Clare Egan skis during the 4x6-kilometer mixed relay at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

LAKE PLACID — Of the roughly 2,900 athletes competing in the 2022 Olympic Winter Games at Beijing, China, only two have votes in how their sports are run — and both are local: Chris Mazdzer, a luger who grew up in Saranac Lake and lived for years in Lake Placid, and Clare Egan, a biathlete who lives in Lake Placid now.

As people watch the games on television, few are likely to think about the governing body behind each sport — the organization that manages seasons, sets policies, tries to attract fans and sponsors, and is responsible for the overall good of the sport. There are seven such international federations for the Winter Olympic sports: one each for biathlon, bobsled/skeleton, curling, ice hockey, ice skating (including figure skating and speedskating), luge and skiing (including all snowboarding and ski sports).

While each gives athletes some say, only four of these seven let athletes elect one of their own to a voting board seat. Furthermore, retired athletes are the current reps for bobsled/skeleton and skiing. That leaves only two active winter competitors with board authority: Egan, with the International Biathlon Union, and Mazdzer, with the International Luge Federation (FIL).

Lake Placid’s connection runs even deeper. Egan’s predecessor on the IBU board was Lowell Bailey, who grew up here and still lives here. Also, one of the International Ski Federation (FIS) board’s two athlete reps is Hannah Kearney, a Vermonter who was living and training in Lake Placid when she became the 2010 Olympic champion in freestyle moguls skiing.

These are elected offices. In these sports, all the athletes in all the nations of the world chose to be represented by people with roots in the Lake Placid area.

Chris Mazdzer, of the United States, prepares to start the luge men's single round 3 at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Sunday, Feb. 6, 2022, in the Yanqing district of Beijing. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

Biathlon and luge are massively dominated by European nations.

“That’s pretty special,” said longtime U.S. Biathlon President and CEO Max Cobb, who also holds a voting seat on the IBU board.

What is it about Lake Placid that produces such public servants in the world of sport? Neither Mazdzer nor Egan wagered a guess when interviewed recently, but Cobb took a stab at it. He said Lake Placid is justifiably called the “Winter Sports Capital of the World.”

“I’ve traveled to a lot of places, and I don’t know of a single community that has every single sport in the winter community — and they’re visible,” he said. “As an athlete living the 24/7 lifestyle, being a resident of Lake Placid makes a lot of sense.”

Cobb, Mazdzer and Egan all said American athletes are more inclined to take on leadership roles than Europeans. Cobb, who has worked for U.S. Biathlon since 1989 and competed before that, said U.S. sports organizations have a long tradition of athlete representation going back at least to the 1970s.

“Because of that, I think our athletes are well equipped to speak out, and I think their peers recognize that,” he said.

“I feel like the U.S. is typically a step or two ahead when it comes to, ‘Guys, we should really be looking at concussions; we should be looking at safe sport,'” said Mazdzer, 33, a fourth-time Olympian who now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. He speculated that Americans may be more aware of policies because “we have a lot of lawyers.”

“Americans, in my experience, we value speaking up and speaking out,” said Egan, a 34-year-old Maine native who’s lived in Lake Placid since 2015. “That’s like a uniquely American cultural thing.” She was elected IBU athlete rep in 2018, and at her early board meetings, she said, she was the only woman speaking up — or maybe she and a Canadian.

She noted that European biathletes are superstars, and fame can make them cautious about what they say. Hardly anyone in her home country knows who she is, and that is freeing.

“It’s not going to be front-page news if I say my organization used to be corrupt,” she said.

And she does say that.

“We’ve gone from being a very corrupt organization to not being a corrupt organization in the last four years, thanks to a police raid in 2018 that sort of routed out the former leadership,” Egan said. She was referring to former IBU President Anders Besseberg and ex-Secretary-General Nicole Resch, who resigned after being accused of accepting bribes to defend Russian biathletes against doping accusations. “We’re lucky that we had that police raid. It’s the best thing that ever happened to the organization. Some other organizations are still waiting on theirs.”

Mazdzer said FIL has also made progress recently, from German-centered traditionalism “to being more international and open.” FIL’s new president is only the third in its 65-year history. Bert Isatich of Austria led the luge federation from its founding in 1957 until his death in 1994, and Josef Fendt of Germany took over from then until 2020.

“So not a lot changed,” Mazdzer said. “Super-nice, very good at keeping the sport exactly as it was.”

Luge isn’t alone in that. For skiing, last year the FIS got only its fifth president since its founding in 1924.

Mazdzer was elected head of the FIL athletes council in 2013 and given a voting board seat in 2015.

“Just getting athletes’ feedback has been nice,” he said. “When I first got into this, athletes weren’t really involved in the organization besides one meeting a year, and now we have athletes who are involved in, I would say, most meetings.”

He likes that FIL’s new strategic plan focuses on digital media to help more people see the sport.

“It was becoming outdated, completely relying on (European) cable TV to basically support what we do,” Mazdzer said.

Part of Egan’s job is communicating COVID-19 decisions. She’s one of four members of IBU’s Event Task Force.

“We make all the really high-level decisions, like, ‘OK, do we need to cancel an event? Do we need to change a protocol for an event?'” she said.

Egan and Mazdzer are very social, which makes them well suited to be representatives. It also helps that Egan speaks six languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, German and most recently Russian. But the pandemic has restricted social opportunities, which makes their jobs less fun. Egan said biathletes “used to often stay at big hotels all together, and we would eat in a big room all together, and we’d all mix and mingle at different tables even — or I did, at least. I liked to go sit with different teams.”

Mazdzer is thinking about retirement and wants other lugers to step up.

“At the end of the day, I’ll be able to just kind of look back and say, ‘Cool. I worked really hard for that, and it’s great that it happened,'” he said. “The problem is, if you do too good of a job, then people are like, ‘Chris, just do it,’ and I’m like, ‘Guys, I don’t want to be on these meetings. I am leaving soon. I want other people to be on these commissions, you know?’ ‘No, no, no, no, we trust you.’ And I’m like, ‘Don’t trust me! Let’s go; let’s get other people in there.'”