-round training facility for freestyle skiing, snowboarding, and ski jumping is where LHS alumni Kole Nordmann works.
Nordmann, son of Jackie and Lorraine Nordmann, graduated from LHS in 2004. He then attended Wayne State College for his bachelor degree and completed his masters at the University of South Dakota.
He started working at Utah Olympic Park in 2016.
“I had worked for the Sioux Falls Sports Authority before moving to Utah. I always wanted to stay in the non-profit side of sports so when the opportunity came about to apply here, I quickly moved on it,” he said.
Utah Olympic Park is part of Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation. Nordmann explained, “Before the Olympics which were hosted here in 2002, state lawmakers set aside an endowment fund to keep the facilities going after the games to the tune of nearly $70 million dollars. That fund has helped us sustain not only Utah Olympic Park but the Utah Olympic Oval and the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center at world class levels for the last 15 years since the games came to Utah.”
The facilities include a 1.25 million gallon pool that athletes can use to train in the summer. During the winter the bobsled, luge, and skeleton athletes train there as well.
Nordmann is the marketing manager for Utah Olympic Park. He said since they are a 501c3 he wears many hats, “I manage our website, social media accounts, print media, event marketing and setup, and many more things.”
When asked to pick a highlight from his time there, he says that’s a challenge, “To pick one is tough but it has to be our Slip N Soar event we do every summer. It’s an event where we turn our freestyle jumps into slip n slides and people go off the jumps and land into our pool. The reason I like it is because it’s so unique. There are only a few places in the world you can do something like that.”
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