Four days before the Winter Olympics opened at Lake Placid in February 1980, the Soviet national ice hockey team met the United States in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden and won 10-3. Nobody was surprised. The Soviets had taken gold at every Winter Games since 1964 — and every one since 1956 bar the 1960 upset at Squaw Valley — and had recently beaten a team of NHL All-Stars. Their line-up, nominally amateur soldiers and students, were in practice full-time professionals: the great goaltender Vladislav Tretiak, the elegant captain Boris Mikhailov, the young genius Sergei Makarov. The Americans were actual amateurs — college players with an average age of about 22, the youngest US Olympic hockey team ever assembled, drawn largely from Minnesota and Boston and moulded by a driven, abrasive coach named Herb Brooks, who had been the last man cut from the 1960 gold-medal squad.
Brooks's plan was heretical. Rather than play the dump-and-chase style of North American hockey, he drilled his students in a hybrid of Soviet-style weaving, possession and conditioning — "Brooks's system" — reasoning that nobody could out-Soviet the Soviets, but a young team might out-skate them for one night. He rode his players mercilessly and united them, by his own design, in shared resentment of him. His pre-game speech survives in fragments: you were born to be a player, you were meant to be here, this moment is yours.
One night in Lake Placid
The teams met on 22 February 1980 — not, as memory insists, in the final, but in the first game of the medal round. The context could hardly have been heavier: American hostages were in Tehran, Soviet troops had just invaded Afghanistan, and a US-led boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics was already being argued. The game itself was not shown live across most of America; ABC broadcast it on tape delay in prime time, meaning millions watched a miracle that had already happened.
The Soviets outshot and mostly outplayed the Americans, leading 2-1 late in the first period. Then came the game's hinge. With one second left in the period, Mark Johnson pounced on a long rebound that Tretiak lazily surrendered and tied it at 19:59. The Soviet coach, Viktor Tikhonov, responded with the most second-guessed decision in hockey history: he pulled Tretiak, the best goaltender in the world, and sent out backup Vladimir Myshkin for the rest of the game. Tikhonov later called it his greatest mistake. The USSR still led 3-2 after two periods, but Johnson levelled again on a power play, and at exactly ten minutes into the third the captain, Mike Eruzione — a walk-on from Boston University whose name means "eruption" in Italian — snapped a screened wrist shot past Myshkin. 4-3. For the last ten minutes goaltender Jim Craig, who finished with 36 saves, repelled everything, and the Soviets, oddly, never pulled their goalie for an extra attacker. As the clock ran out, ABC's Al Michaels ad-libbed the most famous line in American sports broadcasting: "Do you believe in miracles? YES!"
The forgotten final
The miracle had a sequel Americans routinely forget: it won nothing by itself. Under the round-robin rules, a loss to Finland two days later would have cost the US the gold medal. Trailing 2-1 going into the third period — prompting Brooks's celebrated threat that losing would follow the players to their graves — the Americans scored three times and won 4-2 for gold. The image of Craig wrapped in a flag, scanning the stands and asking "Where's my father?", closed the fortnight. Team members took turns, uniquely, standing on the podium's top step together after Eruzione called them all up.
The afterlives diverged. Thirteen of the twenty US players went on to the NHL; Brooks coached four NHL teams and the 2002 silver-medal US Olympic side before dying in a car crash in 2003 — the Lake Placid rink now bears his name, and Sports Illustrated named the game the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century, running its original cover photo with no headline at all, the only cover the magazine ever published without words. The Soviets, for their part, won the next two Olympic golds, suffering only a single loss — to Finland in 1988. That is the final measure of Lake Placid: it changed no rankings and settled no argument. It simply proved, for one Friday night in the Adirondacks, that the impossible merely required sixty minutes.
Quiz nuggets
- The USA beat the USSR 4-3 at Lake Placid on 22 February 1980 — in the medal round, not the final; gold was clinched by beating Finland 4-2.
- Thirteen days earlier the Soviets had beaten the same US team 10-3 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden.
- Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov pulled goaltender Vladislav Tretiak after the first period, a move he later called his greatest mistake.
- Captain Mike Eruzione scored the winner exactly halfway through the third period; Al Michaels asked, "Do you believe in miracles?"
- The game was shown on tape delay by ABC, and Sports Illustrated's commemorative cover famously carried no headline.