07 Nov Lake Placid’s Miracle Ice
Last fall, The Olympic Center in Lake Placid, NY added a REALice system to treat the water for the Luge Track at the two-time Winter Olympic venue. Bryan Berghorn, the Director of Sliding Sports for the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) told us they’d never had better ice on the track — and track records were made using, what we affectionately call the “Bazooka“, due to its size.
This summer, ORDA’s two indoor ice rinks — the Herb Brooks Arena, the 1980 Rink (home of the famous “Miracle on Ice“) and the 1932 Jack Shea Arena — also changed how the floodwater is treated, moving from traditional hot water flooding to REALice. And when the James C. Sheffield Speed Skating Oval opens to the public at the end of this month, that track, like many 400 meter tracks in Europe, will be using REALice, too.
Miracle Ice?
“I’m not saying it’s ‘Miracle Ice’,” says Chadd Cassidy, Vice President of Legacy Venues Operations, “We were skeptics if REALice would work, but not anymore! The REALice ice is everything they say it is, letting us use colder floodwater to produce clear, dense, durable ice that is completely against everything we thought how ice making should be done. We’re using cold floodwater to maintain the ice, the ice needs to run at higher set points than it did with hot water floods. and the ice quality, I’d say, is as even better, than what we had before.”
Cassidy, a Lake Placid native, knows ice. Before returning to Lake Placid to work at ORDA, he coached hockey for a variety of high-level teams, including the Rochester Americans of the American Hockey League.
“We were skeptical it would work, but we saw, as soon as we started laying down the REALice water, that this water is different.”
