A Winter Olympics Tale

The Hockey Rink was Rocking

Lake Placid Miracle

When I was invited to be on the crew of the official film of the Lake Placid Winter Olympics it seemed like a great opportunity to be part of sports film history. I was to be one of maybe 6 different crews putting together the official record of the event and agreed happily.

When my AC and work partner Ron Kanter arrived late at night and were given our humble living assignments....which turned out to be a trailer with multiple rooms cordoned off. The one we were assigned to was no bigger than a closet....and had two double decker bunk beds. No room for a small personal bag let alone a full camera package! Looking back, the right move might have been to go over to housing and turn in our key and head back West....but we decided that maybe we should give it a few days.

Now I have been in many worse living conditions in an international career for National Geographic and others....so I probably should not be whining about this one.... so we shut up and attended our first production meeting.

The events were assigned each morning to the crews and we each had a say as to what we would like to do. Ron and I drew some speed skating, luge, downhill skiing(where Kanter caught an edge on the incredibly steep icy course .... fell a hundred feet into a safety fence occasioning the Chef du Course to ban him from the course for LIFE).

It was exciting for sure and aside from getting little sleep in our trailer where two other strangers spent all night snoring loudly after a night of drinking. We began to settle in to the business of capturing some of the best athletes of the time.

At one production meeting our boss, Ronnie Latour of the legendary film rental house FERCO ,asked who wants to do hockey tonight.....and no one raised their hands. Ive always kind of enjoyed the sport so Ron and I were sent to the ice arena for the evening.

The hockey venue in Lake Placid is a typical ice facility....with the unusual(to me) feature that it is made completely of concrete. The press guys...many crews from the countries that were hoping for some success down there....were stationed up in the nose bleeds....with the ABC live tv crews down where the real action was taking place.

So up there we were when the US and the USSR(the Red Army Team as they were called) started to play. As the game unfolded a strange feeling began to spread throughout the stadium....you could almost feel the emotion taking over.

As the periods continued....a rising tide of sound from the Americans in the crowd began to swell.... reaching almost a crescendo.

When the final horn sounded and the US had almost impossibly beat the Russians....the stadium erupted...so violently that the whole concrete stadium was moving up and down and we were not able to hold a steady shot of the chaos! Ron and I had conserved our film so that there was enough left to see the last goal and the incredible roar of the crowd as it surged over us. But it was not loud enough to drown out Al Michael’s historical show ending yell!

“DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES.....YES!!!!!”