Call it the biggest party Salt Lake City will have ever seen, spread over 10 blocks and 15 days, smack in the middle of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.

Salt Lake City has awarded rock promoter United Concerts, which brought the Rolling Stones to Rice-Eccles Stadium, a $729,000 contract to provide a 14-hour-a-day entertainment backdrop to the world's biggest sports extravaganza.

"This is going to be the festive face of Utah," United Concerts Vice President Dave McKay said Thursday. "It's a party not only for Olympic visitors, but the people who live here as well."

There will be six stages along the festival corridor, which begins at Washington Square -- the block housing the City-County Building -- snakes down through Exchange Place and then fans out along Main Street and 300 South. The exact locations of the stages have not been set, but officials expect that Exchange Place and the Gallivan Center will be among the major stopping points.

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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- With 100 days to go, the International Olympic Committee ended its final inspection of Salt Lake's preparations for the Winter Games with praise for security arrangements.
"The games will take place and the athletes and spectators must accept those extra measures that could cause inconvenience," said Marc Hodler, who oversees the games for the IOC.

The Feb. 8-24 games will have the tightest security ever for an Olympic event, Hodler said.

"The world is not the same anymore," he said. "We can't deny it and just do whatever we have been doing in the past."

So far, the only sign of trouble for the games are street protests planned by animal rights groups against a rodeo that will be part of the Olympic cultural program. Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, said the rodeo was part of Utah's heritage and would go on.

The IOC coordination commission left Salt Lake on Wednesday with few if any doubts. It was the IOC's seventh and final inspection before the games and ended on the 100-day mark until the opening ceremony.

"Salt Lake City has the best possible infrastructure for the Winter Games, and SLOC from the beginning has been ahead of schedule. There never were any delays," Hodler said.

In Lausanne, Switzerland, IOC President Jacques Rogge issued a two-page letter also signed by Romney stating security was their No. 1 priority and that the U.S. government was "fully committed" to protecting the games from terrorism.

More than 7,000 federal, state and military personnel will guard a "known perimeter during a specific time period," taking the element of surprise from would-be terrorists, the officials said.

Security arrangements were comprehensive before Sept. 11 and made even more so since the attacks, according to the letter.

"This includes extraordinary measures for combating threats from the air, more restrictive policies and procedures to gain access to a venue and higher levels of security at non-competition sites," Rogge and Romney wrote to 122 IOC members, national Olympic committees and international sports federations.

The letter divulged no details about security because, Hodler said, "the most dangerous weapon against terrorism is secrecy."