LAKE PLACID — The Empire State Winter Games are back, and the countdown has begun. Jan. 5 will mark 30 days until the 2022 ESWG’s Opening Ceremony.
After last year’s event was canceled due to COVID-19, the 42nd Empire State Winter Games are set to return to Lake Placid and the Adirondacks from Feb. 3-6, 2022.
The ESWG will begin with the Opening Ceremony on Feb. 3 on the same grounds where Lake Placid’s 1980 Olympics opened.
The opening ceremony will nearly coincide with the 2022 Winter Olympic Games which will hold its Opening Ceremony on Feb. 4.
An estimated 2,000 athletes will compete in more than 30 sports, around the same time as the Olympic Games.
Ties between the Empire State Winter Games and the Olympics run deep. Some local athletes who have competed in both the Olympics and the ESWG include Bill Demong, Tim Burke, Andrew Weibrecht and Erin Hamlin.
“I remember being extremely excited to not only compete but get the hat and jacket. That kind of event really helps athletes like myself put in perspective what they’re trying to do,” Demong, two-time Olympic medalist and five-time Olympian in Nordic Combined, said in a statement. “It’s like a stepping-stone, it’s a leap above the normal Bill Koch junior competitions.”
Demong, who grew up in Vermontville, competed from the ages of 13 to 15 years old.
“Certainly, every competition feeds your future routine,” Demong said.
For Demong, walking in the Opening Ceremony when he was a teenager, felt real.
“The distinction about being part of an event that’s bigger than normal is that it prepares you if you decide to go on,” he said. “But, if you quit right there, your favorite sports memory was ‘I competed in the Empire State Games.’”
Burke, who was born in Paul Smith’s and currently resides in Lake Placid, had a similar experience to the ESWG.
“For a lot of athletes like myself, the Empire State Games were my first experience at a bigger set of competitions that involved not only my own sport but lots of other sports,” Burke, a four-time Olympian said. “That feeling is something unique to these athletes that are experiencing it for the first time. Ultimately that does help prepare athletes for what’s to come.
“I remember the Opening Ceremony, they were held inside the speedskating oval in Lake Placid. All the athletes were there, there was a big stage, speakers were there. That was definitely a noticeably different feel than anything else I had experienced up to that point.”
Burke said the average person might not know a sport like biathlon, but they know the Empire State Winter Games and the Olympics. The Empire State Winter Games provide practice for the increased level of attention and pressure to land on the podium in a big event.
“You learn to stick to your own routine and not try and do things differently. Because at the end of the day the race is still the same length. For us, the targets are still the same size. And what makes you do well in a small race also makes you do well in a big one.”
For Weibrecht, a two-time Olympic medalist and a three-time Olympian in alpine skiing, the size and complexity of the ESWG helped him adjust to larger-scale events later in his career, like the Olympics and world championships.
“They just have a different feel, a different flow. That’s probably what was helpful with an event like the Empire State Games. It takes you out of your normal routine a tiny bit,” Weibrecht said. “The more you get to feel that, it helps you go to other (big) events.
“I grew up in Lake Placid and was able to see (the ESWG) from a younger kids’ perspective year after year. It was one of the things I was looking forward to at a certain point in my life,” he added. “As a young kid, I remember some of the older successful athletes in the area and they were racing Empire State Winter Games, so it was an aspirational kind of thing…I remember getting the opportunity to race and it was a really fun time and cool event. It lived up to my expectations…”
Weibrecht was 16 and remembers going to watch school classmates play in the hockey tournament.
“It’s a large event, it’s a much bigger event in terms of size and numbers of athletes, and meeting athletes in a number of different sports and being able to see another side to them. It’s sort of a one-off really. There’s nothing like that experience that I had until, really, the Olympics,” he said.
Hamlin, an Olympic medalist and a four-time Olympian, didn’t compete internationally until age 15, so it was a big deal to compete in the multi-day, multi-sport Empire State Winter Games. It gave her “that teeny tiny window into the experience of what an Olympics is.”
“Just that extra experience in a (larger) racing environment is really beneficial. The opportunity to do that is not very great in luge,” Hamlin said. “When you’re at the junior level, there are not a lot of those big-race opportunities.” One year, the ESWG doubled as junior nationals. “It was the first time I had ever won junior nationals – the double victory in one.”
Getting the team windbreaker jacket and pants, “you get excited about it. Even at the Olympics, it’s the most exciting time.
Since 2010, 34 athletes who competed in the Empire State Winter Games went on to become Olympians in the 2010, 2014 and 2018 Games.
Twelve won Olympic medals and eight competed in multiple Olympics. That list is expected to grow with the 2022 Winter Olympics.
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