Do You Believe in Miracles

BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Russian athletes have dominated the winter Olympiads. But this year, the evee-formidable Russian Olympic team banned from the 2018 winter games in South Korea because of prior systemic doping.

MALE SPEAKER: Today, the UN ambassador said it’s an open question whether the United States will participate in the Winter Olympics in South Korea. Is it an open question, is that now in doubt?

MALE SPEAKER: An Olympics first tonight for North and South Korea, they’ll play together. A United women’s hockey team.

ED: The 23rd Winter Olympics is about to open in Pyongyang, South Korea. And given the tensions in that peninsula, the event has something of a Cold War feel to it.

BRIAN: Our first story takes us back to 1980. It was tough times for the United States. The Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan and the United States was in the dying days of the Carter presidency.

But, the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid are about to serve up an unexpected sporting victory against the Soviets, which gives American morale a much-needed shot in the arm. No wonder it got called “The Miracle on Ice.”

DON ABELSON: The United States, in many respects at that time, felt paralyzed on the world stage.

BRIAN: This is Don Abelson, professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.

DON ABELSON: Jimmy Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1980, often talked about a crisis in confidence that Americans had lost faith in government, that they had lost faith in the ability of the United States to project power abroad.

BRIAN: Throughout the Cold War, sports had become a proxy for political antagonism between East and West. But the American ice hockey team at the Winter Olympics was an unlikely group of national heroes.

DON ABELSON: And this team of 20 college students came together under the leadership of the legendary college coach Herb Brooks from the University of Minnesota. And these were kids drawn mainly from Minnesota and throughout Massachusetts, primarily in the Boston area.

BRIAN: And these college students were facing the most fearsome ice hockey team in the world.

DON ABELSON: And the Soviet Union had won the Olympic gold medal in hockey in 1964, ’68, ’72, and ’76. Not surprisingly, were heavily favored to take the gold again in 1980.

BRIAN: Yeah, didn’t they have some awesome nickname like “The Big Red Machine” or something like that?

DON ABELSON: They were the Big Red Machine.

BRIAN: They were the Big Red Machine. Now, understand that the first game that the United States played which ended in a tie, the stadium was only half-full.

DON ABELSON: I don’t even think it was half-full.

BRIAN: Yet, when they faced off against the Soviet Union several games later–

[CHANTS OF ‘USA’]

it was packed to the gills and the fans were shouting “USA, USA” even before the game started.

DON ABELSON: Oh, people went crazy. So, you’re absolutely right, when the games began– you know, the first game that the US played in their pool was against Sweden. And it was very, very late in the third period that they were able to tie it up and it ended up being 2-2.

Then they went on and they played Czechoslovakia, which was really ranked second in the pool. They defeated the Czechs, 7-2– or 7-3. That was a fantastic team. And then they went on to beat the Romanians, the West Germans, and the Norwegians before getting to the Soviets.

So every time they were able to win a game, the media focus became more intense. Politicians began to focus more on what was happening in Lake Placid. So, not surprisingly, by the time they entered the first medal game– or the medal round against the Soviet Union– there was this frenzy around the American team. And, as Al Michaels of ABC News at the time– and he was one of the key broadcasters along with the legendary Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden said,

“you know most of the people in this arena– most of the people in this country– might not know the difference between a blue line and a clothesline, but they do understand the significance of this contest.” And he was right. It wasn’t about hockey, it was about what a potential victory represented.

BRIAN: But in a match that was increasingly cast as an episode in the Cold War, the American College students kept their cool on the ice.

DON ABELSON: For the players, it was about a hockey game. It was a sport they loved, it was something they felt passionate about. And, yes, they were going up against a team that had won four previous gold medals. And, yes, they thought, staring across the ice, that these were many of the players that they had admired for years.

But I think they were able to keep focused on what was important. And, although other people wanted to draw them into this Cold War arena, although they wanted them to take on a role that they were uncomfortable with, they were able to remain focused on the issue at hand, and that was to play a sport that they loved.

BRIAN: The American team had a strong leader in their inspirational coach Herb Brooks. Brooks had spent time in the USSR watching their game. And he understood just what it would take to win against the Soviets.

DON ABELSON: Certainly in the Olympics, when you’re playing against all of these European teams, particularly the Soviets, the emphasis had to be on skating, it had to be on speed, it had to be on passing. It really had to be executed with what he regarded as surgical precision, and get the players to think less about themselves individually and more as a team.

BRIAN: And, it worked.

DON ABELSON: It’s akin to a college football team beating the Green Bay Packers. That’s what they did.

BRIAN: Even the Soviet players were able to acknowledge that something quite incredible had happened.

DON ABELSON: The Soviets saw the Americans celebrating– and it’s that famous photo of sticks and gloves in the air and helmets coming off and players on the ice hugging each other and crying and looking up to the heavens just wondering how is it that this happened. Many of the Soviet players looked at the Americans and thought, we have lost that feeling. Look at how the Americans are celebrating, look at what this means to them, perhaps it didn’t mean as much to us.

BRIAN: Before long, Don Abelson says that the Miracle on Ice was being used by Americans who were desperate for a much-needed national victory.

DON ABELSON: The media certainly embraced it, policy-makers did. President Carter was among the first people to call Herb Brooks and the team to congratulate them. Later on, Ronald Reagan would tap into the victory as a way of promoting American values and our ideology and political system over that of the Soviets.

So it became far more than a hockey game in the ensuing years. But there’s no question that, even today, when people watch footage of that game and what it represented, it really sends a chill down their spine. It was a magical moment which helped not only bring hockey onto the radar in the United States, but I think played a very important role in boosting the spirits of a nation that was suffering terribly.