d4 eZ su the washington post.saturday, february 22 , 2020
chuck culpepper/the washington postThe lake placid Olympic center in New York contains the Herb Brooks arena and 1980 Rink, two other rinks and a museum.
ASSOCIATED PRESSB ryson DeChambeau kept
making so many birdies in the
mexico Championship that when
he rolled in his ninth one from
45 feet, all he could do was throw
his hands in the air in pure won-
der.
He wasn’t alone friday in mak-
ing birdies, although rory mcIl-
roy would like to have joined the
party.
DeChambeau made seven b ird-
ies in an eight-hole stretch at
Chapultepec Golf Club in mexico
City for an 8-under-par 63, giving
him a one-shot lead over Erik van
rooyen of South Africa and Pat-
rick reed at the halfway point of
this World Golf Championship.
DeChambeau was a t 11-under 131.
Van rooyen, who played col-
lege golf at minnesota, celebrated
his 30 th birthday by making nine
birdies to tie the course record
with a 62. reed made five birdies
on the back nine for a 63.
Justin Thomas ran off four
straight birdies to end the back
nine and then holed a 35-foot
eagle putt to build a three-shot
lead through 10 holes. That was
gone in a matter of four holes as
player after player kept rolling in
putts on a day with much less
wind and far better scoring. The
average score was 70.28, more
than two shots better than Thurs-
day.
Hideki matusyama was at 9 u n-
der for his round through 15 holes
and had a 20-foot birdie attempt
from the fringe on the par-3 sev-
enth. He missed that three feet to
the left, then missed the next one.
He b ogeyed the next hole, t oo, and
had to settle for a 64. That l eft him
at 9-under 133, along with Thom-
as, who had t o settle for a 66.
mcIlroy wasn’t so fortunate.
Staked to a two-shot lead at the
start of the day, he opened with
eight straight pars, didn’t make a
birdie until his 12th hole and fell
six shots behind at one point. Two
birdies at the end gave him a 69,and the world’s No. 1 player was
only three shots b ehind.
DeChambeau’s big run began
on the 18th hole with a 15-foot
birdie putt. He got up-and-down
from short of the green on the
reachable par-4 first hole, made a
15-footer on the n ext hole, added a
few birdies inside six feet and then
made a 2 5-foot birdie.
Defending champion Dustin
Johnson, a two-time winner in
mexico, has m ade o nly three b ird-
ies in two days. He shot a 71 and
was 16 shots behind....
r ookie Viktor Hovland shot a
6-under 66 a t windy Coco Beach
for a share of the Puerto rico open
lead i n rio G rande.
With most of the top players in
the world playing the World Golf
Championship, the 22-year-old
Norwegian eagled the par-5 sec-
ond and rebounded from a late
bogey on a par 5 with a birdie to
join first-round leader Kyle Stan-
ley, Josh Te ater and E miliano Gril-
lo at 1 0-under 1 34.
Stanley followed an opening 64
with a 70. Grillo birdied the final
two holes in a 68. Te ater also shot a
68.Woods to skip Honda classic
Tiger Woods decided not to play
in the H onda Classic in Palm
Beach Gardens, fla., for the sec-
ond straight year.
Woods not entering next week’s
tournament near his home in
South florida was not a big sur-
prise because he had said l ast
week that he would take time to
practice and train.
Woods has played the Honda
Classic only four times at PGA
National since 2012, when he was
the runner-up to mcIlroy. That
was his only top 1 0.
mcIlroy, who also lives a short
drive away, also will m iss the Hon-
da for the second straight year,
instead opting to add the Texas
open to his schedule a week be-
fore t he masters.
World No. 2 Brooks Koepka is
the o nly top 10 player entered.Golf RoundupDeChambeau takes lead
with a string of birdies
ASSOCIATED PRESSUSA Luge said it is pulling its
team out of this weekend’s World
Cup races in Winterberg, Germa-
ny, adding to a chorus of athletes
from many nations protesting
what they are calling unsafe ice
conditions.
Austria also withdrew its team
from the weekend events, and
even several sliders from Germa-
ny, including all three of its top
doubles sleds, said they are not
willing to race this weekend — on
home ice, no less. The Internation-
al Luge federation offered a com-
promise o f sorts f riday by saying it
would shorten the race distances,
but even that did not solve the
intense disagreement between
sliders and o fficials over the s afety
issue.
“Based on the feedback from
our athletes and coaches, we will
not participate in the Winterberg
World Cup,” USA Luge said in a
statement friday. “We respect
their opinions that conditions are
not s afe.”
Sliders from many nations said
there is too much ice buildup on
certain track curves, which s ignifi-
cantly increases the chance of
crashing. Coaches from multiple
nations jumped in to work on the
track t hemselves, a highly u nusual
move but one done with hopes of
making the surface at least some-
what safer.
Training this weekend in Win-
terberg was marred by several
crashes. The German doubles
team of To bias Wendl and Tobias
Arlt — one of the best and most
accomplished in the history of the
sport — wrote on its facebook
page that the risk of crashing was“extremely high and therefore in-
calculable.”
The de facto boycott by some
athletes will have an impact on
who winds up winning the season
World Cup men’s, women’s and
doubles championships. Winter-
berg is the next-to-last race on the
World Cup schedule, followed by
the finale next weekend in
Konigssee, Germany.
russian s lider roman repilov
leads the men’s standings by
61 points over Italy’s Dominik
fischnaller. Ta tiana Ivanova of
russia leads Germany’s Julia Tau-
bitz by 12 points in the women’s
race. Germany’s Toni Eggert and
Sascha B enecken lead the d oubles
title race by 10 points.
With 100 points awarded for a
win, the standings could have
shifted wildly t his weekend.
This month was the 10th anni-
versary of the most recent on-
track luge fatality, the death of
Georgian athlete Nodar Kumar-
itashvili during a training run at
the 2 010 Vancouver olympics.
l alpiNe SkiiNG: Lara Gut-
Behrami won the World Cup
downhill race in Crans-montana,
Switzerland, for her first victory in
more than two years.
Gut-Behrami led a one-two
Swiss finish on the mont Lachaux
course, beating downhill stand-
ings leader Corinne Suter by 0.80
seconds. Suter can clinch the sea-
son-long discipline title Saturday,
taking advantage of closest chal-
lenger mikaela S hiffrin’s e xtended
break from racing after the death
of her father.
Shiffrin still leads the overall
standings but could lose her posi-
tion depending on Saturday’s re-
sults.WInTER SpoRTS RoundupUSA Luge joins boycott
of event over ice safety
store on main Street with hun-
dreds of others”... skating at age
13 at a rink in Cleveland... “Not
born yet” (with sad emoji pen-
ciled in)... age 15 in Cincinnati
with buddies in a basement with
a 32-inch Sony Trinitron... stu-
dent center at the University of
Wisconsin Eau Claire... in a
living room in Brooklyn with six
siblings... a father’s basketball
game in Greendale, Wis., where
they announced results... in
college in Indiana, at a m ovie that
stopped briefly for the announce-
ment of the score... sneaking
into the rink during the last
period and seeing mike Eruzi-
one’s winning goal with 10 min-
utes left... “I was not even alive”... in a dorm room with a bunch
of guys at the University of South
Carolina... in graduate school in
New Jersey, avoiding the score on
the radio while watching ABC’s
tape-delay... in high school and
babysitting... in parents’ den in
Pennsylvania with cousins and
neighbors before everyone went
out in the streets banging pots...
at a basketball game because
parents said the United States
couldn’t possibly win... at the
game with husband, behind one
goal, in the middle section, “wav-
ing my flag in disbelief.”
Then when it all ended that
Sunday and monday morning
came and the olympics had come
and gone from Caligiore’s little
town, he stood before the bath-
room mirror and suddenly, sur-
prisingly sobbed. He had called
radio play-by-play of an event so
powerful that people 40 years
later would remember it lucidly,
so powerful that when Caligiore
worked in communications for
the Lake Placid olympic Center
from 1999 till 2009, he had him-
self a ritual.
At the end of the workdays, he
could have reached his car in
seconds through a door near his
office, or he could take minutes
on a roundabout path through
the arena to the parking lot. Each
and every day, he chose the
roundabout.
[email protected]
They were here
He was there, and it was so
loud that he and broadcast part-
ner To m fisch had to stand al-
most cheek-to-cheek to hear each
other, and they paced as much as
they could given the wires, and
the game clock did seem slow,
and Caligiore’s call — “It’s over!
It’s over!” — well, speaking of
goose bumps. He and all others
can tell you how main Street felt
like Times Square that night and
how people sang and how that
guy took a trumpet to the roof of
Arena Grill, which sat where the
gift shop now sits, and played
“The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“It’s fascinating to think people
like yourself will still come to
Lake Placid so they can remem-
ber,” Lundin said, and those peo-
ple do come to the small museum
in the facility — entry price: $8 —
and the ABC broadcast,
t ape-delayed as it was at the time,
does play in a loop in the corner
on a Samsung framed by wood
that slightly suggests 1970s pan-
eling. That broadcast reminds
that “m*A*S*H” actor Jamie farr
joined those roaring from the
stands and that, back then, TV
broadcasts didn’t see the need to
display the game clock in perpe-
tuity in the corner of the screen,
starting it with 20 seconds left in
this case.
That lack lent a certain magic
when a 35-year-old Al michaels,
in his famed call, would have to
say, “Two-oh-nine to play in the
game,” or, “A minute fifteen,” or
“Thirty-eight, thirty-seven sec-
onds left i n the game!” Eventually
he gets to his, “Do you believe in
miracles? Yes!” and soon, “Un-
known, totally anonymous, about
a week and a half ago!”
Along a wall opposite, the mu-
seum offers small pieces of paper
on which visitors can answer the
question for which so many know
readily the answer: Where were
you?
on main Street as a biathlon
and cross-country olympic vol-
unteer... on 42 nd Street in New
York at a bar where Xerox em-
ployees met... “outside a TVIn the sainted Locker room 5
where the U.S. team gathered
before it played the Soviets,
Ducks Coach mike franchetti re-
cited to the youngsters Brooks’s
famous pregame speech, parts of
which are quoted on T-shirts sold
in main Street shops.
much else remains unchanged.
“Seats are the same!” Lundin said
of those durable red, plastic
chairs, though “they replaced the
scoreboard a couple of years ago
to an LED board from a lightbulb
style.” The ads ringing the rink
have that clunky charm: North-
woods Hotel, Price Chopper gro-
cery store, WSLP 93.3, Ellis coffee
(family roasted Since 1854!),
Paul Smith’s College. Around the
top, in white letters with red trim
and light-blue backgrounds, are
the names of the 20 1980 U.S.
olympic players and two coaches
(Brooks and assistant Craig Pat-
rick). It’s the same four-rink facil-
ity where Sonja Henie won her
figure skating gold medal at the
1932 olympics. It’s one of those
fieldhouses in which you can hear
yesteryear through the quiet.
out on the high concourse,
through large windows, the flags
of the olympic nations still flap in
their row outdoors. In the dis-
tance rule the Adirondacks, but
right smack down in the fore-
ground, in front of the high
school, lies the track where Wis-
consinite Eric Heiden won five
speedskating gold medals and
general heartthrob-itude.
The people who see this unpre-
possessing little arena every day
have fanned out and learned how
it registers across the country
even to the multitudes who have
never seen it.
“If I’m at a c onference,” Lundin
said, and he states he’s from Lake
Placid, the people, “They’re going
to talk to a complete stranger. It’s
something that immediately
bonds them. It’s incredible. Noth-
ing else has that power.”
At a golf course in, say, florida,
Caligiore might find himself
grouped with strangers, whose
second question always tends to
be, “Were you there?”finland, 4-2, for the olympic gold
medal Sunday, feb. 24, 1980, that
building in all of its glorious
non-glory still breathes magic
through the 2,600-strong town. It
still offers its endless relevance in
ways both intellectual and viscer-
al, day to day to day, even 14,000-
plus days since the Soviets came
to Lake Placid in 1980 having
toyed with NHL clubs as part of
preparation, then lost to “a ragtag
m élange of peach-fuzz kids and
knockaround minor leaguers,” as
Leonard Shapiro wrote in The
Washington Post, such that de-
fenseman Bill Baker said: “You
can’t explain what’s happened
here. It just happened.”
mary Anne Hawley owns
There... And Back Again, the gift
shop in front of the arena with
sassy kitchen gloves beckoning
from the windows. “oh, I think
it’s a daily presence,” she said of
that olympic weekend. “Yes, I do
think of that all the time.”
“It’s the living history,” s aid Jon
Lundin, the Lake Placid olympic
Center communications director,
who works a quick walk just a
stairwell-and-change from the
1980 rink, its formal name by
now. “When you come here, you
can feel it. You can feel the
o lympics.”
“I drive by it every day, coming
and going,” said Caligiore, who
called the deathless games for
nearby WNBZ radio. “A nd it’s
always that shrine. Every single
time. It’s always that shrine.”
‘Seats are the same!’
That peerless friday 40 years
ago, Hawley worked with her
husband in their olympic-appar-
el shop across main Street from
the arena. “There was an energy
and an electricity in the air dur-
ing that game that I’ve never felt
before or since. You could literally
hear the crowd that was inside
the arena, outside the arena,” s he
said. “Just when we were talking
here, I had goose bumps up my
back.”
Surely, some days she comes to
the shop and thinks about her
tasks and doesn’t think about the
arena.
But there are no such days.
“Every time,” s he said.
for one thing, shoppers bring
it up.
forty years after a mix of geo-
politics, intimacy of venue and
helpful lack of Twitter built the
enchantment that will never be
replicated, this rectangular little
winner of fate’s g rand raffle keeps
busy. It hosts the ECAC men’s
college hockey tournament. You
could walk into it on the last
Sunday in January and see the
local Paul Smith’s College women
playing Norwich. There are “mir-
acle on Ice” fantasy camps. It has
youth hockey events wherein
even the children look wide-eyed,
relish their souvenir medals,
r elish on-ice photos.
Steven Zulli was visiting from
Pennsylvania in January with his
daughter, who was playing at
Herb Brooks Arena with her Dela-
ware Ducks team of 13 boys and
two girls. The father strained to
explain the magic of the place to
Nicola, 10, but he did say: “She’s
been playing for a few years now,
so she understands what it’s like
to be the underdog. She’s played
on teams that were underdogs.”
lake placid from d1
At Miracle arena, magic never vanished
michael hill/associated press
Some shops on Main Street sell Olympic memorabilia 40 years after lake placid hosted the Games.cliff hawkins/agence france-presse/getty images
Bryson dechambeau made seven birdies in an eight-hole stretch to
take a one-shot l ead in t he WGc Mexico championship on Friday.