Six Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Miracle on Ice

1. Team USA’s captain Mike Eruzione never played another game of professional hockey after the 1980 Winter Olympics. Most of his team had dreams of glory in the NHL (and many went on to win Stanley Cup championships) but Eruzione effectively ended his career after leading his team to a come-from-behind win over Finland to claim the Gold medal, realising that he would never play a game with as much meaning as the Miracle.

It was a smart move from Eruzione, because for every Ken Morrow on Herb Brooks’ roster, there’s a Jim Craig. Morrow left the 1980 Olympic squad, went straight to the NHL with the New York Islanders and won the Stanley Cup less than six months later, and three more in the next three years. On the flip side, is Craig, whose NHL career was less than stellar, and ended with more of a whimper than a bang.

Eruzione became – and still is – a permanent fixture on the public speaking circuit, and inspired one of the all-time great quotes from Brooks, who was never short of something to say: “Mike Eruzione believes in free speech. He’s just never given one.”

2. Herb Brooks was worried that he wouldn’t have Mark Johnson on his squad. Because Johnson was the son of ‘Badger’ Bob Johnson, and there was quite a rivalry between the Brooks and Johnson. A lot of it was borne from their coaching styles, which were markedly different, but Johnson coached at Wisconsin and Brooks in Minnesota, and there are few more hotly-contested hockey rivalries than Minnesota-Wisconsin.
Brooks apparently fretted that Johnson would be held back from the squad by his father, which would have been a major blow, because Johnson’s speed and scoring touch was key to Brooks’ audacious plan to beat the Russians at their own game. It was just as well for American hockey that Badger Bob didn’t hold his son back, because Mark scored two goals in the Miracle game, and was probably the best American player other than Jim Craig that night.

3. The Russian team were followed everywhere by KGB officials. It was the height of the Cold War, and the very fact that the USSR squad were on American soil was no small thing, particularly considering US President Ronald Reagan was considering boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow scheduled for later that year.

Obviously, coming from communist Russia to a generally more prosperous America, the differences were highlighted, and to ensure that none of the USSR players tried to defect to the United States, they were shadowed just about everywhere they went by undercover KGB officials, likely officially listed as embassy officials.

4. The USSR tried to forget their team lost. There is very little in the annals of Russian hockey history to indicate that the Miracle game even took place. Back at home, there was no mention of the game in the following day’s edition of the Communist-run newspaper, Pravda, and no mention of the game when the newspaper published a wrap-up of the entire Olympic tournament. It was as if the contest never took place. In the Russian Ice Hockey Federation headquarters sits a montage of so many of the country’s defining moments on the ice, but there are exactly zero photos from Lake Placid.

The fact that Russian hockey still wishes to forget Lake Placid gives us an idea of just how much losing that game meant to the USSR. It was, as has been written so often, the Miracle was far more important than a simple hockey game. It was a chance for two nations in the midst of a prolonged Cold War to cross swords and decide who was better.

5. The Miracle was nearly upstaged by one man. The American speed skater Eric Heiden had himself an Olympics to remember. Whilst the country’s hocky squad struggled through the early games, it was Heiden who became the darling of the country. He won Gold in each of the events he skated in, 500m 1000m, 1500m, 1000m and the marathon 10,000m – on the outdoor rink in front of Lake Placid High School, and just a slap shot away from the hockey arena. Heiden goes down in history as being the only skater to have won all five events in one Olympic meet, and one of only two to win an Olympic medal in all speed skating events.

6. The entire team has only been together twice since the end of the 1980 Olympics. One was for an NHL All Star Weekend event in Los Angeles in 2002. Most of the team was together at Salt Lake City that same year, lighting the Olympic cauldron, but not noted recluse Mark Pavelich. 

The second occasion was in 2003, after Herb Brooks died. The entire team gathered in Saint Paul, Minnesota, not for the funeral, but for the wake. Pavelich did not attend the funeral. Bob Suter died of a heart attack in 2014, so the 20-man roster will never be in the same room again.