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How does New York 2042 sound for a future Winter Olympic games?
The idea got a shot in the arm last week when Gov. Kathy Hochul launched an exploratory committee to examine the feasibility of hosting the Olympics here in the Empire State between New York City and Lake Placid.
Split-screen games had another test run this year in Milan-Cortina, so why not New York?
Ice hockey at Madison Square Garden; speed skating at the Barclays Center. Skiing, skeleton, luge and biathlon in Lake Placid?
There are differences of opinion over how and where in Albany the idea came to be “on the back of a napkin," but Brooklyn state Assemblyman Bobby Carroll and former Assemblyman Billy Jones, who currently serves as vice president at Clinton College in Plattsburgh, both agree it’s an idea whose time has come.
“During the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, those games had Beijing as the center of the ice events and about 175 miles away they did the snow and sliding events in the mountains,” Carroll told Capital Tonight.
Carroll, who attended the 2026 games in Milan-Cortina, shared that he and his wife were able to take mass transit from Milan to the smaller city. Mass transit from New York City to Lake Placid isn’t yet widely available in New York state, something that former Assemblyman Jones acknowledged.
“Of course, there are going to be challenges and that’s why formalizing an exploratory committee to answer these questions is a great idea,” he said.
Jones sees the possibility of an Olympics as a way of engaging stakeholders and public-private partnerships around the infrastructure needs that have frustrated North Country leaders in the past, including affordable housing and high speed rail.
“We are always in need to housing,” he said of the North Country.
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