The Olympics will always be in Lake Placid

Due to a death in my family, what was supposed to be a one-day trip to my hometown in upstate New York for my cousin's wedding last week turned into a three-day trip where Mrs. Last Honest and I had nothing planned for the middle day.

So we decided to make the 2 1/2-hour drive north to Lake Placid.

I had been to Lake Placid three times previously, twice for an all-star concert band when I was in high school -- in case you're interested, I played trombone -- and once about 11 years ago not long after my wife and I started dating. It's a beautiful place, but probably not that much different than a lot of Adirondack villages ...

... except for the Olympics. It's actually hard to believe the Olympics took place three hours north of where I grew up.

I stood at the top of the ski jump during my last trip, forgetting my lifelong fear of all means of elevation that involve riding along a wire, and chickened out of a bobsled ride when I heard someone say you needed to sign a waiver. (At the time, I said I didn't want to spend the $30, so while I guess the blog is called the Last Honest Sports Fan, I'm not honest all the time.)

We had also gone to the Olympic ice hockey arena, but just kind of poked our heads in the door. This time, however, we stayed, walked around, watched skaters on one of the other rinks. It was then that I was struck by the fact that the Miracle on Ice took place in the arena we were sitting in ... an arena small enough that the second level was a half-dozen rows of wooden benches.

It's not a very big arena, but you can't beat the history, and except for the seats they put behind the rails to the staircases, there's not a bad seat in the place. (I didn't bring my camera, so all the photos are from Mrs. Last Honest.)

By the way, as an example of how times have changed, in a town where one of the great sporting victories of the Cold War took place, the USA Hockey store was selling Soviet jerseys, the red ones with the CCCP across the chest.

Then we walked outside, and onto the speed skating oval, although there was no ice.

The only sport suitable on this day would be speed splashing.

Hard to believe I was on the site where Eric Heiden won five gold medals.

(As an aside, back in my pickup volleyball days, the mother of one of the neighborhood kids who showed up from time to time brought samples of some drink mix she was hawking at the time. She tried to impress me by telling me it was what Eric Heiden was drinking when he finally won a gold medal after all his previous failures. I didn't correct her; I figured it she couldn't tell the difference between Eric Heiden and Dan Jansen in her sales pitch, she deserved to lose a customer someday.)

I love how Olympic sites in Lake Placid are so accessible to the public, but to my mind, the reason why is kind of unusual ... that Lake Placid will never host an Olympics again.

I've had a few arguments with a friend of mine who insists that the Olympics could come back to Lake Placid someday, maybe with Montreal or Albany, both of which are impossibilities. The Olympics have just gotten too big for a town that had a population of 2,521 as of 2010. By comparison, Whistler, British Columbia, which hosted only a few events in conjunction with Vancouver in 2010, had 9,595.

But when we went to Vancouver in the summer of 2010, not even six months after the Olympics, the sites that weren't being modified for other use weren't open for the public to view. It's almost like they were trying to put the Olympics behind them. My wife even bought a pair of Olympic mittens with the maple leaf in the middle, which had been all the rage when we were in Toronto the year before, out of a clearance bin.



But then again, Vancouver is a bustling, awesome city that has a lot going on. The Olympics were just another event that happened there.

Meanwhile, the Olympics give Lake Placid its identity as something more than another pretty Adirondack village. For that reason, the town embraces its Olympic past, and wants to share that embrace as much as possible.