Arena gets an Olympic alias
Bloomberg News Service
SALT LAKE CITY — Olympic visitors can scour the official guide map for hours without finding one of the best-known buildings in Salt Lake City.
Associated Press
Although it's the site of figure skating and short-track speed skating, the Delta Center officially doesn't exist during the two week-long Winter Games.
The Delta Center arena is officially known as the Salt Lake Ice Center during the Winter Games, because of a ban on corporate advertising at Olympic venues.
The 16,000-seat arena, home to basketball's Utah Jazz, is still two blocks from the world-famous Mormon temple. But because of an Olympic policy that prohibits corporate names on venues, the arena has been temporarily renamed the "Salt Lake Ice Center."
"It's a little bit confusing," said Cecelia Paglia, general manager of the arena during the Olympics. "We have people standing right below the Delta Center sign, with the map in their hand saying, 'Where the heck is the Salt Lake Ice Center?"'
Even though Delta Air Lines Inc. is the official airline of the 2002 Winter Games and is paying the arena $25 million over 20 years to use its name, Olympic officials refused to lift their ban.
During Monday night's figure skating coverage on NBC, announcers mentioned "Salt Lake Ice Center" 20 times, according to Eric Wright of Joyce Julius & Associates, which estimates the value of corporate sponsorships. If they had said "Delta Center," the company would have had an estimated $4.3 million worth of exposure, Wright said. The figure is based on the $600,000 NBC charges for a prime-time, 30-second Olympics commercial.
"That's just one night's events in that arena," Wright said. "Multiply that by the number of nights they'll have events there and it comes out to a huge number."
