Sochi, Russia, is a long way from Lake Placid. Thousands of miles and 34 years separate a Winter Olympics in a small, Adirondack mountain village from a subtropical summer resort city below the Caucasus Mountains. The world and the Olympics are different, and yet, in some ways, much the same.
Certainly the price tag has changed — Lake Placid cost $150 million; Sochi is pegged at $50 billion. The staggering sum suggests the Olympics have lost a sense of balance between economic development and sports competition.
When the "North Country boys," as the Lake Placid Olympic bid committee was known, made their presentation to the International Olympic Committee in Vienna in 1974, they promised "an Olympics in perspective." After the $800 million price tag for the Sapporo games in 1972, and after Denver withdrew as host city for the 1976 games because of an inability to get financing, Lake Placid promised to return the games to the athletes in a small mountain town.
By the time the IOC was scheduled to make a decision, its choice was either Lake Placid or canceling the games. All the other interested bidders had withdrawn their proposals due to a lack of guaranteed financing.
Fast forward to Sochi, Russia, 2014, and a price tag of over $50 billion. The Sochi Olympics seem out of proportion. They have a different perspective, that of Vladimir Putin, who has championed these Olympics as a nationalistic indulgence, now subject to charges of massive corruption. Putin has committed the government's resources to finance dazzling new facilities and permanent infrastructure to make Sochi a world destination resort after the games.
The Olympics changed in the years after Lake Placid. Those of us who attended the Lake Placid games loved the small town atmosphere and that "Olympics in perspective." The Winter Olympics will never return to Lake Placid or the perspective of the North Country boys, but the area sends athletes to every winter games. The Olympic flag still flies high over the village where the original spirit and meaning of the Olympics had some of its finest moments.
Small towns can't handle the increasing number of athletes and competitions as well as the ever growing media invasion and other logistics.
In addition to the athletes and national sports committees, there will be 14,000 media representatives in Sochi. Professional athletes now participate, so NHL stars play hockey, rather than a group of college and amateur players like the U.S. team that defeated the seemingly invincible Soviets in Lake Placid's "Miracle on Ice."
Yet, despite all the financial, political and geographic differences, these Olympic games always face similar obstacles. Adequate transportation, sound and safe construction of facilities, and planning for weather conditions and a lack of snow preoccupy planners.
Security is the major headache even for the strongman Putin, after the late December suicide bombings in Volgograd by Islamic terrorists from Chechnya who are trying to disrupt Russia as the games begin.
But terrorism is hardly a recent Olympic concern. It was a worry even at Lake Placid, coming a little over seven years after the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich summer games in 1972. The FBI played out "terrorist hostage scenes" in the Adirondacks prior to the games and the State Police trained on skis in case they needed to be deployed in the mountains.
Politics also intervenes despite every effort by the IOC to keep the games above politics.
When our athletes arrive in Sochi, they will be the first Americans to compete in a Russian or Soviet Olympics. It was at the IOC meeting in Lake Placid on the eve of the 1980 games that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance declared that the United States would boycott the summer games that year if the IOC did not move them out of Moscow. President Jimmy Carter used the Olympic boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan two months earlier.
Soviet athletes were allowed into the country to compete at Lake Placid, though baggage handlers at JFK airport wouldn't service an Aeroflot plane carrying them, forcing it to go Dulles in Washington. The treatment of the Soviet hockey team on Lake Placid ice by the miracle American collegians was a more apt humiliation. The boycott went ahead, but it didn't change the Soviet military action, and the U.S. and other allied athletes suffered.
Thirty-four years later, relations are frosty again after Putin gave asylum to Edward Snowden, the leaker of U.S. national security secrets. Calls for a boycott rose anew after the passage of Russia's anti-gay laws. President Barack Obama opted for a different message, with gay former Olympians including Billie Jean King and Brian Boitano to lead the U.S. delegation to Sochi.
And therein lies an unchanging challenge for the Olympics — to make sure that amid the glitter and noise of the marketing and entertainment and political tensions, the sports and the athletes remain most important. Or, as the North Country Boys would put it, keeping the Olympics in perspective.
Michael Burgess of Delmar is the author of "A Long Shot to Glory, How Lake Placid Saved the Winter Olympics and Restored the Nation's Pride." Mjburgess1002@gmail.com