Nearly 100 years ago on Christmas Day, something special happened in Lake Placid, an event that still echoes through these mountains and around the world.
On wooden sleds with metal blades, daredevils zoomed down North America’s first-ever bobsled track, built at Mt Van Hoevenberg for the 1932 Winter Olympic Games. That moment marked the beginning of Lake Placid’s ascent as an international powerhouse in sliding sports.
Today, thanks to the solid support from the State of New York, we are once again preparing to welcome the world’s best luge athletes for not one but two World Cup events to be held at a newly and fully modernized venue that we are proud to say provides among the best visitor and athlete experiences on the planet.
The Early Beginnings
In April of 1930, after winning the bid to host the Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, Polish engineer and famed track designer, Stanislaus Zentzytzki, was hired to design North America’s first bobsled track along the contours of the north slope of Mt Van Hoevenberg.
At the time, bobsled was the only sliding sport in the Olympics, so skeleton and luge were not considered in the design and were not part of the planning. The four-man bobsled was the Olympic standard at the time, and the 2-man bobsled event debuted at the 1932 Games.