Vail, Colorado: Winter Mountain Games Postponed until 2016

With so much going on in the Vail Valley this year, and for the next two, Vail's newly introduced Winter Mountain Games have to be postponed until 2016.

The Winter Mountain Games were introduced to the Vail Valley in 2012 and successfully took place again this year. The Games are a celebration of human powered winter sports on snow, and are the counterpart to the very successful Summer Mountain Games. Along with the sports element of the games, arts and music are featured as well.

The Alpine World Ski Championships will be coming to Vail in 2015, and this undertaking is proving to be a much larger event than originally anticipated. So, for the Vail Valley Foundation, the decision to postpone the games until 2016 just made sense.  The Winter Mountain Games would have been cancelled in 2015 to accommodate the scale of the Alpine Championships anyway, and the foundation realized that taking the prior year to prepare would also be a wise choice.

Officials with the Foundation want to make it clear that they are committed to The Winter Mountain Games and look forward to a very successful 2016 Games. But, they are also keenly aware of the scope of the Alpine World Ski Championships, and would not want to hinder the operational flow for a supremely successful and smooth-running 2015 event.

The Alpine Championships attract participants from over 70 countries with a worldwide television viewership of over 750 million. Resources and assistance from all over the Vail Valley will be employed for this championship and the world will be watching.

How does this two year delay for the Winter Mountain Games affect Vail?  Will you continue to support the Winter Mountain Games when they return in 2016? Do you look forward to the Alpine World Ski Championships of 2015?