A Placid Preview of the Games to Come

Departure Day for Vancouver is now just eight days away!

But back in October, I got a little preview of the work I’ll be doing — not to mention a glimpse of how much fun it is to cover the Olympics.

In preparation for the 2010 Winter Games, the folks in charge sent me up to Lake Placid, NY for three days. You might recognize it as the site of the 1980 Games, or, as they’re commonly known, the “Do you believe in miracles?!?” Games. But Lake Placid is also where many of the US Olympic athletes train … and that’s how I found myself on a plane to SLP Airport on a Sunday in mid-October.

First, when I say “plane”, I’m not talking about your typical Delta flight. I’m talking about a nine-seater where you can actually see through the front of the cockpit. And when I say “airport”, I’m talking about a building barely bigger than your standard McDonald’s; it has just one terminal and serves just three flights a day.

(See my plane? It’s the one all the way on the left … Also, this is at Boston’s Logan Airport, not Lake Placid’s, which is far smaller …)

I could probably spend the rest of this entry making “How small is Lake Placid?” jokes. (This is true — there’s only one rental car place at the airport, and I had to call the owner at home to come in and give me my car. Thankfully, as was typical of the folks in Lake Placid, he was tremendously friendly once he got there.) The fact is, Lake Placid could never host an Olympics today; it’s way too small to handle the gargantuan number of athletes, families, fans, and media that make up the modern Winter Games.

But as a place to visit and spend a few days, it’s just about perfect.

You won’t find a resort town with much more personality than Lake Placid. During the winter it’s a palace of white, seemingly always smothered with snow while skiers and tourists come to get away.

When I was there, in the middle of autumn, I got a different view: the leaves changing all over the forest that is the New York Adirondacks. Combine that with crisp fall weather, and you couldn’t ask for a more picturesque feel.

As for my work up there, I spent three days interviewing a variety of potential US Olympians from the luge, bobsled, and skeleton. Since we will only have limited access to the athletes in Vancouver, we decided to jump the fun and talk to a whole bunch of them at the start of the season. I spoke with luge standouts Erin Hamlin and Tony Benshoof; bobsled stars Shauna Rohbock and Steve Holcomb; skeleton racers Zach Lund and Noelle Pikus-Pace; and a slew of others, including Douglasville, GA native and now-Olympian Elana Meyers. I also filmed their training sessions and got to stand atop the track as their sleds came whizzing by.

Your nutshell/understatement/summary? It was fun.

I came back with enough video and interviews for 20 stories; you’ll likely see about 8-9 of them on the Olympic Zone shows running throughout the 2010 Games. In addition to talking with the athletes, I also received a tour of Lake Placid from the town historian and got an inside look at the 1980 Arena, home of the Miracle on Ice. One of the coolest moments was at the 1980 Olympic Museum, where they were showing a tape of the actual “Miracle on Ice” game. As the third period played out, two middle-aged gentlemen stood at the screen, unable to turn away from a game whose ending they already knew.

To me that moment crystallized the joy of sports, the joy of being a fan, the joy of the Olympics. It’s the type of moment I hope I experience in Vancouver; we leave in eight days … let the Games begin.