The athletes that pulled off the “Miracle on Ice” will now see if their luck extends past the rink.
Saturday marks four decades since Team U.S.A. famously defeated the Soviet Union in the Feb. 22, 1980, hockey match held in Lake Placid, New York. To celebrate the anniversary, several members of the triumphant underdogOlympicsquad are reuniting for a weekend trip to Las Vegas.
“I’m just so proud to be part of that team, doing something nobody thought we could do,” Neal Broten toldWCCO. “I think back at all the times we walked to the rink as kids, and skated six or seven hours at the rink.”
Broten added, “They paid off in the long run. To win a gold medal, I still can’t believe it.”
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The inspiring story was dramatized in the 2004 movieMiracle, which starredKurt Russellas coach Herb Brooks, who died in a car accident in 2003 at the age of 66, according toThe New York Times.
“Certainly as a group, we became great friends and that certainly had a lot to do with not just [our] playing hockey ability but the friendships — a lot to do with how well we did in 1980,” John Harrington told WCCO.
Al Michaels — whose announcing “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” at the time of the victory became just as iconic as the win itself — recently reflected on the historical impact of the match.
“I’ll think back upon it always, as it galvanized the country,” he said, according to theChicago Tribune. ”It was an event that brought people together.”
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Michaels added of his statements staying power: “In those years, nobody had a home video machine, so this is not something you think lives forever. Now, of course, anything anybody says gets played 18 gazillion times, but that was never a thought back in 1980.”
source: people.com
