Boise will host 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games

KTVB.COM Boise Idaho News, Weather, Sports & Traffic Local News: "Boise will host 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games

06:37 PM MDT on Tuesday, May 16, 2006
BOISE -- The decision is final -- Boise will host the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games. The announcement was made just moments ago.

The news broke at the Allen Noble Hall of Fame on the Boise State campus. The games will take place at BSU, Tamarack Resort, Qwest Arena, Bogus Basin and Idaho Ice World.
The Idaho bid was lead by Jim and Pirie Grossman and a team of business leaders, some of which gathered at the Cottonwood Grille in Boise to wait for a call from the site selection committee earlier today.

NewsChannel 7 was there as the call came in, hours before the official news was made public.
"Just looking around the room and seeing the faces, we know this is the right thing. We knew Idaho was ready for it. We know no one else could really bring what we had to offer and that was the heart,' said Pirie Grossman.

The Special Olympics is a non-private organization that supplies year round sport training and competition in state Olympic games to 1,900 Idaho children and adults with intellectual disabilities.

Boise was one of two U.S. cities among the final four locations considered for the World Winter Games. The other was Reno-Tahoe. Cites in Austria and Germany were also finalists.
Economic impact will be huge

1997 award winning report on Special Olympics Boise will follow in the footsteps of Nagano, Japan -- the host of the 2005 World Winter Games.

Not only is this a major event for participants, but for the Boise area as well. It's estimated the games could bring in as much as $50 mil" More