41st annual Simplot Games kick off Thursday
Thursday marks the start of the 41st annual Simplot Games. Held at Idaho State University’s Holt Arena each year, the event is considered “North America’s premier indoor high school track and field event.”
This year, more than 2,200 high school athletes from around the globe and several Olympians will gather in the Gate City.
“If a coach has an athlete that has Olympic hopefuls or perhaps even a scholarship hopeful, they’ve pretty well gotta have them at Simplot Games to make their mark there,” Simplot’s manager of public affairs Rick Phillips said. “It’s just that level of competition.”
And those who have competed and succeeded at the sports highest level are always around the event. Olympians like 1968 gold medalist and Simplot Games chairman Dick Fosbury.
Fosbury has been attending the games since the early ’80s and says it’s been getting bigger and better ever since.
“The meet grows, in number of athletes, the countries that they come from and the quality of performance,” Fosbury said. “We’ve had a number of national records here.”
Fosbury, known for inventing the revolutionary back-first “Fosbury Flop,” loves watching the athletes perform a technique he created more than 50 years ago, as “a move of desperation.”
“They are a lot better, technically, than I was ’cause I was still developing the technique in high school,” he said.
And from Thursday through Saturday, inside Holt Arena, many of these athletes will perform in an unfamiliar place, on a grand stage.
“For most of these kids, probably 99 percent of these kids, this will be the single biggest athletic event of their life,” Phillips said. “There’s a few that’s gonna go on to Olympic greatness and college greatness but for most of these kids this is it.”
While the event has evolved greatly during its four-decade run, Phillips said Pocatello is the only place it can be held.
“So the whole community has embraced it at this point, it would be impossible to move Simplot Games any other place,” he said.
And, of course, “there’s not another Holt Arena,” Phillips said.
