On Feb. 4, 1976, an expectant crowd packed shoulder to shoulder into a chilly open-air stadium for the opening ceremony of the XII Olympic Winter Games. Performers and dignitaries alike took the stage against a backdrop of majestic, snowy mountains, and runners clad in red and white sprinted up a long flight of stairs, touching torches to massive cauldrons and setting them ablaze with the Olympic flame.

Country by country, athletes marched in the parade of nations — that moment of glory guaranteed to every Olympian before dreams are fulfilled, or dashed — the Greek athletes first by tradition, and those from the host nation last.

Those final athletes were Austrian, but they were supposed to have been American. And the stadium — Bergisel, near Innsbruck — should have been Mile High, home of the Broncos. Six years earlier, the International Olympic Committee had welcomed Denver, Colo., into the exclusive fraternity of Olympic hosts, but in the end Denver gained an entirely different distinction: It became the only city in the history of the modern Olympic era to win the Games and then give them up.

The story begins in the 1960s, when a coalition of Denver’s business and civic leaders began preparing a bid to bring the Olympics to town. Colorado’s then-governor, Republican John Love, lent his enthusiastic support to the effort, appointing skiing trailblazer Merrill Hastings as the state’s Olympic coordinator. Operating as the Denver Olympic Organizing Committee (DOOC), the group spent the better part of the decade devising a $14 million plan to transform the city into the kind of winter-sports mecca capable of hosting an Olympic competition.

On May 13, 1970, at the 70th IOC Session in Amsterdam, the committee convinced the IOC of the validity of its plan. The Mile High City was officially anointed the site of the 1976 Winter Games, and seemingly the entire state of Colorado greeted the news with a wave of boosterism and civic pride.

Then it all began to fall apart.

The first flaw in the plan should have been the most obvious: Denver is not, strictly speaking, located in the mountains. It lies on the eastern slope of the Continental Divide, to the east of even the foothills of the Rockies. Yes, it sits at 5,280 feet, but what the city has in altitude it lacks in terrain and, more importantly, snow. But in its quest to convince the IOC that Denver was an ideal choice, the DOOC had placed all of the sporting venues — none of which actually existed at that point — within less than an hour’s drive of the city.

Among the sites was Mount Sniktau, the proposed site for the alpine events, which is not a skier’s mountain, and doesn’t have reliable snow cover. (In fact, the DOOC had to have snow airbrushed on the mountain in the picture of Sniktau that accompanied the pitch to the IOC.) In the nearby community of Evergreen, where the Nordic events were to be staged, residents learned that the competitions would literally run through their backyards (and the grounds of at least one school), and formed an organization called Protect Our Mountain Environment in protest.

As the complaints mounted, the DOOC recalibrated. The alpine events headed west to Vail, which had abundant snowfall and a desire to host, but was still a relatively young resort. The Nordic events were moved even farther to Steamboat Springs, where there was, at least, a ski jump already in place. Top 10 Winter Games cities

This solution became a new problem. From Denver it takes nearly two hours to drive the 100 miles to Vail; the trip to Steamboat Springs, 156 miles away, takes a minimum of three hours. The promised hour-long jaunt to fully half of the events — and the sexy ones, at that — had ballooned into an unmanageable commute over mountain roads and passes not designed to handle a great volume of traffic.

Colorado’s ski industry was still in its infancy at the time — Vail was only entering its 10th year of operation — and the idea of promoting the largely unsullied Rockies as a winter playground for the world triggered another round of environmental angst, along with a new fear: Once you invite the hordes in, it’s hard to keep them out. The sprawling Olympics seemed to herald the onslaught of unchecked development across the state.

But for all the hand-wringing over environmental concerns, the mushroom cloud of questions looming over Denver’s Olympics centered on “how,” not “if.” After all, no city had ever turned down a chance to host the Games. It simply wasn’t done.

Enter Dick Lamm, who wasn’t familiar with that particular rule of international etiquette. Elected to the state legislature in 1967, Lamm sat on the committee charged with auditing the state’s finances. When the issue of the Colorado taxpayers’ share of the Olympic tab — $5 million — came up, that committee began asking questions. The original $14 million total budget had gone the way of the 60-minute drive, more than doubling to $35 million — and that was after the bobsled events had been jettisoned as a cost-cutting measure.

And Lamm had noticed something even more troubling: No city had ever made money on the Olympics, and in fact most had been left with a sizable debt. “The first thing on my mind was the financial vulnerability,” he recalls. “Look, if a city in Japan hosts the Olympics they’ve got the whole financial structure of the country to support that, but Colorado was a small state.”

Lamm channeled his uneasiness into action, forming a statewide coalition of regular folks turned activists who dubbed themselves Citizens for Colorado’s Future. In short order and with shorter funds they led a successful petition drive to add an amendment to the state’s constitution outlawing the use of state money for the Olympics; the DOOC fought back with an extensive PR campaign. On Nov. 7, 1972, it all came down to the voters.

It wasn’t even close. A whopping 60 percent of the votes were cast in favor of the amendment. Without state funding there could be no federal funding, and without either there could be no Olympic Games in Denver. Developmental, environmental, and financial crises averted.

But of course, that wasn’t the case. Citizens for Colorado’s Future may have put Denver’s Olympic dreams on ice, but it did nothing to stop the rampant growth that so many feared would follow the Games: The state’s population in 1970 was just over 2.2 million; by 1990 it had grown by half, to just shy of 3.3 million. Much of that growth was concentrated along the Interstate 70 corridor, dotting the once pristine landscape with a jumble of condo developments, strip malls, and ski resorts.

The interstate became — and remains — the bane of virtually every mountain-loving Coloradan’s existence, home prices spiraled out of sight, and the granola crunchers and ski bums who had fought to keep Colorado wild found themselves shut out by powerful developers who gobbled up all the best land for private resorts catering to affluent ski tourists — or they became real-estate agents themselves.

People began to wonder if the state had been so smart to turn down the Games after all. Perhaps, the reasoning went, it would have been better to view those millions of taxpayer dollars not as a risk, but as an investment in the state’s infrastructure. Combined with the $15-plus million Uncle Sam had been prepared to kick in, the Denver-Vail stretch of I-70 could have been re-engineered to accommodate the impatient mass of cars that now clogs every lane — or even better, supplemented by some form of mass transit.

Several of the proposed venues were built anyway, but without the impetus of an impending Olympics they took much longer to come about (Beaver Creek, conceived as the alpine site and now host to World Cup races, didn’t open until 1980), resulting in higher startup costs and lost revenues. In some corners there were whispers that Colorado had passed up a golden opportunity.

Even Lamm entertains that notion. Sort of. “I’ve heard that many times,” he says, “but looking back, how would we ever know? We didn’t stop growth, but we made a wonderful statement about growth at any price. And I still think we were right from the financial perspective.”

He’s got some agreement from an unlikely source: Denver’s current mayor (and newly minted gubernatorial candidate), John Hickenlooper. “If I could go back to 1972, I think I probably would have voted against it myself,” Hickenlooper says. “I don’t think the city and the state were ready and could have accommodated the Games without too much risk for the reward.”

But don’t mistake hindsight for Hickenlooper’s current perspective. “I think now the state could benefit dramatically from the Games,” he adds.

Which brings us back to the future, and to the question that began burning this summer: Would Denver again throw its hat into the rings?

It certainly looked like it, albeit not officially. As Chicago nervously twiddled its thumbs waiting for word on its bid for the 2016 Summer Games, speculation began that Denver would plead its case for the following Winter Olympics. The United States Olympic Committee wasn’t having it. Maintaining that its focus was on Chicago and 2016, the USOC effectively closed the door on any American bid for 2018. Then the deadline for submissions passed, making the question moot. And so all eyes are now turning to 2022.