The 1980 Olympic Games at Lake Placid were accompanied by a serious scandal, one of the loudest in the history of the Winter Games, over the conditions in which the American side housed the athletes

The 1980 Olympic Games at Lake Placid were accompanied by a serious scandal, one of the loudest in the history of the Winter Games, over the conditions in which the American side housed the athletes. The Olympic Village was set up on the grounds of a prison.

Some American sources write in this vein: the decision that the building housing the athletes would be given a new life as a medium-security federal prison was taken after the Olympics, or that such accommodation was connected with new security requirements after the terrorist attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972. It is known for certain that this is untrue. The Olympic Village at Ray Brook was designed and built from the outset as a
medium-security federal prison. And given that the US government had allocated 28 million dollars on condition that all Olympic facilities be used after the Games, the American side decided that a prison was an excellent solution, all the more so as it would provide jobs for local residents.

It is curious that this Federal Bureau of Prisons institution now holds 700 medium-security inmates, whereas for the 1980 Games it was meant to accommodate more than 1,000 athletes. That is to say, the finest sportsmen from around the world lived in greater cramp than convicted criminals.

Naturally, many athletes refused to move into the prison and looked for lodgings on their own. Meanwhile spectators, local residents and assorted activists held rallies at the gates of the "Olympic village" and fixed to the walls placards showing the Olympic symbol behind bars.

...more than a thousand athletes who had come to the Games were lodged in several small prison buildings designed for five hundred inmates; after the Olympics they were put to their intended use. This housing of the athletes prompted the president of the International Ski Federation (FIS), Marc Hodler, to declare publicly and in all seriousness that he was ready to give up his room in the best hotel in Lake Placid to one of the skiers and take his prison cell in the Olympic Village himself.

The cells in which the athletes were placed were very cramped and uncomfortable, the sound insulation was dreadful, and there were grey walls, barred windows, iron doors and barbed wire, with an armed guard and dogs around the perimeter.

Vyacheslav Fetisov, in his book «Overtime», recalls the American Games thus:

I have a terrible impression of the Lake Placid Games. They put us up in a forest, in the building of a future prison. Dogs, barbed wire, snow, even watchtowers with machine-gunners: not America but a Siberian concentration camp.

The head of the USSR Sports Committee officially declared that conditions at the Games in the USA were worse than at any previous Olympics.

Vladislav Tretiak noted in his memoirs the monstrous lack of soundproofing. By his account, the walls were so thin that when Vladimir Petrov sneezed in the next cell, Vladimir Krutov could say "bless you" without raising his voice.

Despite protests, scandals and appeals to the IOC, nothing could be done any longer: the athletes settled into these appalling conditions and lived amid stress, sleeplessness and prison trappings until the end of the Games.