Back Where The Games Belong

The Olympic mantle fell again last week—at long last—upon the peaceful Adirondack Mountain village of Lake Placid. The International Olympic Committee, assembled in Vienna in its traditional setting of splendor and quasi-royal indifference, selected the unpretentious upstate New York town to stage the XIII Winter Games in 1980. The choice was not unexpected. Indeed, it could scarcely have been avoided, for by the time the IOC convened, Lake Placid had come to be the only place in the world that wanted the job.

This was victory by attrition. Still, the logic of the selection is both geometric and poetic—a perfect circle finished. It was in 1932 that Lake Placid became something more than a frozen flyspeck on the U.S. map. That was the year this cold, hick village of just 2,930 North Country folks conducted the III Winter Olympiad. Those were times of simplicity: no more than 331 athletes turned up to compete in a mere 14 events, hand-twined ropes made of real evergreens festooned the single main street and a good time was had by all. Games in those days, even Olympic Games, were something played rather than propagandized. Technocracy and power politics had not fully infected international sport, and the Olympics had not yet been overwhelmed by numbers.

Nowadays well over a billion dollars is routinely spent on the Games, winter and summer, in an average Olympic year. Entire cities are refurbished, even rebuilt. The number of winter events has grown to 34 and, the last time around, the roster of athletes had swelled to 1,130. It seemed that nothing would ever be simple any longer.

But now we return to Lake Placid, current population down to 2,731, surrounded by the notably un-Alp-like prominences of the Adirondacks, whose simple, slope-shouldered old hills are covered with green fir and delightfully pocked with placid lakes. No sense of tension or immensity, no roar of Sapporo traffic, no rush of Grenoble throngs, no hint of Innsbruck's police battalions. Lake Placid is not a city. Neither is it a gaudy winter-sports confection spun yesterday at the edge of some megalopolis. Lake Placid is a village, isolated and real, far from madding crowds.

And therein lies the beauty, at least potentially, of the XIII Winter Olympiad: a return to a mountain village setting, a return to naturalness, an Olympics scaled to decent size.

Almost all of the men who have led Lake Placid's patient quest to restage the Winter Games are Adirondack Mountain born and bred; "North Country Boys," they're called. They were raised on small-town notions of neighborliness, loyalty and something elusive and old-fashioned called community spirit.

The major source of energy behind the Olympics bid was a markedly Main Street form of kinetics—voluntary participation powered by the same civic excitement that once was harnessed to raise money to buy uniforms for the fire department drum and bugle corps. The whole town seems to be as committed to the righteousness of returning the Olympics to a proper honest human scale as it is to the merchants' projection of wholesale free publicity, and subsequent business, that will be generated both during and after the Games.

Chairman of the organizing committee is the Rev. J. Bernard Fell, 52, a Methodist minister who was formerly a village cop. About 20 years ago Officer Fell was shot in the stomach by a deranged fugitive who had already killed two people while fleeing through the Adirondack woods. Fell nearly died. When he finally emerged, healthy, from his ordeal he decided that Officer Fell would become Pastor Fell and dedicate the rest of his life to Christianity. Bespectacled and ascetic, the Rev. Bernie Fell has further devoted himself in recent years to bringing the Olympics back to his hometown. And so have many others.

Norman Hess, 52, is a country lawyer, for 15 years a loyal member of the town sports council, a solid no-nonsense attorney who has lived in Lake Placid for 20 years. Luke Patnode, 46, graying and portly, was born the son of a carpenter in Lake Placid, played basketball and football for Lake Placid High School, once ran the Chamber of Commerce and now is publicity director of Essex County. Jack Shea, 64, is a big, gentle fellow, a longtime storekeeper in Lake Placid who was a justice of the peace for years. A famous speed skater in his youth, Shea won two gold medals before ecstatic hometown fans in the 1932 Olympic Games. He is now the elected supervisor of the town of North Elba in which the village of Lake Placid lies.

Ron MacKenzie, 71, is the retired postmaster of Lake Placid as well as a longtime ski-area expert who was instrumental in getting nearby Whiteface Mountain developed by New York State and was one of the founders of the National Ski Patrol. James (Bunny) Sheffield, 64, has a real-estate and insurance office on Main Street, and was a daring bobsledder, speed skater and barrel jumper in the old days. Art Devlin, 52, runs a motel on Main Street and is assuredly more famed for his exploits as an international ski jumper than as an innkeeper. Vern Lamb, 49, is the scion of one of Lake Placid's founding families and runs Lamb's Lumberyard. Bob Allen, 50, is manager of the North Elba Park District, meaning that he operates the skating rink, the 70-meter ski jump, the golf course, the airport and the horse-show arena outside town. Mayor Bob Peacock, 54, makes his living as a milkman. Serge Lussi runs the Holiday Inn. And there are many others who have tossed in their talents to help their hometown become an Olympic town once more.