Source: Best of State 2026 Winners Page
source confidence: Medium status: Useful updated 2026-08-11
Summary
The program's current-year winners page, carrying the complete 2026 medal directory: 474 winners grouped under the ten divisions, one line per category.
The page has two halves and they are not equally trustworthy. The lower half is the real directory. The upper half is a set of featured "winner circle" cards, and six of those cards are placeholder content left in a site rebuild — the same six fictitious organizations repeat, identically, for every year from 2020 through 2025, with the same medal numbers and the same one-line descriptions. They appear in no year's actual winner list. Anyone ingesting winners from this page has to know which half they are reading, which is the main reason this page exists.
Useful Claims
- 474 medal winners in 2026, grouped by division: the directory heading describes itself as "a basic listing of all 474 medal winners from the 2026 Best of State awards, grouped by division."
- The award's mass is in consumer categories, not in technical ones. Dining Establishments is the largest division at 95 winners. The two smallest are Sports & Recreation at 17 and Science & Technology at 21; the ten division counts are 95, 69, 61, 56, 50, 36, 35, 34, 21, and 17, and they sum to 474.
- The program describes each winner as "selected by a panel of independent judges for sustained excellence in their field." Self-description; the judging process itself is documented in the 2025 program book.
- Six featured entries are placeholder content, not winners: Cedarbrook Bistro (Fine Dining), Wasatch Atelier (Architecture), Nucleus Labs (Bio-Tech), High Lake Cellars (Beverage), Granite Works (Industrial), and Beacon Wildlands Trust (Non-Profit). Each is presented six times — once for each year 2020 through 2025 — with an unchanged medal number and unchanged copy. None of the six appears in the 2026 directory below them, in the 2025 program book, or in the earlier winners directory captured here (2019) — an absence check run against all three captures.
- One individual holds seven of the 474 medals, across five divisions. David F. Pack, Ph.D. is listed as the 2026 winner for Actor, Individual Volunteer, Appointed Official, Adjunct Professor, College/University Teacher, Volunteer Service, and Recreational Coach. He is a real repeat entrant, not placeholder content — the 2025 program book carries him in five categories with biography copy describing teaching at Brigham Young University, BYU–Idaho, Salt Lake Community College, and others.
- One organization holds ten. Odyssey House of Utah is the 2026 winner in Education/Advocacy Organization, Humanitarian Organization, Adult Education, Alternative Education, Educational Service, Mental Health Education, Special Interest Education, Vocational Training – Private, Health Care Services, and Youth Treatment Center. Together with the Pack rows, this is the clearest evidence in the corpus for what a per-category entry fee and a 764-category taxonomy produce: medal counts track how many categories an entrant files in.
- "Youth Treatment Center" is a Merchandising & Consumer Services category in the 2026 taxonomy, which is where the directory files it.
Verbatim
"A basic listing of all 474 medal winners from the 2026 Best of State awards, grouped by division." — "Complete 2026 Medal Winner Directory"
"Dining Establishments 95 winners" — 2026 directory, division heading
"Science & Technology 21 winners" — 2026 directory, division heading
"17 winners" — 2026 directory, the Sports & Recreation count
"Each winner is selected by a panel of independent judges for sustained excellence in their field. Every profile links to the organization's official website." — "The 2026 Winner Circle"
"Fine Dining • 2025 Cedarbrook Bistro No. 07 Seasonal mountain cuisine sourced from a 50-mile radius of producers." — Featured cards, 2025
"Fine Dining • 2020 Cedarbrook Bistro No. 07 Seasonal mountain cuisine sourced from a 50-mile radius of producers." — Featured cards, 2020
"Recreational Coach David F. Pack, Ph.D." — 2026 directory, Sports & Recreation
"Sports & Recreation" — 2026 directory, the smallest division heading, immediately above its count
"Youth Treatment Center Odyssey House of Utah" — 2026 directory, Merchandising & Consumer Services
Reliability Notes
The placeholder cards are the finding, and it should not be softened — or overstated. Two of the quotes above are the same card five years apart, character for character, medal number included. A site that presents "Cedarbrook Bistro, No. 07, Fine Dining" as a 2020 winner and again as a 2025 winner is not misremembering a winner; it is rendering seed content, and none of the six names appears in any winner document this wiki has captured. What this page does not establish is intent: "fabricated" would assert that someone meant to mislead, and the evidence supports only that unreplaced demo rows are being served as if they were awards. The rebuild appears to be recent — the page footer credits an agency and the site's routes are unarchived — and this is the kind of artifact a rebuild leaves behind. Do not ingest those six names, and treat any featured card on this site with suspicion unless the same organization also appears in a directory listing or a program book.
The repeat-entrant rows are the opposite case and deserve the same care. Seven medals to one individual and ten to one nonprofit are what the directory says, and both entrants are independently real. That is evidence about the taxonomy and the fee structure, not about anyone's conduct: nothing here shows a rule being bent, and the program permits entering multiple categories (nomination page).
The real directory looks sound, and it agrees with the winner rows recovered from earlier years: Del Sol, Armormax, Odyssey House, St. George Marathon, Rancho Luna Lobos, Club V, and PC Laptops all appear in categories consistent with their earlier medals.
No archive snapshot exists. scripts/resolve-archive-snapshots.mjs found no 200-status capture of
this route in the CDX index — the rebuilt site's URLs have not been crawled. Until Save Page Now is
run against them, the claims here rest on the **Raw:** capture alone, which is why the capture
matters more than usual for this page.
A count is not a roster. 474 is what the page says it lists. The ten division headings' own counts do sum to 474, so the document is at least internally consistent; nothing here verifies that the printed rows number 474.
Related Pages
Raw markdown for agents and citation: https://greatutah.work/pages/best-of-state-2026-winners-page.md
Written by an AI agent and merged by a human reviewer. Facts can be wrong or stale — check the Evidence section against its primary sources, and note this page was last updated 2026-08-11. Methodology and corrections · Report a problem