Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine, Your destination for travel resources and entertainment.

What one father learned from hosting his own Winter Olympics

By Nathaniel Reade  Illustration by Jessica Hische

AS I ROUNDED the last turn of the final event, I could see the leader ahead of me, some 50 yards from the finish line. Here we were on the cross-country ski track at Lake Placid, New York, the very track that Olympic athletes used in the 1980 Winter Games, and the Olympic spirit gave me a jolt. I kicked a little harder, glided a little farther, and soon I was closing the lead. A few strides from the finish, the leader glanced back nervously and found me half a ski behind him. Lunging at the line, I won by less than 6 inches and raised my poles over my head in triumph. I’d done it! I’d won!

But wait. What’s this? The leader lay collapsed in the snow, sobbing like a young boy. Which was perfectly appropriate, because he was a young boy—my son Henry, age 8.

What had I done? What was wrong with me? This was the baby I once cradled on my forearm, the one I’d diapered 1,600 times, the sweet, gentle little guy who still runs to me every morning with a hug so big it can knock me backwards. How could I do this to him? You egotistical, self-serving idiot, I said to myself—so caught up in my own pathetic, midlife-crisis need to win that I had probably turned my son off the sport for good. Bad father. Bad father.

This was exactly why I had always disliked all forms of competition. I saw the teardrops on Henry’s cheeks and thought: This is all Jason’s fault.

IT WAS MY FRIEND Jason who had convinced me that competing with my kids would be good for them. We had come to Lake Placid, a town of about 2,700 in New York’s vast Adirondack Park, with the purest of motives: We wanted to conduct our own Winter Olympics. My wife, Michaela, and our two sons—Henry and his 5-year-old brother, Charley—love to wallow in the vast pleasures of winter. Henry says it’s his favorite season. He was born within minutes of two Maine ski areas, so he was sliding on snow from the time he could walk. He can’t remember not being able to ski. His younger brother, Charley, who on frigid days insists that he doesn’t need a coat, concedes to having been cold—once. Which is why our vacation compass tends to point north. While others flock to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, we prefer Winter Carnival in Quebec City, even though the only time you see more than a few inches of exposed skin there is on the swimsuit-clad, goose-bumpy participants of the Snow Bath event.

Because I love winter sports, I hold the Winter Olympics sacred, and look forward to watching every frosty delight on television. Is there a better sport on God’s white, wintry Earth than biathlon? What’s not to love about a combination of marksmanship and skate skiing? But last winter I thought, Why watch the Olympic games when we could get off the couch, go outside, and be Olympians? And why not do genuine Olympic sports in a genuine Olympic setting? And some non-genuine ones to boot? Still, I hadn’t wanted to compete at these real and made-up events. When the family’s focus is on winners and losers, I’ve found in the past, it can distract us from the pleasure of the thing itself.

Then I happened to talk to my friend Jason, the kind of person who apparently needs no sleep because he’s always simultaneously doing three things well, like running a marathon, starting a new company, and writing a novel. Jason heartily proselytized for the value of competition. “Competition
is awesome for kids,” he said. “I compete with my kids all the time. It’s great. They kick my butt.”

Well, I thought, in our family we don’t do that. We’re more mellow. More caring. Henry’s typical response to losing, even at a game as simple as Sorry, was to whine, “No fair.” We’d heard it so often we were thinking of getting him judicial robes. That’s why we generally stuck to such loser-free pursuits as biking, skiing, and canoeing.

Yet I had great faith in Jason. He’s smart and wise; his grown kids are happy and healthy. When Henry was born I’d asked Jason if he had any parenting advice, and he’d given me the best guidance ever: “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t listen to people who want to give you parenting advice. Especially people who have theories about parenting.”

Despite Jason’s warning about taking advice, I almost always found it wise to take his. So when he told me competition was great, I began to worry that my kids might be dangerously competition-deprived. Maybe they weren’t prepared for real life. After all, while we had avoided competition because we were concerned that losing would hurt our kids, a winter’s wind can hurt, too. Yet Michaela and I were strong believers in going out in the cold and learning to deal with it; otherwise, kids will forever be slaves to the thermostat. So if a tiny bit of harsh weather is good for them, why not also a tiny bit of harsh competition?

HENRY AND CHARLEY loved the idea of our own Winter Olympics, especially when we told them there would be cash prizes for the winners. (It’s amazing what you can get a kid to do for $2.) They decided to divide the family into two “nations,” kids versus grown-ups, and named themselves Ninja Nation. Its national team consisted of two promising athletes aged 8 and 5. The senior member, who went by the name of Cheeseboy, informed this reporter that he was “fast and agile, which means I should be good in the bed-jumping competition.” (He clearly had not received information that, in the hotel room that would serve as headquarters for both teams, there would definitely not be a bed-jumping competition.) His younger teammate, Puncher, said with equal disregard for the official winter sports that he was “really good at kicking people and punching people.” Puncher added, “I’m gonna win every single one—well, not every single one. And the grown-ups are gonna lose and we’re gonna win, because we’re more fast.”

 “And we’re gonna get head starts!” said Cheeseboy, who had connections among the Reade Olympics’ organizers.

They would be competing against the Nation of Geritol, represented by Grumpy, a 50-year-old, out-of-shape writer; and his spouse, 48-year-old Ritzy, who admitted, “This is my first competition ever.”

It takes about two hours to drive up to Lake Placid from the airport in Albany—just enough time for our kids to watch Robert Redford in Downhill Racer on a backseat DVD player. From our hotel on Main Street we could see recreational skaters tooling around on the frozen lake behind us; and on the main street in front of us, vast quantities of Olympic history. Lake Placid hosted the Winter Games twice, in 1932 and 1980. We could see the 1932 rink, the first Olympic rink with a roof, and the outdoor speed-skating oval, cooled by 33 miles of pipe. In 1980 the American super-skater Eric Heiden won every speed-skating event here. Possessor of a 32-inch waist and 27-inch thighs, he became the first Olympian to win five individual golds in one Games (three of swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven had been in relays). But instant celebrity didn’t appeal to Heiden. He said after the Games, “I really liked it best when I was a nobody,” and became an orthopedic surgeon.

That sounded to me like the true spirit of Olympic competition, and Baron Pierre de Coubertin would have agreed. The wealthy Parisian dreamed up the modern Olympics and headed the committee that put on the first Games in Athens, in 1896. (Chamonix, France, hosted the first Winter Games in 1924.) At a time when most people’s work had shifted from farms to factory floors and offices, Baron Coubertin preached that sport could heal bodies, improve minds, even bring about peace. “The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the fight,” reads the Olympic creed, which he helped write. “The essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well.” Right on!

Jim Rogers, a tour guide we met inside the Lake Placid hockey rink, told us that Olympic competition can even transform global politics. A tall, wiry, Lake Placid native and retired radio executive, Rogers was in utero at the 1932 Winter Games in Lake Placid and a member of the local organizing committee for 1980. He reminded us that the United States was not feeling very good about itself in 1980, what with inflation, hostages in Iran, and America’s boycott of the Summer Games. The Soviets at that time seemed particularly big and threatening, as exemplified by their hulking hockey team with its full-time players—army soldiers, officially. The Soviet hockey team had won 42 of their last 43 games, losing only to the Philadelphia Flyers. And a couple of weeks before the U.S.S.R. played the 1980 U.S. Olympic team, the Soviets had beaten the American team 10­-3.

You probably know the rest of the story, if not the terrific details, but I personally get a proud shiver down my spine every time it’s told. The U.S. Olympic team consisted of a bunch of recent college grads. Average age: 22. They had every reason to lose that year, and at the beginning of every game in the Olympics, they showed it. They fell behind
the powerful Czech team—but beat them. Norway scored first, but the U.S. won. They trailed the West Germans 2-0, but came back to win 4-2. The Russians scored first, too, and yet this American team had a unique talent: They didn’t panic. They won the gold.

The Miracle on Ice, the media called it. Said Rogers, “All of a sudden people felt good about America.” Back in the Soviet Union, meanwhile, government officials tried to cover up the loss, claiming that the refs had been bribed. When the truth came out, Rogers says, Russians began to question all kinds of things their government was telling them, which gradually led to Gorbachev and the falling of the Wall. Rogers pointed to the rink where it all happened and said, “So this may not be where Soviet Communism fell, but it is where the slide began.” A bit of a fairy tale from a home-town booster? Judge for yourself. After all, the Miracle on Ice was a fairy tale, too, except it happened.

At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, the opening ceremony lasted more than three hours. The opening ceremonies of the Reade Winter Games were conducted during a several-minute walk to a nice little Japanese restaurant, in front of the 1932 indoor skating rink. Ninja Nation waved a beautiful paper flag, which they had taped to a cardboard tube—ninja eyes on a field of black with yellow lightning bolts, rampant. Geritol Nation, being elderly, forgot theirs. If the ceremonies were themselves a sporting event, Ninja Nation would already have pulled ahead.

One great thing about running your own family Olympics is that you can make stuff up. At the 1932 games in Lake Placid, 252 competitors from 17 nations competed in 14 events covering a few sports: cross-country skiing, ski jumping, speed skating, figure skating, hockey, and bobsleigh. That was it. At the 2010 Vancouver games, more than 2,000 athletes from a projected 80-plus countries will compete in 86 events, including curling, ice dancing, and, new this year, ski cross, which is kind of like ski racing mixed with roller derby. Not to be outdone, the Reade Olympics devised a plethora of new events that the International Olympic Committee might wish to consider. Besides the traditional outdoor sports, the new ones were blatantly developed for the benefit of parents: Not Nose Picking. Underwear Changing. Table Manners. Trying New Foods. And best of all, in the kind of brilliantly unfair maneuver that only parents and dictators get away with, Geritol Nation appointed themselves the Olympics’ sole judges.

Michaela and I also got to make up the rules. “Sportsmanship,” I announced at dinner, “will count for half of team points. And sportsmanship means following the rules. My rules. Napkins in laps!” Henry began opening doors for us, standing at attention, and saluting. Some of the indoor events spurred intra-team rivalries. When I pointed to Henry’s teammate later that night and said, “Charley seems to be winning the Get-Ready-for-Bed Competition,” Henry instantly stopped fiddling with the hotel’s cool soap and finished brushing his teeth. OK! This competition thing was definitely working for me.

Then we moved outdoors. In Lake Placid you can try out various Olympic sports at actual world-class venues, from speed skating to bobsleigh. Under the excellent coaching of Stuart Hemsley, a handsome young Briton who guides corporate groups through various Lake Placid activities, we attempted a run down the bottom third of a state-of-the-art Olympic course on a “skeleton”—so called because it consists of nothing more than a sled’s bare bones. The kids were too young to participate, and I could see why as I suited up. The sport itself is definitely no-frills: Donning elbow pads and helmet, you lie otherwise unprotected on top of a medal frame and hurtle face-first down a covered tube of ice. Hemsley pointed to what looked like a giant white drainpipe snaking down the hill: “You know you’re playing in Yankee Stadium, right? This is not some shabby little track.”

I’d watched these sledding-on-steroids events on television, and frankly always found them a bit boring. Try it, however, and as Hemsley told us, you might need a change of underwear. You fly down the icy track, snap high around sharp turns, and imagine yourself flying off the top of the run and into the wild blue yonder. My technique largely consisted of closing my eyes and swearing a lot. I felt kind of wobbly at the end, which is probably why they have two workers there to grab you when you stand.

After her own run, Michaela said, “I was so nervous beforehand that my stomach completely flipped. Once I started it was fun.” Yeah? Well, her time was 34.6, and mine was 33.5.

I won!

THE NEXT MORNING after breakfast, Charley didn’t want to leave his bed. He can be an obstinate little fellow, and we’d planned to compete in downhill skiing at the Whiteface ski resort that day. I said to him, “Charley, this is the day you’re going to win Olympic gold!” That did it. He got right up and put on his pants.

Whiteface is where American Phil Mahre, despite a 2-inch metal plate and seven screws in his left ankle from a fall 11 months earlier, won silver in the 1980 Olympic slalom. I love this place. Because Whiteface is owned and run by the state of New York, it used to have the reputation in some quarters of being a bit like a visit to the DMV. Yet in my 46 years of skiing all over the continent and Europe, it’s the only place that someone other than my father helped me unload skis off the car. “We want people to have a good first impression,” said the helper, who does this 20 days a year in return for a free pass. That’s smart management. Besides, this is a really big mountain, with the biggest vertical rise in the East. And it’s beautiful. As we rode up the chairlift, Henry admired the flat expanse of rock over which a clear stream burbled, surrounded by mounds of snow and ice: “It looks like a cave painting!” It was the perfect venue to triumph over my kids.

When I had asked my friend Jason how he managed to compete fairly with his kids, he had looked at me like I had the mind of a mackerel and said, “Handicapping!” These judgment calls aren’t always easy to make. Luckily, in downhill skiing, there’s an organization that does everything for you on computers. It’s called NASTAR, for National Standard Race. It’s open to everybody. You just go to one of over 120 participating ski areas in 27 states, pay a small fee, and get timed as you push through a starting gate, ski down an official course between beflagged poles, or “gates,” and cross the finish line, just like real racers on TV. NASTAR uses rated course-runners to calibrate the difficulty of various runs, then compares your time with every other participant on the continent in your age and class. At some mountains you look up your results later, on the NASTAR website. At Whiteface, the guys running things gave us our places almost instantly.

When Henry was 3, he’d seen a NASTAR course from a chairlift in Maine. He beelined for it, butted into the front of the line as only oblivious 3-year-olds can, and proceeded, first time out—with me hurtling after him petrified that he’d crash—to win a bronze medal. Yet I had assumed that Charley, a strong skier, would have the best chance of beating out our NASTAR peers or even establishing a new record. For one thing, there just aren’t that many 5-year-old ski racers. What I had failed to recognize, however, is what a big role attitude plays. Charley can be very cautious, which will be a good thing when I finally hand him the keys to my car; but after three runs the only record he actually set was for number of seconds behind the average. Ski races can be lost by hundredths of seconds. Compared to other boys his age, he was about half a minute away from a medal.

Oh, well. There’s a time-honored place for that in the Olympics. In 1952, Greek skier Alexandros Vouxinos competed on the downhill course, the fastest and straightest of all the skiing events, where the difference between a gold medal and the ignominy of 10th place was seven seconds. The winner finished in two and a half minutes. Vouxinos, moving at the toddler pace of not quite 16 miles per hour, finished 3 minutes and 40 seconds later than that.

Besides, while Charley was slow, he was also hooked. When I asked him, “How do you like racing?” he said, “Good. I mean awesome. Because it’s fast. It’s fun. And it was racing! I don’t like to go fast. I love to go fast. I don’t like racing. I love racing!”

Henry, meanwhile, was motivated like I’d never seen him before. After four runs down the course, the rest of us were exhausted. He still hadn’t medaled—none of us had—and he now stood leaning on his poles at the bottom of the course, dejected. But when I asked him if he wanted to keep trying, he said, “One more run.”

He and I did one more. I was shocked to turn in my best time, winning myself a bronze. But Henry, despite looking great on the course in a tight little tuck, was just off the medal time. Rather than discourage him, however, as I’d feared, it actually inspired him. Next winter, he plans to join the ski-racing team at our little local hill in Massachusetts. Cool!

I had won the downhill skiing competition. Michaela’s efforts put her in third behind Henry, which made Geritol Nation the winner in downhill skiing. Because we had also awarded ourselves a gold in Manners, we led in national medals overall. But when the downhill event was over, Charley made an untimed run from the summit, singing the whole way (including the disconcerting made-up lyrics “I’m skiing on the wrong side of the trail, I’m skiing on the wrong side of the trail…”). Then, at lunch in the lodge, Henry earned a gold in our hearts for Trying New Foods when he mastered the unprecedented maneuver of downing a bit of red pepper. This performance gave the judges no choice but to award Ninja Nation all the day’s sportsmanship points, which we’d already announced counted for half. And so going into the final event, Nordic skiing, Geritol and Ninja were locked in a tie.

Most American cross-country ski centers in the U.S. look like remote country inns of the sort Bing Crosby would visit in White Christmas. Lake Placid’s, on the other hand, was the first I’d ever seen with a sign pointing to the “stadium.” The lodge is surrounded by a wide, flat field to allow a simultaneous start for hundreds of skiers. This was the bigtime.

“OK, you kids,” I told Ninja Nation in the parking lot. “We are no longer your parents. We are no longer your friends. We are your opponents. And we are going to crush you like bugs!”

 “Well, I have that ankle injury,” Michaela noted unhelpfully. She had cut herself shaving.

 “You are going down,” Charley shot back.

“We’re gonna crush you,” Henry seconded. “Because we’re awesome!”

I was impressed. I’d never heard such openly expressed confidence from these boys. Maybe Jason was right about this competitive thing.

I had fully embraced the competitive spirit myself. When Charley arbitrarily decided he was going to ski without poles, I didn’t point out how ridiculous that was: A third of your power in Nordic skiing comes from poling. Instead I said, “Good!”

We had done a practice circuit the day before, which allowed us to determine how much of a head start everyone needed. Charley, who shuffles along, needed a massive head start. Michaela, another veteran shuffler, needed one, too. So on our 1/2K (about a quarter mile) course, Charley would get a lead of 200 seconds, Henry would get 100, and Michaela would get 50. Michaela’s maternal instincts overpowered her allegiance to Geritol Nation, however. She was now helping Charley, who struggled without his poles, even though I had coached her to beat him at all cost.

Which I proceeded to do to the older boy.

Henry had been determined, if dejected, during the NASTAR races. But after I won by inches in our Nordic race, he now seemed emotionally shattered. I sat down in the snow beside him and put my arms around him. I asked why he was crying, even though I knew the answer.

“Because I lost.”

“But you came in second!”

“So far I haven’t beaten you in anything.”

This was exactly why I didn’t like competition. Rather than appreciate how well he’d done, my son was disgusted with himself. Curse you, Jason.

“You should really be proud,” I said. “I held nothing back, and you nearly beat me even though you’re half my size.” And it’s true; the guy has only been skiing Nordic for one year, and he had been flying. I pointed out that if his head-start had been 105 seconds instead of 100 he’d have won.

Henry wasn’t having any of it. He just sat there, sobbing.

So I recounted a story that Jim Rogers, the tour guide, had told us. In the 15K race (that’s about nine miles!) at the 1980 Winter Games, right on these trails, Thomas Wassberg of Sweden beat Juha Mieto of Finland by one hundredth of a second: 41 minutes, 57.63 seconds to Mieto’s 41:57.64, a difference so nearly imperceptible that afterwards the IOC changed the rules, now rounding up times to the nearest tenth of a second. So Wassberg, the winner, said it was really a tie, and Mieto said no, no, you won. Then one day back home in Finland, Mieto got a package in the mail. Inside was the gold medal, sawn in half, with a note from Thomas Wassberg asking him to do the same with the silver, and to send half back so he could have it brazed together. “Now, that’s sportsmanship!” Rogers said.

Sportsmanship indeed. But it didn’t cheer up Henry any.

ON THE DRIVE HOME, when I asked Henry if our Winter Olympics had been worth it, he said it had. His reason? The all-you-can-eat bacon at the buffet and the flat-screen TV in the hotel room. Not the answer I’d been looking for. While our competitive vacation hadn’t seemed to do anyone lasting harm—at least, I hoped it hadn’t—losing to his dad probably wouldn’t ever top Henry’s list of happy childhood memories.

Then a week later I read in The New York Times about an entrepreneur, Mark Pincus, who’s formed various successful web businesses. The story contained something that hit me like a wet snowball: A successful entrepreneur, Pincus said, has to “get used to failure. It is just part of the path to success.”

This made a lot of sense to me. After all, the few people I know who have become wildly successful aren’t the most talented in their fields. Pincus made me realize that what many of them did have was the same ability as the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team: They could brush off setbacks and keep on trying. Meanwhile some of the most innately talented people I know haven’t produced much of anything because they’ve either faced failures and it’s devastated them, or they’re afraid of failing, or both.

Then my niece began hearing back from colleges.

I love all my family members, but any college that wouldn’t want Sophie must not want anyone. She had killer test scores and a GPA over 4.0 because of her advanced-placement classes. She was the tri-captain of a sport she wasn’t even particularly good at just because the other girls liked her, and on top of all that, she’s got the world’s biggest heart. She still organizes an annual picnic for the piano teacher she hasn’t studied with in seven years. Ever since she was 10 she has used her prodigious pastry-baking talents to raise money for environmental charities. Nobody told her to do this. Yet despite several acceptances, the college she really wanted to go to and applied to early decision decided not to accept her.

I asked my sister: Was Sophie crushed? I would have been. My sister said Sophie was disappointed but was taking it in stride. I asked why. My sister attributed it to all those years on sports teams, where you have to learn how to lose, and then keep going.

Encouraged by Sophie’s example, I decided to talk some more to Henry about that cross-country race. I told him that the most important thing I’d learned from our Winter Olympics was that the secret to success doesn’t lie in winning gold when it’s easy. “The real gold, the gold of a happy life, goes to the people who know how to lose,” I said. “They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and keep on going.” Not a bad reason for children to compete: It helps make them good at losing.

“Think you’d like to race me four years from now?” I asked Henry.

“Definitely.”

Will I try to crush him? Or will I be merciful and let him win? Hard to say. He’ll be older, and so will I. At some point, I suspect, he’ll be teaching his old man a few lessons about losing.

Nathaniel Reade is a writer who lives in western Massachusetts. He insists that he is much less competitive than you are.