Lake Placid, winter and summer playground

Jim Shea paused for more than a moment, almost unable to imagine the thought of Lake Placid without the legacy of hosting two Winter Olympic games, in 1932 and 1980.

“We’d just be a sleepy little Adirondack town, just a small little Adirondack resort,” said Shea, an Olympic skier whose father helped bring the games back to Lake Placid for the second time. “It certainly would not have grown like it’s grown. We have built our lives basically around the five Olympic rings. It kind of put us on the map.”

Indeed.

Since Godfrey Dewey brought the 1932 Winter Games to Lake Placid and Shea’s father, Jack, became the home-grown star, winning two speedskating gold medals, Lake Placid has evolved into a travel destination like no other.

The village, nestled in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, was a pioneer American resort in popularizing snow and presenting winter attractions to the public. Yet unlike so many ski areas, Lake Placid began as a summer destination and remains so, with two-thirds of its tourism coming between Memorial Day and Columbus Day.

But it was the 1932 Olympics that made Lake Placid famous around the world. And with the opening of Whiteface Mountain Ski Center in 1958, town leaders began dreaming of another taste of the Winter Games.

“The town was getting a little worn-out,” said James McKenna, president of the Lake Placid Essex County Visitors Bureau. “Getting the Games again would be the tool to get the venues and get the town, not only on the map, but to redo a lot of the hospitality facilities.”

McKenna said the momentum to bid for the 1980 Olympic Games began in the late 1960s and quickly reached high gear.

“I can remember putting Lake Placid stickers all over and telling people the Olympics were coming here, you’d better get ready,” he said.

And the village’s favorite son, Jack Shea, the patriarch of the only family in Winter Olympic history to have three generations of competitors helped deliver it. (Jim Shea competed in skiiing in 1968 at Innsbruck, Austria and his son, Jim Jr., won skeleton gold in 2002 at Salt Lake City just weeks after his grandfather died in a car crash.) As supervisor of the town of North Elba, which includes Lake Placid, Jack Shea was instrumental in persuading Olympic officials to award the 1980 Winter Games to his hometown.

It proved to be a bigger boon than anyone could have imagined for Lake Placid, which along with St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Innsbruck are the only places to twice host the Winter Olympics. Squaw Valley, Calif. (1960) and Salt Lake City are the only other U.S. locales to host the Games.

Up went a massive ski jumping complex with a sky deck for tourists, a new refrigerated track for bobsled, luge and skeleton outside the village at Mount Van Hoevenberg, and a new ice arena adjacent to the 1932 rink.

“It created a recognition, a buzz about the village,” said Ed Weibrecht, owner of the stately Mirror Lake Inn at the north edge of the village. “It put us back into the international limelight. It was a tremendous marketing boost for the community.

“I think the one change that probably came out of it more than anything else, though, was it became better rather than bigger,” Weibrecht said.

And the Olympiad became one for the history books. Eric Heiden won five speedskating gold medals, all outdoors in world-record time, and the U.S. hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union is considered a signature moment in sports in the 20th century.