Eleven minutes’ worth.
That’s all the 16-millimeter color film Alan Dater had in the canister of his handheld camera on the night of Feb. 22, 1980, inside the Field House International Ice Rink (now named Herb Brooks Arena) in Lake Placid, New York. The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team was to play the Soviet Union in a medal-round, semifinal game that night, and Dater was there to get shots of the game as part of an arts film.
This would be a game nobody from the American side would want to remember when it was over. While there were no official bets on the game, not even in Las Vegas, oddsmakers would have put an American victory at something like 100-1. The Russians were four-time defending gold medal champs and had beaten Team USA 10-3 in a pre-Olympic game not even two weeks prior at Madison Square Garden in New York. The Russians had older, experienced professionals. The Americans were a bunch of college kids with zero pro experience.
But Dater and his friend, fellow cameraman Bob Elfstrom, thought it would be good to get some shots of the game as a complement to the arts film. They had been holed up for nearly two weeks in Lake Placid by that point and were looking for new things to shoot.
“ I was a freelance cameraman hired to work on a film at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Mitchell Johnson of Fort Worth Productions was the producer. This film was centered on the arts at the Olympics. In particular, we followed a dancer and the founder of the Pilobolus Dance Company, Moses Pendleton, as he choreographed and rehearsed a performance by a high school marching band for one of the ceremonies,” Dater said. “Moses Pendleton was an avant-garde choreographer and dancer who was highly regarded for the dances he created and performed with Allison Chase for Pilobolus.”
That film of Pendleton would not be the best-remembered footage Dater and Elfstrom shot at those Olympics. The Feb. 22 game became known as “The Miracle On Ice,” with Team USA shocking the world with a 4-3 victory over the Russians. They would go on to win gold two days later against Finland. The only hockey game Dater and Elfstrom chose to film in their 12-day stay in Lake Placid was the one against the Russians.
“The director filmed in a bar near the rink as people watched the game on a TV and cheered on the U.S. – kind of behind-the-scenes story of the game. I was in the stadium and took a position behind the glass on the right side of the rink looking toward Russia’s goal. I was shooting handheld with no tripod,” Dater said.
Here’s where the story concerning Dater’s footage gets more interesting. Only a frame or two from the hockey game was used for that film on the arts – the rest was discarded. And, for about 45 years, nobody seemed to know what happened to it.
If you’ve read this far and happen to notice the author of this article also has the last name of Dater, it’s not a coincidence. Alan Dater is my father. He’s been a filmmaker and cameraman since the 1960s, with credits such as being the sound man on the 1970 Brian DePalma-Robert DeNiro movie, Hi, Mom!, and a cameraman on a 1972 movie, The Gospel Road, financed by Johnny Cash and filmed on location in Israel. Dad also played the role of Nicodemus in the film, now considered a cult classic, and Elfstrom played Jesus Christ himself.
For most of my adult life I was a sportswriter in Denver, and my beat for 20 straight years at The Denver Post was the Colorado Avalanche National Hockey League team. I live in Springfield now, and happily so. But it wasn’t until about 12 years ago that I even knew my dad filmed the Miracle On Ice. I knew he was a filmmaker, but I didn’t grow up living with him full-time, and he never told me he filmed what has consistently been named the most famous sporting event in American history. But that’s my dad for you. It was just another assignment to him. No big deal.
Over the last few years, I occasionally made forays into trying to find that lost footage. My dad thought it might be somewhere in Texas. We still don’t know all the details about who finally found it, but that footage is now part of a highly acclaimed recent Netflix documentary, Miracle: The Boys of ’80.
You can see some of Elfstrom’s footage from that bar area in the middle concourse area above the rink, and you can see my dad’s footage from down below in that right corner. The crème de la crème shot of his is the Mike Eruzione game-winning goal with 10 minutes left in the third period. Before then, the only footage of the goal was from ABC’s grainy broadcast video footage, with Al Michaels (“Do you believe in miracles – yes”) and Ken Dryden on the call.
This was a whole new angle, in beautiful color. And, it happened when Dad was almost out of film.
“I had only 11 minutes of film that I could shoot without changing magazines, which takes time and might have caused me to miss important action. So I had to be very judicious about what I chose to roll the camera on,” said Dater, who lives in Putney, Vermont, and still owns a film company, Marlboro Productions. “At that point in my career, I had quite a bit of experience filming hockey for the NHL Game of the Week series, which was shown in airplanes. And because 16 mm film was expensive to shoot and process, as a cameraman you had to have a sense when a goal might happen and then start rolling. If not much happened, you quickly stopped filming in order not to waste film.”
Dad had never seen his own footage until the Netflix documentary came out. You won’t see his or Elfstrom’s name in the end credits, however. The film is old enough to legally be called “stock footage,” which doesn’t require the camera operator to be credited.
“I think the footage went to a lab for developing and then back to the production office of Fort Worth Productions in Fort Worth, Texas, for editing,” Dater said. “I’m very happy someone found it.”
Dad was watching on Sunday when the Americans won gold in men’s hockey for the first time since 1980.
“It definitely brought back some memories,” he said.
Adrian Dater, a longtime former sportswriter in Denver and author of seven books, moved to Springfield in 2023 to get his first taste of life in the Midwest.
This article appears in February 26 – March 4, 2026.
