Lake Placid, New York
Of the four occasions the United States has hosted the Winter Olympics, Lake Placid has twice been the venue, endowing it with a permanent Olympic legacy. You can ski, snowboard, ice skate and play ice hockey in many venues across the country, but Lake Placid is one of the only places where you can try out some of the Winter Olympics’ more esoteric pursuits: bobsled, luge and skeleton.
The city has retained most of its facilities from the 1980 Olympics and keeps them open for visitors, creating a huge tourism draw for adventurous groups.
Just outside downtown at the Olympic Sports Complex, the exact facilities used in the 1980 games, visitors can hop in a bobsled with a professional driver and brakeman and run the exact Olympic track, go it alone on a bracing 30-mile-per-hour skeleton run stomach down or try their hand at the winter biathlon, a combination of skiing and shooting.
The Olympic skating oval is also open to the public and keeps separate hours for speed and figure skating. Though the ski jumps are closed for public use, the Olympic complex operates a new tube ride down a 700-foot chute that simulates the ski jump chute experience, and groups can also take a 26-story elevator to the top of the ski jump tower to experience the rush a ski jumper feels before setting off down the chute.
In the heart of downtown, the city has also created more accessible options for casual winter experiential sports activities on frozen Mirror Lake, including an ice skating path around the entire lake and a toboggan chute.
Irvine, California
Thanks to strong local clubs, high school and college sports teams and an abundance of facilities, Irvine is home to multiple qualifiers and competitions sanctioned by USA Water Polo, the Olympic water polo feeder organization.
“Irvine’s a very business-oriented destination, and we have a lot of occupancy Monday through Thursday, so hotels are very appreciative of the weekend business,” said Wendy Haase, Destination Irvine’s director of tourism marketing.
The city oversees Irvine’s aquatic center, so residents of Irvine have first priority for facilities. Schedulers fill in outside groups and competitions when local groups don’t have something scheduled, which can make it challenging for the CVB to coordinate requests from outside groups.
“I think in the next four or five years, we’re going to see a specific change, as there are additional facilities being built at the Orange County Great Park,” said Haase. “In discussions on who is managing and who gets priority for those facilities, we continue to speak the word of tourism and highlight how much economic impact is generated because of people staying over in the hotels.”
The Irvine CVB has had great success by adding a clause in the contract for outside groups that rent a sports facility in the city that requires them to use hotels within the city if they can be accommodated.
Burlington, Vermont
When Petra Cliffs Climbing Center and Mountaineering School first opened in Burlington, Vermont, in 2000, it was the only facility of its kind in northern Vermont. Rock climbing has changed dramatically in the intervening years, but at the time, it was hard to get experienced climbers — used to climbing outside in freely accessible places open to the public — to pay for climbing.
“In the last four or five years, rock climbing has become much more popular around the country,” said Petra Cliffs co-owner Andrea Charest. “Now we have families that come up once a month or during school breaks and make a vacation out of it. We’ve become much more focused on kids and teens. That’s where the growth and the money is.”
Charest has particularly found that engaging with visitors through social media has allowed her to create a community of families and teens who want to return to Burlington over and over again. “Facebook and Instagram have worked really well for us,” she said. “With rock climbing, we don’t have to write blogs a lot. A picture really says a thousand words.”
