Venues of the 2002 Winter Olympics through broadcasts from the stadium. The opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Paralympics was also held in the stadium on March 7, 2002. The Salt Lake Olympic Square was located in downtown Salt Lake City, and was a four-block area open only to pedestrians during the 2002 games. The Olympic Square was home to two other venues, the Olympic Medals Plaza and the Salt Lake Ice Center. It also included the Olympic Superstore, which sold officially licensed products. The square also housed the Sponsor Showcases and featured live music, food, drink, and other activities including the Olympic Celebration Series concerts.
Winter Olympic Games War since the Soviet Union first participated at the 1956 Winter Games. It did not take long for the Cold War combatants to discover what a powerful propaganda tool the Olympic Games could be. The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but many of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on