Skiing All Olympic Runs of Whiteface, Lake Placid from 1980

The year was 1980. People on TV didn't yell at us. Super-G was still not a thing. And Lake Placid was full of miracles. I mean, literally. There was this miracle on ice, which united America, which is kind of a miracle in its own right. And the East Coast Mountain was granted Olympic downhill races. That's definitely a miracle. There was a desperate guy who wanted to buy an atomic bomb from the federal government and explode it in Vermont, so he can have Olympics at his resort. That's how seriously Olympic it is around here. Today we are at Whiteface Lake Placid. The original idea was to ski down all the Olympic courses, but I'm not sure if all the trails are open today. So we'll do what we can. If we can ski that, then I'll just show you around. This is to record how fast these lifts are moving. It's unprecedented. It's so fast. I think if any of you have a problem with sleeping, I could make a video of these chairs passing by and you can count them instead of sheep. Let's watch it. It's a speech. As you can see, I could beat Ingemar if I had no gates in front of me in about just the same time as he did, but he had like 150 million gates in his way. The Whiteface Mountain has the biggest vertical drop of any mountain on the East Coast. The Olympic run for downhill was three kilometers long. I'm not gonna ski it in shoes or, you know, tuck position. My skis are not really meant for downhilling. I think my legs are not ready for it either. I'm just gonna go as fast as I can. Just check out the trail and see what time I can make. I couldn't really find the Olympic downhill race. The first time I ran it, it was a wrong one. The second time I missed a trail in the middle. Then I got on the lift with somebody who is actually local and knows the trail pretty well and he told me that what I was doing is actually not even it. So I had to run that one three times. This time I'm gonna run directly down the skyward. There were two good reasons for me to believe this is the right course. Let's go. one reason is the locals said that the house at the top is actually the starting building. The second one is Franz Klammer when he was describing the around he said at the top it's like Kitzbühel. At this point I'm doing about 72 kilometers an hour which is the highest speed I reached during the descent. Just for comparison the average speed of the winning racer was 100 kilometers an hour. I think the highest speed was around 85-88 miles an hour. Here I am reaching the midpoint. There is this last pitch and after that the trail becomes pretty much flat. If you look at the clock you'll see that by now the racers were reaching the finish line. I still have half of it in front of me. Franz Klammer described this Olympic downhill course as the top is like Kitzbühel. You must In the middle it is like Baldisere with average turns but it's still very fast. Then at the bottom it is unfortunately quite flat and it is also a bit too short overall. Those of you who know better probably can tell that I should be getting DNF here or perhaps DNS as in did not even start. The top was also not the Olympic run as I found out later. So here we are at the top of Super G. Actually Giant Slalom. I'm doing this one last on the snow turned into something that feels like skiing on carpet. So we'll see if this is going to be a speed discipline. Let's go. Let's see how it goes. Okay this was absolute night. Maybe you could see it on the video. Each ski wants to do its own thing depending on what's underneath. One second it goes another it wants to stop. The snow is turning into a really slushy and slow material. This is far from what I was hoping for. So much for my idea of racing against the Olympic winners. I spent the rest of the day exploring the mountain. There are some areas that are really nice. There are some really nice gladed trails. The slides looked beautiful on this day. They didn't let me in because I didn't have all the gear necessary. But I'll definitely have to come back and explore even more. Maybe do a review of the mountain. Somehow the the van key has this tool on it.