2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics

(03/29/10) The only firm plan on today's agenda at the state Legislature is for the Senate to give final approval of Gov. David Paterson's emergency bare-bones budget plan. The budget is supposed to be in place by April 1, but lawmakers plan to take their Passover-Easter break this week.

They're wrangling over a spending plan that includes some of the deepest cuts ever in school aid and other areas to contend with the state's fiscal crisis. The latest competing proposals are $1 billion apart. The state's fiscal health is in the balance. So are facilities and services considered vital to communities across the North Country: from parks to prisons, to ski hills.

Friday, local athletes just back from competing in the Vancouver Olympics were in Albany fighting for Lake Placid's Olympic venues. Chris Knight reports.

(03/22/10) Many of the nation's top alpine skiers, including more than a dozen Olympians, are in the North Country to compete in the 2010 U.S. Alpine Championships at Whiteface Mountain, which got underway Saturday and continue today.

The roster of athletes includes Julia Mancuso, who won two silver medals at the Vancouver Winter Games, and 2006 Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety. But before they took to the slopes of Whiteface, a half-dozen members of the U.S. Alpine Ski Team visited Mount Pisgah, a small ski hill run by the Village of Saranac Lake, to ski with area kids and help raise funds for a new lift at the ski center. Chris Knight reports.

(03/09/10) Lake Placid-based photographer Nancie Battaglia was NCPR's eyes, and ears, during the Vancouver Olympic games. Battaglia came to Lake Placid to document the 1980 Winter Olympics, and she's is now an experienced Olympic "regular." Vancouver was her eighth games, seventh winter games. She shoots for a number of publications, including Sport Illustrated. This year she not only sent us great shots of local athletes at the games, she found their families and fans, too, and checked in on-air during breaks in the action. Martha Foley called her for a final conversation this week. She's been back for about a week, catching up, catching her breath. She left early on the final Sunday - missing the climactic US Canada hockey game, but also ahead of the crowds that jammed the region's airports that night and the next day.

(03/08/10) A huge crowd turned out Friday afternoon in Saranac Lake for a parade through the village's downtown to honor the North Country athletes who competed at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. Organized by the Olympic Regional Development Authority, the Women's Civic Chamber and the Saranac Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, the event brought together eight local Olympians, led by nordic combined gold and silver medalist Bill Demong of Vermontville. As Chris Knight reports, the parade was just as important to the athletes as it was to the local residents who cheered them on in Vancouver.

(03/01/10) Canadians celebrated the thrilling gold medal victory across the country last night. On Rue St. Laurent in downtown Montreal, cars paraded uptown with Canadian flags flying. The party spilled out of Champs Sports Bar for today's Heard Up North.

(02/26/10) Cartoonist Marquil invaded the Canadian capital to incite a sports-based border conflict on the occasion of the US-Canada Men's Hockey game. In this sketchbook, the wisely pseudonymous artist takes scurrilous aim at Canadian manhood, womanhood, culture and cuisine from the corner table of a sports bar. more

(02/26/10) Lake Placid plans a first Olympic celebration this afternoon at 4, starting near the Olympic Arena, to celebrate alpine skier Andrew Weibrecht's bronze medal in Super-G. There will be more celebrations once all the region's Olympic athletes come home from Vancouver, with Saranac Lake planning a parade on March 13th. The two Adirondack communities combined to produce ten percent of the total U.S. medals so far in Vancouver. Martha Foley has more.

(02/26/10) Vermontville's Bill Demong gave the United States its first Olympic gold medal ever in a Nordic event as Americans posted a 1-2 finish in the Nordic Combined ski event at the Vancouver Olympics yesterday. Teammate Johnny Spillane captured the silver.
Demong surged from sixth place after the ski jump to win the 10-kilometer cross-country leg by four seconds. Bernhard Gruber of Austria, who had a head start after jumping the farthest off the large hill, took the bronze.

Demong will be flag bearer for the U.S. Olympic team at the Olympic closing ceremony Sunday.

(02/26/10) While North Country athletes competing at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver have been grabbing the headlines, and rightfully so, another group of local residents has been making a quieter contribution to the games.

People from the Saranac Lake and Lake Placid area have been working at the Olympics, helping to run bobsled, luge and skeleton races, setting up interviews and photo shoots for athletes, organizing events for sponsors, and playing a host of other behind-the-scenes roles. Chris Knight reports.

(02/25/10) Our regional cartoonist Marquil, in a fit of hometown pride at the performance of local Olympians, has burst forth into full color. Here are two cartoons celebrating the silver medal effort of Vermontville's Bill Demong in the Olympic Nordic combined, and Lake Placid's Andrew Weibrecht, who took the bronze medal in the Super-G.