Do you believe in nostalgia?
Visit Lake Placid, N.Y., and you will be immersed in countless references, souvenirs and images recalling the moment in sports history when sportscaster Al Michaels hyperbolically asked 34 million American viewers, “Do you believe in miracles?”
It’s a central feature in the village’s international claim to fame as Winter Olympic host. It was a long time ago—43 years—before more than half of the world population was born. But, still: Approaching upstate Lake Placid now from the main road off the New York Thruway, one can’t avoid the various 1980 Olympic sites—the Mount Van Hoevenberg complex with its bobsled and luge run, the biathlon venue, the Olympic ski jump.
At the village’s southern edge, there are the flying flags from the 1980 participating Olympic nations, as if those Games still were going on, just outside the speed skating oval where American Eric Heiden won five gold medals, and adjacent to the imposing Olympic Center that includes two hockey arenas—from the two Lake Placid Winter Games, in 1932 and 1980—situated, naturally, at “Miracle Plaza.”
It has been more than a decade since the New York Times noted how Lake Placid “can feel cryogenically frozen in time—1980 to be exact, which was when this secluded pocket of the Adirondacks hosted its second Winter Olympics” yet continued to “look much as it did when Jimmy Carter was in office.”
And still: Forty-three years on, around town there are pictograms of the various Winter Olympic sports displayed on buildings; an old bobsled perched on a sidewalk; 1980 Olympic jerseys, signed by members of that winter’s U.S. team, hung in hotel lobbies; rows of shops with sweatshirts and caps adorned with 1980 logos; the local newspaper’s masthead proclaiming Lake Placid “host of the 1932 and 1980 Olympic Winter Games;” books and memorabilia chronicling the so-called 1980 “Miracle on Ice.”
On Labor Day weekend—this Labor Day, 2023—the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and the weekly Lake Placid News both ran reports on New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s recent visit to Lake Placid and her specific recollections of that “miracle” 1980 semifinal ice hockey victory by the underdog Americans over the Soviets. Gillibrand even noted that her parents had attended the game. Which apparently prompted current Olympic Regional Development Authority board president Joe Martens’ aside that “It’s kind of a running joke in Lake Placid—there were 8,500 people in here for the game but 30,000 people say they were here.”
It was just a hockey game. But it featured a shocking upset by a rag-tag team of American amateurs over the four-time reigning gold medalists from the old Soviet Union. And amid Cold War tensions, the Yanks’ thoroughly unlikely upset of the so-called Evil Empire was widely cast as a victory for righteousness, somehow evidence of Americans’ morality, and as the game’s final seconds ticked away, Michaels laid it on pretty thick with his “miracles” question.
Forty-three years ago. Sooo yesterday, no? Yet the Lake Placid of 2023 hardly has a Paleolithic feel; rather, it is a thoroughly up-to-date, scenic burg, alive with flora and fauna, centered by serene Mirror Lake with the Adirondack Mountains as a picturesque backdrop.
It teems with energy—joggers, swimmers, dog walkers, baby strollers, kayakers and cyclists—and with community affairs such as the I Love BBQ and Music Festival Weekend surrounding Labor Day, and a state golf championship for seniors and “superseniors” (65-plus).
It’s just that village leaders know how their bread is buttered. So, along with the ongoing Olympic reminiscence is the continued outreach for similar—if less famous—international winter competitions such as last February’s World University Winter Games and next month’s World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships, in which competitors form artistic squiggles on black ice.
The local population is not quite 2,500 but there are year-round crowds of tourists, many speaking in foreign tongues, lured by the village’s international renown and resort status.
“If the town were not smothered in Olympic logos,” the long-ago Times travel piece reported, “visitors might forget about its Olympic connections and think they had wandered into an idyllic Swiss hamlet.
Not likely, that. The miracle has been held over by popular demand.