Ed Kane flashes a coy smile when he explains how he got ahold of the thick wooden disk with the ESPN Great Outdoor Games logo stenciled on the side.

	“	It is so great, so entertaining, so clean, so free. It's just regular people doing what they're good at. ”
		— Local proprietor Ed Kane, on the ESPN Great Outdoor Games

"We had to do a little conning to get that," says the co-owner of a downtown Lake Placid brewery and restaurant. The 20-inch disk was the end of a log that suffered a hot saw event at last year's GO Games. It's now on the wall, along with other pieces of Lake Placid sports memorabilia, including posters of the 1980 Winter Olympics and that year's "Miracle on Ice" U.S. hockey team, which won the gold just a couple of blocks from Kane's restaurant.

Lake Placid has outdoor sports in its DNA, no doubt, and on the day before the GO Games kick off, everywhere there are reminders why. The Adirondacks crest and ebb in the distance around the town of 2,800 like a living painting. The water of Mirror Lake ripples in the stiff, brisk breeze. Crews work to finish the GO Games venues under a cloud-speckled sky, weather fine enough to have been ordered out of a catalog. Even in a town so proud of its Olympic heritage and enamored with its natural surroundings, the GO Games present a treat.

"It is so great, so entertaining, so clean, so free. You simply can't go wrong," Kane said. "It's just regular people doing what they're good at."

Olympic heritage runs deep

That could describe the origins of the Olympics, which turn people's elemental athletic endeavors — moving fast, throwing hard, jumping far — into spectator sports. The Olympics are tattooed on Lake Placid, from the two-man Russian bobsled outside a Main Street pub to the masthead of the local paper reminding readers that the town hosted the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980. Lake Placid still maintains many of the training sites for current Olympians, including a towering ski jumping complex visible from all over town. There's an United States Olympic Committee training center near the hospital. Locals still recall the boisterous Jamaican bobsled team training here.

	“	Whenever you have a competition in Lake Placid, any kind of competition, the competitors and the spectators get that Olympic feeling. ”
		— Jim Shea, Sr., local businessman and former U.S. olympic skier

Then you've got the Sheas. Jimmy Shea won the gold in the 2002 skeleton event in Salt Lake City; his late grandfather, Jack, won two speedskating medals in the 1932 games; his father, Jim Shea Sr. skied for the United States in the 1964 games. The eldest Sheas were both born in Lake Placid, and Jim Shea Sr. now runs a liquor store mere blocks from the Olympic ice rinks. He moved back to Lake Placid in the late 80s, and Jimmy became involved in the sliding sports. It was in Lake Placid in December last year that Jimmy qualified for the 2002 games, making him the first third-generation American Olympian.

To Jim Shea Sr., the GO Games represent another link in the town's sports tradition.

"Whenever you have a competition in Lake Placid, any kind of competition, the competitors and the spectators get that Olympic feeling," he said as he puffed a pipe behind the counter at his store Wednesday. Lake Placid residents volunteer in droves even for the most picayune sporting events, Shea said, "because they realize it's part of their heritage, and they're so proud to do it. It's one of the things that that made Jimmy's gold medal to me so special. He won the medal, but that medal is a reflection of the community from which he has come. Who coined the phrase — Hillary Clinton — it takes a village. And this is the village that got Jimmy to the peak."

A girl of maybe 15 carrying a notebook entered the store.

"Can I help you, young lady?" Shea said.

"I was wondering if I could have your autograph," she said.

"You want my autograph?" he asked.

"I do."

He signed the pad and then opened an envelope full of autographed pictures of Jimmy Shea. He hands one to her, and she thanks him very much.

"Don't tell your friends you got that here," Shea said.

"I don't live around here," she said lightly on her way out.

Shea was asked about how the GO Games feel, compared with the Olympics.

"It's a thing my dad carried high on his list of priorities: The medal isn't the important thing, it's the ability to compete and make friends," he said. "Now, these competitors who are coming here from all over are going to make some new friends. The Shea family experience has been just that: the friends you make through sports last forever."

Anticipation at a low boil

The lasting sporting memory of this town is the 1980 hockey gold, and Lake Placid is still a hockey town, a good fit with the sometimes dangerous world of outdoor sports. A shirt in the window of a hockey shop downtown reads, "Trample the weak, hurdle the dead," a survival-of-the-fittest attitude if ever one was copyrighted. No surprise, GO Games schedules and information are on the counter inside the store, just as they are in the Ben & Jerry's ice cream parlor near some razor scooters parked inside the door, near some old magazines being sold for a quarter apiece inside the public library, right inside the chocolate shop. The GO Games are omnipresent, but the athletes, who are surely around, are tough to spot, walking among the citizens like pod people. And is a barking dog a star athlete, or just a normal yapping pooch? Can't tell. Hard to spot those regular people who do what they're good at.

	“	It's like everything your mother told you never to do, all at once. It's a great sport. ”
		— Lake Placid visitor Jon Bentley, on the timber Springboard event

Anticipation of the games is at a low boil. At the town's visitors bureau, other regular people stop in for information, asking how to get into the games, whether they have to pay. A skinny kid in sneakers asks, "Do you guys have, like, a schedule for the Great Outdoor Games?" A visitor named Jon Bentley, who climbed a mountain Wednesday morning, was looking forward to the timber sports, particularly in the springboard event. "It's like everything your mother told you never to do, all at once," he says. "It's a great sport."

Out-of-towners like Bentley are drawn in part because of the visibility of ESPN's coverage. In town, the GO Games aren't as huge a deal as might be expected. Just this week, there's a hockey camp and an amateur figure skating tournament in the Olympic arenas. A two-week horse show just ended, and an Ironman triathlon is coming later this month. According to Steve Piatt, the communications manager of the visitors bureau, the GO Games brought about $3.5 million in direct spending to Lake Placid last year, less than half of the horse show's impact.

It's a hopping sports town, even without the GO Games, which have been here three years but are considering bids from towns across the country for next year's games. Still, Piatt echoed others in town when he said this town, which thrives on games and the outdoors, has a natural affinity for the GO Games.

"We challenge anybody to provide the kind of backdrop that we can provide," Piatt said, acknowledging that these GO Games could be the last in Lake Placid in the foreseeable future. "We're having the Great Outdoor Games in an area that typifies the great outdoors."