Lake Placid Ski Jump Starter's Stick

A Lake Placid Ski Jumping Tradition
The Starter's Stick

When a reporter asks a ski jumper what is going though his mind as he sits on the start-bar ready to start his run down the tower, she hopes to get a weighty or poetic quote,

Bob, George and Dick
show off THE STICK

perhaps something about the jumper's life flashing before his eyes. The skier's thoughts are his own, but his last view is almost surely the Official Starter standing a few meters below, holding a slender, rustic walking stick across the track, then waving the stick away and calling out "the hill is clear".

That stick has become a Lake Placid tradition, bringing jumpers down the hill for almost twenty years. I thought that it went all the way back to the 1980 Olympics, but not so. According to long-time volunteer starter Dick Brewer, it goes back to about 1983 and top-of-the-hill stalwart George McCarthy tells us it started when John Durant was working as starter.

John, whose son Matt was jumping at that time, noticed on TV that European starters held something across the track. Not to be outdone, Durant did what any good North Country fellow would have done, he walked into the woods and found a suitable sapling, cut and peeled it to make The Stick...and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Stick has served in hundreds of competitions to direct thousands of athletes on tens of thousands of rides down the two big Olympic towers. The athletes ranged from World Cup competitors Ernst Vettori, Andreas Felder and the infamous Matti Nykkaenen to "the danglers", little kids so small that their skis don't reach the snow as they slide out onto the start bar.

But The Stick did not always command the appropriate respect. Sometime in the 1980's, someone in the office drove it into the soil of a big flower pot to help support a sagging houseplant. The result was that six inches of the small end of the stick got a little rotten, but another long-time starter Skip Outcalt applied a band-aid of black electrical tape, and the old stick is good as new.

The Stick has seen danglers become Olympians, then Master jumpers and finally retire to coaching and to a real job, and it has seen the birth of the Ladies Class in ski jumping. And, along with volunteers Brewer, Outcalt and the McCarthy brothers, Bob and George, The Stick will no doubt outlast the present generations of jumpers and direct the jumps of a new crop of skiers who have yet to be born.

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