The Winter Olympics were held in Lake Placid in 1932 and 1980, while the Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles in 1932 and 1984. Los Angeles will host the Olympics for the third time in 2028, making it the first North American city and the third in the world to do so.
Lake Placid has had the honor of hosting two Winter Olympics, the first in 1932 and the second in 1980. The games were not held in 1944 because of World War II but they did take place one year later in August of that year in Tokyo.
There was also a Summer Olympic Games held in 1920 in Paris but it only included men's tennis, rowing, and baseball-babeisball. France prevented women from competing so they went to America instead. The women's events took place in Manhattan at Madison Square Garden. It is this version that is used when comparing numbers for women's sports.
So Lake Placid has been chosen as the site for both Winter and Summer Olympic competitions twice before. That's more than any other city!
The IOC (International Olympic Committee) will decide in 2017 if another city will be selected to hold the 2024 Olympics. There are candidates from all over the world including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Hamburg in Germany. None of them have been chosen yet though so we don't know who will get which games.
Lake Placid, which hosted the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics, contemplated a proposal for the 2026 Winter Olympics but was forced to withdraw after the USOC opted not to mount a bid for the Games.
The decision came two days after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Pyeongchang, South Korea, will be the next host city of the 2018 Winter Olympics. The announcement ended months of speculation about who would take on the responsibility of organizing the event.
Lake Placid has been actively pursuing the 2024 Summer Olympics, but its chances appear bleak given that Paris, Rome, Hamburg, and Berlin have already been selected as the only European cities capable of bidding for the games.
However, former New York Governor George Pataki is lobbying Congress to approve funds for a United States Olympic Team headquarters and training facility in upstate New York, which would include a bobsled, skeleton, and luge track. If this effort is successful, Lake Placid could rejoin the list of candidates for the 2024 Olympics.
In 2002, just before his death, he carried the Olympic flame around Lake Placid. In his honor, his grandson, Jimmy Shea, won gold in the skeleton at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. The community is best known in the United States as the site of the 1980 USA-USSR hockey game.
Salt Lake City volunteered to host the games, but the IOC, still reeling from the Denver rejection, rejected and chose Innsbruck, which had held the 1964 Winter Olympics events twelve years previously, to host the 1976 Winter Olympics on February 5, 1973. The Winter Olympics would then be held in Salt Lake City in 2002. Games in Athens, 1896.
The Winter Olympic Games were held for the 13th time in Lake Placid. The little upstate New York hamlet hosted the Winter Olympics for the second time in 1980. However, in this day and age of television and rising connectivity The little upstate New York hamlet hosted the Winter Olympics for the second time in 1980.
Utah became the sixth state in the United States to hold an Olympic Games, and the 2002 Winter Olympics were the last to be hosted in the United States until the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. These were the first Olympic Games held under Jacques Rogge's leadership of the International Olympic Committee. They were also the last Winter Olympics until 2022 when Beijing hosts them again.
Salt Lake City was chosen as the host city on March 17, 1997. The games were scheduled to start on February 12, 2002, but were postponed for the day because of snowstorms that affected most of the country. When it was time to resume competition, all eyes were on Salt Lake City since no other cities had been approved by the IOC to hold the event. After much debate at their meeting in October 2001, the voting members of the IOC decided that Salt Lake City would also host the 2004 Summer Olympics. The two cities are separated by only 105 miles (169 kilometers) but requires a five-hour drive to get from one side of the valley to the other. Organizers say this will be the fastest transportation system in any previous Olympics.
The Salt Lake Tribune reports that some athletes and officials were surprised by this decision since Salt Lake City had not yet built any of the facilities needed for such an event. But others felt it was the right choice since the city has done a lot of work toward becoming more competitive in sports and was sure to put on a great show for those attending.
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