By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
When watching the Winter Olympics on television every four years, I try to remember all the hard work that unknown people do behind the scenes to help make the games happen. Two of those people are my uncle and my wife.
My uncle George Niewenhous was born in October 1922 in New York, New York. During World War II, he served in the United States Army’s 83rd Artillery Battalion in central Europe, the Rhineland, Sicily, Southern France, and Tunisia. After the war in 1947, he married my father’s sister Florence O’Brien.
I first learned about his Olympics work when I was in college at Notre Dame. Uncle George and Aunt Florence sent me a shirt with the 1980 Lake Placid logo on it. It was a cool shirt, and in those days before internet shopping, I was the only one on campus sporting one.
For many years while living in Vermont, George had served as executive director of the Burlington and Winooski Housing Authorities. This experience came in quite handy when George later worked for the Lake Placid Olympic organizing committee, which developed a unique approach to housing athletes at the games.
A 2016 Smithsonian Magazine article explains further, “Although Congress set aside $28 million for Lake Placid’s new Olympic Village, it came with the requirement that they be built with a second life already in mind.” Organizers considered several options, “like turning the village into a hospital, housing space or a permanent athletics facility, but in the end the only government agency that would sign on was the Federal Bureau of Prisons.”
A few months after the 1980 Olympics ended, the athletes’ village reopened as the Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution. According to Smithsonian, “The prison still houses about 1,000 inmates today, and it is seen as one of the earliest models of the prison system as an economic driver in rural regions.”
My cousin—George’s daughter Bunny Niewenhous— recalls that her father’s Olympics job was to act as the liaison “between the government and the building contractors to make sure that the facility was built to the specifications needed for the future prison housing according to government regulations.”
After the Olympics were over, part of George’s job was to dispose of all the mattresses and towels in the athlete dorms, as they were not going to be used by the prisoners. Instead of taking them to the local dump, George donated everything to a local convent of Catholic religious sisters to be distributed to the poor.
Not everyone was happy with the Lake Placid decision to have a village/prison. “After four years of hard training we cannot expect competitors to live in such a lousy place,” said a member of the 1980 Italian Olympic Committee.
Some countries rented nearby homes or hotels for their athletes instead of using the village. I am pretty certain, however, that the members of the “Miracle on Ice” USA mens hockey team stayed in the Lake Placid village that my uncle helped build.
Twenty-two years later, Captain Mike Eruzione and the rest of that same gold medal hockey team reunited to light the cauldron during the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics opening ceremony. My wife Vicki was there, and helped with the international Utah games held twenty years ago this month.
From Lake Placid in 1980 I got just a shirt, but Vicki got an official winter weather uniform featuring the 2002 logo. One Russian athlete she met liked the Utah Olympic coats so well that he offered to trade with her. Saying she worked too hard for it, Vicki politely declined.
Vicki handled various crowd control tasks on the floor of the stadium that hosted both the opening and closing ceremonies. She volunteered at several weeks of rehearsals for both shows, monitoring the doors and making hot chocolate for the participants.
She also enjoyed 15 minutes of fame. President George W. Bush stood close by her in the opening. At the closing, Vicki was on NBC television for a few seconds and just feet away from performers like NSYNC, KISS, and Willie Nelson. She also participated in a stadium-wide snowball fight with athletes and celebrities as the final ceremony ended.
To participate as a volunteer, Vicki had to promise not to reveal any details of the show to people like me watching at home (with our three small children). She kept this promise, but did tip me off to watch out for “Donny and Marie.” I was surprised and delighted as Donny and Marie Osmond were the voices for a pair of 75 foot tall animatronic dinosaurs who peeked into the stadium during the closing.
Over 20,000 volunteers worked at about a dozen different venues during the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics. They made the games one of the most memorable in sports history, and certainly quite unforgettable here in Utah.
Founder Pierre de Coubertin, upon the creation of the International Olympic Committee in 1894, proposed the motto the games still use today: “Citius, Altius, Fortius” which is Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” It’s a phrase that applies not just to the competitors, but to the people behind the scenes who actually make the quadrennial competition possible.
People like George and Vicki.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
