Step onto the ice with us as we journey back to the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, where an improbable victory against impossible odds captured the heart of a nation. This is the unforgettable tale of the “Miracle on Ice,” often called the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. In a time when America wrestled with doubt and division, a young U.S. Olympic hockey team, made up of college kids, faced off against the seemingly invincible Soviet Union – a clash that became far more than just a game. It was a poignant symbol of the Cold War, a struggle for freedom played out on a sheet of ice, and a moment that reminded us of the enduring power of the American spirit.
Nobody gave these fresh-faced American amateurs a chance against the veteran Soviet machine, whose “government-sponsored magicians on ice” had dominated international hockey for decades. Yet, guided by the fiery coach Herb Brooks – a man with his own unfinished business on the Olympic stage – these players embarked on a journey that would defy all expectations. This is a story of incredible determination, unexpected heroes, and a nation’s quest to reclaim its confidence, proving that even in the darkest of times, an underdog team can ignite a spark of American pride. Join Our American Stories as we explore the deeper layers of this legendary hockey triumph, revealing new details behind a truly miraculous event.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
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Here at Our American Stories, add new details to our hearts’ familiar pictures.
Let’s take a listen.
It was more than a hockey game.
It was us against them. It was freedom versus Communism.
Nobody gave us a hope in Halloweenen.
It was a sliver of the Cold War played out on a sheet of ice. Here you have a bunch of fresh faced college kids taking on the big bed Soviet Bear in the United States, in the Olympics. The confluence of events was so extraordinary that it can never happen again.
Nobody paid attention to what Americans said in the world anymore. Our hostages had been taken, and we couldn’t get them back. The Red Army went into Afghanistan; we couldn’t get them out.
It might have been the all-time low point for American public self-esteem. Who knew that these kids would become the vehicle for making people feel excited and proud again to wave a flag?
It was a miracle. David slew Goliath.
It was the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century.
No one could know how important one game could possibly be to a nation that seemed to be losing its way. Certainly not in 1979, when a weary America heard from its embattled leader who told us we were a nation in crisis.
It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.
President Carter was seen as an expression of the American self-doubt and lack of self-confidence of the mid-seventies.
Here’s Vice President under Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale.
Our public support was eroding rapidly.
You could feel it when you’re out with people, when you’re giving speeches, when you’re shaking, and America, I think, began to wonder whether we’d lost our…
Edge. In the twenty years since winning the gold medal at the 1960 Olympics, American teams had become increasingly unable to compete with the dominant Europeans, especially the Soviet Union, whose players were amateurs in name only. The goal was to avoid being embarrassed at home. So in July of 1979, the best amateur players in the country were invited to try out for the 1980 Olympic team.
They invited us all to Colorado Springs, and they divided us up into four teams, basically Eastern Guys, Michigan Guys, Minnesota Guys, and an at-large team. Over the course of ten days in Colorado Springs, those four teams played a round robin. It was a nerve-racking situation. It was a pressure-packed situation, and as that tournament went on, it was being evaluated by Herb Brooks.
Minnesota native, Herb Brooks, never went to charm school. He was abrasive and intense. He was also the best college hockey coach in the country at the University of Minnesota.
People were a little afraid of him.
He’d always been considered kind of an outsider, had his own way of thinking, his own way of doing things.
And he already had a history with the Olympic team as a University of Minnesota player. Brooks thought he had made the team in 1960. He was even in the team picture, but at the last minute, Coach Jack Riley added a new player to the roster, and someone had to go.
The someone was…
Herb Brooks, cut just one day before the team left for the Games. A crushed Herb Brooks immediately called his father to vent.
So, I call Dan, the sole things: both the Eastern coach, all fixed, all politics, and went through the whole thing.
“Fine, me, honestly, you’ve done this?” “Yeah,” I said, “Let to keep your fleet picked moss shut. I’ve heard enough of them. You get back and thank the coach.”
You get your best in lock crew, wish teammates well, and get your asshole.
As my father got her rest.
The soul said, “Yes, sir,” she hiking home.
I watched the ‘s unfold.
The Americans got hot, and then Winter Company’s first Sobel. I didn’t watch the scan TV.
My father looked over to me.
He says, “Looks like the coach got the right guy, didn’t he?”
Angle that left unfinished business in Herb Brooks’s life. He had something to prove.
He was on a mission, a mission to shake American hockey out of its slumber. First, Brooks had to trim the roster from 80 to 26.
The tough part of me getting about twenty or for reopening ceremonies.
Behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviets were the best hockey team in the world, perhaps the strongest ever assembled, and everybody knew it. Vladislav Tretiak grew up outside Moscow and became immersed in the Soviets’ Communist sports machine at a young age. He developed perhaps the greatest goaltender to ever play and start on the Soviet national team for over fifteen years. By 1980, Boris Mikhailov was already a ten-year veteran of the Soviet national team and the most recognizable face in international hockey. Here’s Boris Mikhailov.
Sport was tied with politics, and any victory had big political undertones, especially during the Olympic Games. We spent a General Secretary, and everybody else was worried about how we would represent our country. Our test was only to place first.
They were government-sponsored magicians on ice. The goal was to win for the Motherland and to show the world that Karl Marx had it right.
They played hockey the way we played basketball, with the same kind of control of the puck, the same kind of intricate offensive patterns, and of course the presence and goal of Tretiak.
How could you beat them?
And you’ve been listening to the story of the Miracle on Ice. It was more than hockey. It was us against them, college kids against the big-bad Soviet Bear. And then, of course, you hear about Herb Brooks, who was cut one day before the 1960 Olympics. This just propelled his engine to succeed. When we come back. More of the story of the Miracle on Ice here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things.
But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of the 1980 Olympics and the Miracle on Ice and the question: How could we beat the Soviets? Let’s pick up where we last left off.
Back in the U.S.
Herb.
Brooks had been contemplating that same question for years. After all, how many times does one have to get hit with the same hammer and sickle before they learn?
We also need to change the way we played the game.
North American hockey had forever been a very linear, dump-and-chase style of hockey, unlike the Soviets and Europeans, who played an artistic, very free-flowing system built on finesse, speed, conditioning, and overlapping movements.
Most of all, team chemistry.
Brooks was calling for a revolution in American hockey.
I tried to develop a team that we threw their game right back at.
But first, Brooks would have to get his players to start thinking as a team, which wouldn’t be easy. The rivalry between the University of Minnesota and Boston University was one of the fiercest in all of college hockey, and regional tensions between many of the new teammates ran high as…
Much as I was a Boston hockey player, and I had pride in my roots as a Boston hockey player, I had an enemy, and my enemy was University of Minnesota.
And the Boston guys, yeah, we thought we were pretty savvy. And, you know, there are guys that didn’t lock their doors or left their wallets out in plain sight. We thought, you know, these guys are a bunch of hicks from the cow pastures.
I wanted to blur the boundaries of our country, build a “Wii,” and “us,” and “ourselves” as opposed to an “I,” “me,” “myself.” Our spirit was going to be a big asset. And you can’t have that type of thing if you have pockets of individuals and there’s not those team-building exercises throughout the year.
To fill the most important role, Brooks picked twenty-two-year-old Boston University goaltender Jim Craig, the man who would backstop history.
You know, people I speak to say Craig’s game has been office. His mom died, and they were seeing when his game’s on.
Craig was recovering from the recent death of his mother, Margaret, to cancer. Starting in August of ’79, Brooks began employing his main team-building exercise to bond them as a team. His players needed one common enemy.
Him, “I won’t be your friend if you need one of those.”
I remember when he told us, “Him, I’ll be a coach, but I won’t be a friend.”
And I’m like, “It’s going to be a long year.”
He quoted in the paper that I had a million-dollar set of legs and a ten-cent park for a brain.
He could give you that glare and that look, and it’s like, “Oh my God, what I do wrong now?”
One of the first things Herb told his assistant coach, Craig Patrick, was, “I’m going to be tough on them, and you are going to have to be the one who keeps everyone together.” It was an elaborate and flawlessly constructed game of good cop, bad cop. He would later call it his loneliest year in hockey. Here is Coach Brooks.
A lot of these guys, being college All-Americans, said they were never pushed like that, never pulled. And I wasn’t trying to put greatness into anybody. I was trying to pull it out, pull it out way up here, and I don’t like coaches that try to put it in because they think they’ve got all the answers. But you’ve got to believe in them. I have high standards, hub dep, and pull it out. And my favorite coach, John Wooden, right here, I think he would concur a plays.
That September arrived; it was time to start playing against the future Olympic competition. So Brooks took the team to Europe for a series of exhibition games. Before a game against Norway, a team they would have to face at the Olympics, he issued a challenge.
I said, “Guys, we’re gonna have to play the Norwegians and qualifications, so we do it tonight.”
Send a message right now.
But playing flat and uninspired hockey, the U.S. can only muster a three-to-three tie against a team they should have trounced. Brooks was furious.
“You guys don’t want to work during again? No problem. Will work, not on…”
Goal line! And standing there with a suit on, it makes us all get behind the net and bombita goal line.
And he starts blowings, listening, and we did what are called Kirbys, which are blue line back, red line back, far blue line back. All the way down and back.
I think you can win on talent alone.
Gentlemen, you don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.
Again, two or three of those would be tiring.
Blue line back, red line back, blue line back, down.
Back. Ten or twelve of them would be excessive.
You better think about something else, each and every one of you.
When you pull on that jersey, you represent yourself and your teammates, and a name.
On the front is a hell of a lot more important than the one on the back.
Get that through your head again.
When we did them for about forty-five minutes to an hour, your rink attendant turned the lights off on us, and we still skated in the dark.
In the dark, he’s screaming at us, booming voice around this empty arena.
“How about it, Zolpi? You’re gonna be the first one to put on me?”
It was pretty intense.
The message went up right that down.
They’re not going to play the game like that and disgrace their abilities or our collective uptors.
And that moment probably had more to do with us gelling as a team, feeling like we were a group, a family who we looked at each other and said, “You know, basically, he can do anything he wants to us.”
“He’s not gonna break us.” The following night, the teams played again. The United States won nine to zero, but there were still six cuts to be made, and Brooks was making it clear that no one was safe, not even the team captain. Here’s Team Captain Mike Eruzione.
Two weeks before the Olympic Games, he calls me in. He’s gonna cut me from the team. “You’re not good enough. You shouldn’t be here. I never should have taken you. I’m going to send you back.”
“Don’t think I won’t do it.”
And I’m thinking he might just do this, you know. I’m like, “Wow.”
The word got down that Eruzione’s job was in jeopardy. So everyone said, “If you’ll cut the captain, where do I stand?”
Which is exactly what Brooks wanted to see.
Give here.
Hey, you guys know your…
Turning the screws even tighter, he brought in new players for tryouts just weeks before the Olympics, provoking the same fear in his players that Brooks himself experienced in 1960 when he was cut from the Olympic team at the last minute. But this was a new generation of player, and they’d had enough. Here’s Defenseman Jack O’Callahan.
And I said, “You know, Herb, I don’t think you should do it.”
“I think it’s wrong.”
“We’ll go on to Lake Placid in a week.”
“I mean, stop it! Get rid of these guys and let us get serious about this.”
And I was looking for that moment where their cohesiveness and strength of association was such a strong bond. And then I just kept court, and that was the moment.
Brooks sent the late additions back home. He trimmed the roster to 20 and kept his captain. Twelve Olympic team members were from Minnesota, four were from Boston, and two apiece were from Wisconsin and Michigan. But just days before the Olympics, the Americans had one more test to take. On February 9, 1980, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, they skated onto the ice to play an exhibition game, just three days before the start of the Olympics. But to their opponents on this night, it wasn’t just an exhibition. The Soviets had just recently embarrassed the NHL All-Stars, the best of the best, defeating them six to nothing. But before the game, Brooks told his team to go out and have fun. “Have fun!” Brooks himself later described the Garden game as a ploy. He said, “What could possibly be gained by playing the Soviets tough and waking them up?”
We got crushed, and then we thought, “These guys are in another world.”
They just kicked us around that rink.
The goals they scored were, you could have filmed them.
It was so beautiful.
They were like robots when they scored a goal.
They never smiled.
I don’t think I ever saw him smile.
We were ready to stand up and applaud them because we didn’t see anything like that before.
The guy’s hitting now, but you see that goal, you see his moves, like we were spectators.
I looked up at the scoreboard. It said 10 to 3. It might as well have said 20 to nothing. 10 to 3 made it sound closer than it was. It was no contest.
They couldn’t have done a great low point given the preparation and the…
Work that we had put in. It was very demor.
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