[N]ORWICH — New York Times sportswriter Karen Crouse was covering the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, when she received an email reporting the virtues of this small Vermont town 5,000 miles away.
“I just wanted to make you aware …” she recalls of the message that claimed the community, population 3,414, had sent at least one U.S. athlete to every Winter Games since 1984.
Deciding to fact-check, Crouse learned that isn’t quite true: Norwich wasn’t represented in 2002. But confirming that residents did compete in the eight other Olympics up to and including 2014, the journalist traveled to the Upper Valley in search of the key to the region’s success.
Her resulting book, “Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town’s Secret to Happiness and Excellence,” doesn’t reveal any specific wellness or workout plan to produce more Olympians per capita than any other place in the country. Instead, it observes that simply being friends and neighbors with one of the world’s best can help somebody believe anything’s possible.
“The well water in Norwich is perfectly delicious,” the author writes, “but the town’s outsize success in Olympic sports has more to do with the way it collectively rears its children, helping them succeed without causing burnout or compromising their future happiness.”
Crouse, a West Coast native who lives in Arizona, wouldn’t appear to be the kind of writer who’d up and move to a snowbound state to interview residents for nearly an entire winter. But she notes that, other than the weather, Norwich is similar to her childhood hometown of Santa Clara, Calif.
“I saw the best in the country swimming right in my backyard,” she says of residents such as nine-time Olympic swimming champion Mark Spitz. “Three of my first four coaches were gold medalists. I grew up from the age of 9 with the absolutely certainty I would go to the Olympics.”
Crouse eventually landed at the games in 1992 — as a sportswriter. She has covered every Summer Olympics since, adding the winter rotation in 2006 shortly after joining the Times.
The reporter didn’t cover Norwich’s most recent skiing sensation, Hannah Kearney, even though the Vermonter made headlines for winning a gold medal in 2010 and a bronze in 2014. But after being told about the town, Crouse went on to learn about Kearney and other local Olympians ranging from 1960 silver-medal skier Betsy Snite to ski-jumping brothers Jim, Joe and Mike Holland.
“The Olympic send-off that Norwich treated as a one-off back in 1984 has become a ritual,” she writes, “with Olympians past, present, and future intertwined like the five Olympic rings.”
Back in the 1950s, a novelist in nearby New Hampshire sparked controversy by penning the scandalously dark “Peyton Place.” Six decades later, Crouse’s book, recently excerpted in the Times, is causing some locals to complain it’s too sunny.
“This kind of portrayal of a town might be suited to some insipid primetime family show or a real estate sales advertisement, but it’s very two-dimensional,” one commenter posted on a local listserv. “Norwich, with all its warts, arguments and differences is a much richer, more multi-dimensional place.”
In response, Crouse notes her book’s last chapter outlines Norwich’s challenges with managing growth and threats of gentrification.
“If the worse criticism is I presented an uplifting narrative in these divisive, discordant time,” she says, “I can live with that.”
Reporting this month from South Korea, Crouse adds the town isn’t represented on the 2018 U.S. Olympic team.
“I think that speaks to the crossroads in which Norwich finds itself,” she says. “Does it reinvent itself for a different future or does it preserve the past? Is this year an anomaly or is the Olympic pipeline drying up because of forces outside the town’s control?”
Sports are changing, Crouse says, and not always for the better.
“Since I’ve been covering the Olympics, the difficulty level is getting so high, the money piece of the puzzle has become more and more prominent, and increasingly we treat our athletes first and foremost as performers rather than people who are perfectly imperfect. We need to take a step back and say, ‘What is happening here?’”
The sportswriter is ready to report the answer.
“I’m interested to see what Norwich will look like in five or 10 years,” she says. “I’m rooting for its values — community spirit, generosity, prioritizing education, developing such life skills as self-discipline, goal setting and perseverance — to remain the same, even if the landscape changes.”
