Winter Games 2022

I’m in Lake Placid, NY right now, the site of the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics. Even if you were BORN in 1980, you may know at least one thing about that latter Olympics, the Miracle on Ice, called by Al Michaels on ABC, when the US hockey team beat the Soviet Union, in spite of the Soviet’s seemingly superior talent. Obviously, it had Cold War implications as well.

You would have thought the US had won the gold medal with that game, but that came a couple days later against…

It’s a lovely little town, with really fine food. It is really in the middle of nowhere. That is a desirable trait for a lot of things. It's easy to get caught up in too much busy-ness. There’s a wonderful walk around Mirror Lake that I take every morning. (Carol and I were here a couple years ago.)

When I was last up here, there was considerable speculation around here about applying for ANOTHER Winter Olympics. Don’t think it’ll happen because it’s really is IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, and, far more importantly than in 1980, the Olympic games need enough hotels and venues, something that would be difficult to build and then sustain in this little town. Indeed, on this trip, there's a lot less talk about it, at least with the people I've met, so perhaps they've drawn the same conclusion.

The upstate New York kid in me thinks it would be great to have a trifecta of Olympics in this beautiful spot. The boring, grown-up me thinks it’s nuts.

…oh, yeah, Finland..SCORE, 4-2.

And I'm here for the conference of the NYS Small Business Development Center. The SBDC has about two dozen centers across the state offering business advisement at no charge. We get together once a year for educational enhancement, and for the opportunity to actually put faces to people who may have been acquainted only by phone or e-mail. The centers are assisted by the administrative office, within which resides the Research Network, the library of which I am (by a few months) the longest tenured person in the group. There are other SBDCs around the country offering similar services, though not all of them have a librarian, let alone four.

There's no such thing as an average question. We might be asked about alpacas or home-based jewelry retail or the record industry. We're asked to find demographics or industry trends or state regulations.

Time for that walk.