Article and column that appeared in both the Lake Placid News and the Adirondack Daily Enterprise following the reunion weekend.


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1980 TORCHBEARERS REUNITE IN LAKE PLACID
LEE MANCHESTER
News Staff Writer

LAKE PLACID -- First, there were 52.

Then, there were 49 -- death had claimed three of the 1980 Olympic Torchbearers over the 22 years since they had run 1,000 miles together, from Virginia to Lake Placid, to open the last Winter Games here.

Last weekend, 17 answered Lake Placid's call to return to the Olympic Village.

They arrived from all over America last week -- one even coming from as far away as England -- to reunite with their teammates, rededicate Lake Placid's Olympic Flame tower and help celebrate the passage of the 2002 Olympic Torch through the North Country.

The reunion of the Lake Placid Torchbearers began on Friday evening at the North Elba Show Grounds. On a snowy field under a nearly full moon, the team's representatives stood in their Seventies-era banana-yellow uniforms before a crowd of about 100 people, a dignitary-laden stage behind them.

At 6:31 p.m., after rousing speeches from Shirley Seney, Roby Politi, Chris Ortloff and Torchbearer spokesman Steve Simon, former WIRD broadcaster Dennis Ryan hit a switch. Up leapt a propane-fueled fire from the rededicated J. Bernard Fell Olympic Flame Tower, the same tower to which the Torchbearers had brought the Olympic Flame in 1980.

After a 7 p.m. reception for the Torchbearers at the Lake Placid Winter Olympic Museum, the team moved on to the home of George and Ruth Hart for a private party. Hart's son-in-law, Assemblyman Chris Ortloff, had been chief of ceremonies for the 1980 Winter Olympics and one of the organizers of the original Torch Relay.

The next day, while the Olympic Village occupied itself with last-minute preparations for the late-afternoon arrival of the Salt Lake Torch caravan, the 1980 Torchbearers were treated by the Olympic Regional Development Authority to rides on the Mount Van Hoevenberg bobsled run.

"I was scared to death," one Torchbearer said later that day, "and I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

As the 2002 Torch drew near, the 1980 Torchbearers split into two groups, each going to one of the staging sites for this year's relay runners. At the Intervale ski jump base lodge, Salt Lake Relay organizers asked two of the 1980 Torchbearers, Sandee Norris and Chris Owens, to fill in for a couple of "no shows." The pair returned to Intervale in time to see Casey Colby's inspirational ski jump from the 90-meter tower while bearing the Olympic Torch.

From Intervale, the team dashed across Cascade Road for another ceremony at the Horse Show Grounds, this time a salute from the 1980 Torchbearers to the 2002 Torch. Carrying the Salt Lake Flame onto the Show Grounds was 1980 Olympic silver medalist Linda Fratianne, who handed the 2002 Torch to the first 1980 Torchbearer. The teammates passed it down the line and back into the hands of another 2002 Relay runner.

Finally, the group was taken in two ORDA vans to the Sheffield Speedskating Oval on Main Street, where the night's finale was to take place: the lighting of the Olympic Flame Cauldron on the Lake Placid stage.

"Lake Placid took such incredibly good care of us," said one team member the following morning at an Olympic Training Center breakfast. "There's really no other place like it."
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THOUGHTS ON THE OLYMPIC TORCH RELAY
LEE MANCHESTER
News Staff Writer

LAKE PLACID -- Call it a study in contrasts.

That's the picture that presented itself as 17 of the 52 original 1980 Winter Olympic Torchbearers returned last weekend to Lake Placid.

They'd returned to the Olympic Village for three reasons. As members of the very first American Olympic Torch Relay team, they had come to pay their respects to the 2002 Olympic Flame, which passed through Lake Placid on Saturday amidst much celebration on its way to Salt Lake for this year's Winter Games.

They'd come to help rededicate Lake Placid's own Olympic Fire, the gas-fueled beacon rising from the cauldron atop the J. Bernard Fell Olympic Flame Tower at the North Elba Show Grounds, in ceremonies last Friday night.

And they'd come for one another, and for themselves, just as they've come to each others' weddings and birthdays and funerals for the last 22 years.

Perhaps that's the essence of the contrasts in evidence last weekend.

The Salt Lake Olympic Torch Relay consists of 11,500 runners carrying the Olympic Flame through hundreds of cities, down 13,500 miles of road between Atlanta and Utah. The fabulous team coordinating the relay is a semi-professional cadre of organizers working for SLOC, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.

The SLOC team does all the advance work, sets up all the stages, outfits and instructs all the runners, emcees all the shows that lead up to the lighting of the Olympic Flame cauldron in every city, village or hamlet where the caravan stops -- and then the SLOC team tears it all down and packs it all up to do it all over again at its next stop.

The contrast?

"We were the team in 1980," noted one of the banana yellow-suited Placid Torchbearers last weekend, "not the organizers."

Salt Lake organizers have put together a relay program that gives as many people as possible the chance to carry to Olympic Torch this winter. Athleticism is not the top criterion for their selection.

In 1980, the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee sought to gather a team of trained amateur athletes to carry the Torch for their "Olympics in Perspective," as the last Games here were themed. The committee sorted through 8,000 applicants, narrowing its choice at last to one runner from every U.S. state, the District of Columbia and the Lake Placid area.

While each 2002 Torchbearer carries his or her 2-1/2-pound flameholder just 352 yards, each of the 1980 Torchbearers carried the Lake Placid Flame more than 3 miles at a time during their 10-day, 1,000-mile relay from Virginia to the North Country.

The experience of carrying the symbol of the Olympic ideal even a fifth of a mile will obviously remain a fond memory for every one of the thousands who bore the Flame this winter, giving each of them a sense of ownership in the Olympic movement.

But the experience of being one of just 52 representatives of the American people, of training together the summer before the 1980 Games, of running and eating and sleeping and living together for 10 days while the whole world watched them bring the Torch to its new winter home -- that experience changed their lives, just as the '80 Olympics changed ours.

(Lee Manchester, a reporter for the Lake Placid News, was the local organizer of the 1980 Olympic Torchbearers reunion.)