Lake Placid: The Town That Hosted the Winter Olympics Twice
Near Lake Placid, New York
Welcome to Lake Placid, a village of fewer than three thousand people that has twice hosted the Winter Olympic Games, in nineteen thirty two and again in nineteen eighty. When the games arrived here in nineteen thirty two, it was the first Winter Olympics ever held outside of Europe. Only seventeen nations sent athletes, roughly two hundred fifty of them, and the United States topped the medal count for the only time until the Vancouver games of two thousand ten.
Those nineteen thirty two games gave the world something we now take for granted, the medal podium ceremony, where the gold, silver, and bronze winners stand at three different heights. To pull it off, this small town built an indoor arena and carved the first bobsled run in North America into a nearby mountainside. Nearly fifty years later, in nineteen eighty, Lake Placid did it again, and this time the whole world was watching in a way the tiny village could barely handle.
Thirty seven nations and more than one thousand athletes came. A speed skater from Wisconsin named Eric Heiden won gold in all five of his events, an individual sweep that had never happened before at any Olympics, summer or winter. And on the twenty second of February, a team of American college players beat the mighty Soviet Union at ice hockey in a game the country still calls the Miracle on Ice.
Lake Placid is unusual because it never tore its Olympic venues down. The bobsled track, the ski jumps, the speed skating oval, the arena where the hockey miracle happened, they are all still here, still in use, training the next generation of athletes. Drive through town and you pass Olympic history on nearly every street.
The village sits in the heart of the Adirondack Park, ringed by the highest mountains in New York, and that combination, world class winter sport wrapped inside six million acres of protected wilderness, is what makes this one of the most remarkable small towns in America. Over the next few stops, we will explore how a place this small left such a giant mark on the world.
