NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 8:22 PM
Updated: Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 8:37 PM
LAKE PLACID, N.Y.– It is 35 years ago, and you are on your way to the Winter Olympics. You pass through Albany, decide not to stop and visit Gov. Carey, and keep going.
Some 120 miles later on the Adirondack Northway, in Essex County, where the Hudson is more creek than river and the high peaks loom over you like pine-clad skyscrapers, you exit the highway and head west on Route 73.
You travel through the hamlets of North Hudson and Keene Valley and Keene, meandering along with the Ausable River as you go.
“Could this be right?” you wonder. “Is this road really going to take me to the Olympic Games?”
Yes, it is. Just keep going. After 30 miles, you arrive at an actual traffic light. Not blinking, either. A real, legitimate light, with red, yellow and green.
It is the only light in the village of Lake Placid, pop. 2,600. It means you have made it to the only place in the whole history of the United States to host the Winter Olympic Games twice — a north-country outpost as majestic as it is remote, the place where the Winter Games changed forever.
The 1980 Lake Placid Games, of course, are famous for giving us Nikolay Zimyatov of the Soviet Union, the winner of three gold medals in cross-country skiing, and even more so for giving us thunder-thighed Wisconsin kid, Eric Heiden, who raced around the oval in front of Lake Placid High School and won every speedskating event from 500 to 10,000 meters, hauling five gold medals back to Madison in what arguably remains the most stunning individual athletic achievement in the annals of the rings, Winter or Summer.
AP The U.S.A. hockey team’s semifinal win over U.S.S.R. catapulted the popularity of the Winter Olympics.
Most of all, though, Lake Placid brought us 20 young U.S. hockey players, virtually all of them college kids, who played seven games over 13 days, one of them coming on Friday night, Feb. 22, at 5 p.m., in the new Olympic Arena. The opponent was the Soviet Union, the occasion the Olympic semifinals. The Soviets were the original Big Red Machine, perhaps the greatest assemblage of hockey talent in history, the country that had won the last four Olympic golds and outscored its opponents, 175-44, in the process, and that had just played the Americans at Madison Square Garden and won 10-3.
The new arena had a capacity of 7,700. Authorities estimated that there were 11,000 people in the building that night. At the end of 60 minutes, the explosion of sound at the top of Main St., made it seem as if Mount Marcy had erupted. The scoreboard said U.S.A. 4, U.S.S.R. 3.
Sandy Caligiore remembers it well.
A 29-year-old broadcaster/reporter, Caligiore was working the game for WNBZ in nearby Saranac Lake. He had a little perch near the top of the building, across the arena from where Al Michaels and Ken Dryden were calling the game for ABC on tape delay. It would be the last time the International Olympic Committee would allow a local outlet to broadcast the Games live, but Sandy Caligiore knew nothing about his sliver of history. He had a game to call, same as Michaels.
Mike Eruzione scored with 10 minutes left. The clocked ticked. The drama built.
“Do you believe in miracles?” Michaels said into his ABC microphone.
View Gallery Lake Placid: A look back 35 years later
“It’s a miracle. I can’t believe it. It’s a miracle,” Caligiore said into his WNBZ microphone.
Caligiore, a public-relations consultant who still lives in town, has worked five additional Winter Games since 1980, all as a media-operations specialist. Though he knew he was witnessing an epic sporting event that Friday night, Caligiore had little notion that he was calling an event that would change the Olympic orbit forever.
“The great irony of the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980 and the stories that came out of them is that it created such a boom of interest that it ensured that Lake Placid would not host them again,” Caligiore said.
He paused.
“It’s romantic to think about, but you’re never going to see the Olympics coming to a small town like this again. It’s just not ever going to happen.”
***
The original president of the Lake Placid organizing committee was the village’s retired postmaster, Ron MacKenzie, a New York City native who attended Brown University and was an ardent promoter of Lake Placid as a winter-sports destination. When MacKenzie died suddenly at age 75, just before Christmas in 1978 (he had climbed to the judges’ observation stand for the first competition at the newly built Olympic ski jump facility), he was replaced by a Methodist minister, J. Bernard Fell. Fell was assisted by a local attorney, Norman Hess.
Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News A plaque commemorating U.S.A. hockey coach Herb Brooks inside Olympic Arena.
If it sounds profoundly quaint and homespun, the organization and staging of the 1980 Games, well, it was. The most expensive ticket to any event was $ 64.70. Lake Placid schoolchildren got a five-week vacation in the run-up to the Olympics. Lake Placid High School served as the media center, sitting on a hill just over the outdoor oval where Eric Heiden skated. The ABC broadcasting compound was a short distance out of town, a structure that is now the Town of North Elba Highway Garage. The Athletes’ Village, in the nearby hamlet of Ray Brook, was converted to a federal correctional institution later that year.
The semifinal hockey game that would become Sports Illustrated’s sports moment of the 20th Century could be seen live on Canadian TV, but not until 8 p.m. on ABC; in the pre-social media universe, it was actually possible to watch the game without finding out what happened.
ABC paid $ 15.5 million for the broadcast rights to the 1980 Winter Games. Four years later, in Sarajevo, the rights fee jumped to $ 90 million. It may not have been solely because Herb Brooks’ hockey team beat the Soviets, but put it this way: it wasn’t because of Nikolay Zimyatov.
Jim Rogers, 82, is a retired businessman who was also one of the 1980 organizers, heading up the protocol committee. These days he gives tours of the arena where the miracle happened, chronicling the history of an Olympics that had just over 1,000 athletes and 37 countries, competing in 38 different events. At the 2014 Games in Sochi, there were 2,800 athletes from 88 countries, competing for a total of 98 gold medals, the differences between then and now as different as the village of Lake Placid is from the city of New York.
“It’s the dollar sign that runs the show (in the Olympics now),” Rogers said. “The IOC can say whatever they want, but the ones calling the shots is television.”
Rogers lives three blocks from the arena, and may know it better than his own house. The arena’s charm is that it is utterly the same, from the red seats to the white grid of ducts on the ceiling.
Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News Memories of the 1980 Olympics are still strong in Lake Placid.
“I don’t know if you can call any sports arena intimate, but this comes pretty darn close,” Rogers said.
Only five things have changed in the building in the intervening four decades. One is its name it is now called Herb Brooks Arena, in honor of the late coach. Netting has been installed to protect spectators from flying pucks, and advertising has been added to the boards, and white strips of paint have been brushed on the cement staircases to make them easier to see. The only other change is the No. 20 banner next to the American flag, over the blue line, a tribute to defenseman Bob Suter, who became the first of the players to die when he was stricken by a heart attack last fall.
As he leads visitors on his tours, Jim Rogers likes to recreate for people a sense of the prevailing world picture at the time, reminding them of the despair and disillusionment that was gripping the American psyche, with interest rates at near loan-shark levels and the economy a mess, with hostages in captivity in Iran, and Soviet troops having just invaded Afghanistan. President Carter himself spoke of a “malaise” that was afflicting the American spirit, a profound sense of powerlessness in the face of a raging ayatollah and Soviet military might, no comforting thought in a Cold War world.
And then came Friday night, Feb. 22, and a hockey game . . . an Olympic semifinal . . . a game the U.S. was not even supposed to be competitive in.
“It was a pick-me-up for the whole country,” Jim Rogers said.
Two days later, the U.S. hockey team came from behind to beat Finland, 4-2, to win the gold medal the only American gold in Lake Placid that didn’t belong to Eric Heiden.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” played in the little arena on Main St., and people cried and cheered, and cried some more. Hours later, the cauldron was extinguished and soon the world would leave, making a turn at the only light in town, bidding adieu to the last small-town Games we will ever see.
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lake placid ,
winter olympics
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