"My grandpa was with me the whole way."
By Tony Quinn

It should have been one of the great stories of the Salt Lake Olympics, Jim Shea Jr. would compete in the reintroduced skeleton event while his father and grandfather, both Olympic athletes in their day looked on. The Shea family became a media phenomenon in the run up to the games, Sprint featured the Sheas in a national TV commercial, and Jack became the 'symbol of enduring Olympic spirit' and was to have been honored at the opening ceremony. It wasn't to be however as 17 days before the games, Jack Shea, Jim Jr.'s grandfather was killed just blocks from his home, when his car collided with a van driven by a 36 year old who was later charged with driving while intoxicated. The dream of having three generations of Winter Olympians together at the games for the first time was over. The Shea family had lost its patriarch and the world of sport had lost a legend. "We have lost a true Olympic hero and inspirational human being," said Lloyd Ward, CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee at the time. "Jack Shea lived the Olympic ideal and passed along his knowledge to generations within the Shea family." At his funeral Jack's casket, draped in an Olympic flag, was carried into St. Agnes Church as the organist played the Olympic theme. At the offering of the gifts, the torch Jack had carried on the Olympic torch run three weeks before was brought to the altar by Jim Shea Jr.

The week before he was killed I spoke to both Jack and his son Jim Sr at their homes in Lake Placid. Throughout the conversation there was an almost Christmas Eve childlike excitement from the two men as they looked forward to the Salt Lake games and Jim Jr's entry into the world's most exclusive club, that of the Olympian.

Jack Shea was 91, had won I two gold medals in speed-skating at his home in the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics and was the United States' oldest Winter Games gold medallist. Jack had grown up in Lake Placid, N.Y. At 3 he had started skating at nearby Mirror Lake. While in high school, he won the North American men's championship in 1929 and 1930. At the 1932 Winter Games, Jack Shea, then a 21year-old Dartmouth sophomore took the Olympic oath on behalf of all the athletes. (At the opening ceremony at the Salt Lake Games in February, 70 years on, Jim Jr. took the same oath.) Jack went out that first day of competition in a red beret and won the 500-meter speed skating gold medal. The next day, he followed it up by winning the 1,500 meters. Two golds in two days, one of the truly great Olympic stories from any games winter or summer.

When the 1936 games approached in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, Jack Shea refused to skate, although as he told me himself he "really wasn't a candidate." "I want to be honest about it, I had a family and I had financial obligations and there really were no sponsors or anything at that time, so it would have been very difficult for me. I had been a student at Dartmouth College and graduated in 1934. I majored in Political science and studied all the different kind of governments. A couple of courses I took were on current events and the textbook was the New York Times. All that was going on Germany and the meaning of it was brought up in the classes everyday.

But there were also far more personal reasons for Jack not attending. "In Lake Placid my father was a successful food purveyor and Lake Placid had a Jewish colony at the time. The Rabbi was Steven Weiss who I think was president of the American Jewish Congress and he contacted me together with some others. They had a committee organized and they were very much against sending the team to Germany because of what was going on over there. These people in Lake Placid had been customers of my dad for many years and he had a very warm, family relationship with them. It was very natural for me with the background knowledge I had and with the knowledge of these people living in Lake Placid who felt like they were being oppressed and discriminated against, and it really was a crime against humanity what they (the Germans) were doing. That was the reason why I took the position that I would not sponsor the American Olympic team going to Germany and I urged all the athletes publicly and privately that it wasn't the thing to do.

In 1934, Jack married Elizabeth Steams of Saranac Lake, in the 1940's they moved into a house on Forest Avenue in Lake Placid where his grandfather had settled in the 1880s,and have lived there since raising four sons ,Jack Jr., Jim, Michael and Patrick. Jack settled into family life and became involved in the community.

From 1958 to 1974, he was the town justice, and from 1974 to 1983 he was the- supervisor of North Elba, the township that included the village of Lake Placid. He then became vice chairman of the Olympic Regional Development Authority, a New York State organization that took over the sites for Lake Placid's 1980 Winter Olympics, and became an important element in bringing those games to Lake Placid. When the Olympic torch came through Lake Placid this year on its way to Salt Lake City, Jack Shea carried it onto the Olympic speedskating oval where he had won his two gold medals.

Jack's son Jim Shea Sr. had wanted to be a speedskater like his father, but cross-country skiing became his sport. He was a member of the 1961 NCAA champion University of Denver team, then made the U.S. Olympic team three years later where he competed in Nordic combined skiing and two cross-country ski races in the 1964 Winter Olympics, readily admitting that he was never a serious medal contender. He did however go on to coach the U.S. biathlon team in the 1972 Winter Olympics.

Then five years ago, Jim Sr.'s son Jim, who has a shamrock tattooed, according to his father, "on lower extremities of his body," took up the Skeleton, a forgotten Olympic sport where competitors ride sleds headfirst face down, reaching speeds of 80 mph. In 1999 Jim Jr. became the first American to win the skeleton World Championships. He then helped persuade the U.S. Olympic Committee to make skeleton an event at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City for the first time in 54 years and qualified to compete.

The family link with Ireland, Jack knew well. "My grandfather Michael Shea came to the United States in 1847 at the height of the famine from County Kerry, the townland of Lack down toward the Dingle peninsula. My grandmother Mary Courtney, came over in 1846, a year before my grandfather came through Montreal. They settled in the town of Wilmington New York a few miles north of Lake Placid." The family haven't forgotten their heritage and every St Patrick's Day celebrate, Jack told me "I always proclaim as much as I can that if you're lucky enough to be Irish you're lucky enough. On St. Patrick's Day we put our big green tie on and we put ourselves out in the community as people who are proud of being Irish."

Jack had traveled to Ireland thirteen times during his life both on vacation and in an attempt to trace the family's roots. "I've been all over and I've pretty much scoured the area down in the township of Lack to find relatives. When I went over there for the first time found some people that were relatives and we visited them and had a very good conversation with them, but when I went to the parish and tried to find out some information I never got any because the priest said that the records of the time had all been destroyed. I always felt when I went to Ireland that I was at home." As I said my goodbyes to both Jack and Jim Snr. Jack thanked me for calling and finished up by saying "Ok Tony, hopefully I'll get to Ireland for the fourteenth time."

Jack Shea, Sept. 7, 1910 - Jan. 22, 2002. Irish American Olympian and family man is survived by his wife Elizabeth, three sons, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.