LAKE PLACID – Don’t think of Jim Shea Sr. as the only Shea in three generations not to win an Olympic medal. Think of him as a Pioneer.

It’s true that his father, Jack Shea, won two gold medals in speedskating at the 1932 Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid and that his son, Jim “Jimmy” Shea Jr., won the gold medal in skeleton at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s also true that Jim Shea Sr. – a member of the U.S. Ski Team during the 1964 Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria – is the only one of these three not to have his own Wikipedia page. But he’s also the only Shea to be inducted into the University of Denver Athletic Hall of Fame.

On Nov. 1, Shea’s induction ceremony came more than 53 years after competing in his final DU Pioneers nordic skiing competition.

“I left Lake Placid to go out to the University of Denver because they had a great ski team,” Shea said. “I had to work my butt off, and it’s nice to be recognized. They were so kind to me. I felt like a king.”

Shea was recognized in the hall of fame’s “legends” category.

“That means you’re old,” he said.

At age 76, Shea capped off a successful athletic career by sharing the honor with his family, including his wife Judy, who also attended the university.

“It was a great trip,” Shea said. “My whole family was there. Jimmy and his family came from Salt Lake. My daughter (Sarah) and her boys came from Lake Placid. It was really very, very special. It’s been 52 years since I’ve been back to the University of Denver.”

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Road to Denver

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Shea was born on June 22, 1938, at the Lake Placid General Hospital, the son of Jack and Elizabeth (Stearns) Shea. His father was from Lake Placid, and his mother was originally from Saranac Lake.

Shea began ski jumping when he was 10 years old and became president of the local ski team by the time he was a high school senior. One day as a senior while training on the old Northwood School cross-country course, which ran parallel to the Mount Whitney Road, he was stopped by a Lake Placid resident who was a senior and member of the ski team at the University of Denver.

“I was out there working out one day, and this yellow Oldsmobile kind of pulled up on the side of the road, and some guy said, ‘Hey, hey, what are you doing there?'” Shea said. “It was Craig Lussi, Serge’s brother. … He said, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ He knew that I had some kind of talent. He said, ‘Hey, Jim, come over here and talk to me.’ We talked for a while, and he said, ‘You ought to come out to the University of Denver. We’ve got a great ski team. It will be hard for you, but I think you can make it.’ And that started a chain of events.”

It was 1957, the year Shea graduated from the Lake Placid High School. He had been accepted to St. Lawrence University, where his older brother Jack Jr. graduated that same year. Shea even had a job lined up in Canton, but his life changed in August when he received a telephone call from Denver.

On the phone was Willy Schaeffler, the University of Denver ski team coach whose team had earned its fourth NCAA championship in a row that spring.

“He said, ‘Shea, you’ve got to come out here to the University of Denver,'” Shea said. “And I said, ‘Oh, why not?’ So I said, ‘I’ll come out.'”

On Monday, Sept. 16, 1957, Shea hitched a ride with Lussi, driving from Lake Placid to Denver.

The ski team placed second in the NCAA championships during each of Shea’s first three years at DU. Then, as a senior during the 1960-1961 season, he was named team captain and an All-American. In March 1961, he led his team to its first NCAA championship since 1957, placing fourth in the cross-country event and sixth in the jump for a combined third-place finish. The championship meet, held at Middlebury College’s Snow Bowl in Hancock, Vermont, was his final competition for the University of Denver. He graduated in June 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

“It opened my eyes to a much bigger world than Lake Placid had to offer and I think probably more than St. Lawrence would have had to offer,” Shea said about his time at DU.

Denver is also where he met his wife, Judy, an avid alpine skier. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from DU in 1962.

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Long road back home

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After graduating, Jim went to work for National Steel in Portage, Indiana. Two months later, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Due to his skiing experience, he was assigned to the U.S. biathlon training center in Anchorage, Alaska, after basic training.

“And all we did there was ski and shoot,” he said. “It was another gem in my lifetime.” Jim left the Army in September 1963, went back to the University of Denver and became an assistant ski instructor coach for Schaeffler. He also married Judy in 1963. Jim was back in Denver for about two months when it came time for the U.S. Ski Team tryouts for the 1964 Winter Olympics. Judy tried out for the U.S. Ski Team in alpine racing but didn’t make it. But Jim did, for nordic skiing.

Jim competed in the 4x10k cross-country ski relay, 30k cross-country race and nordic combined. Americans didn’t win any medals in nordic ski events during those Olympics. After the Olympics, the ski team took a swing through Scandinavia, competing in more races.

“After that, we came back to the real world, got a job in Connecticut in manufacturing and worked there for about 22 years,” he said.

Jim’s company, Stanadyne, was based in Windsor, Connecticut, a short distance from Judy’s hometown. During his time there, he continued to participate in the Olympic movement, coaching the U.S. nordic combined ski team competing in Czechoslovakia in 1970 and the U.S. biathlon team in the 1972 Olympic Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan. During the 1980 Olympic Winter Games in his hometown, he was assistant to the chief of cross-country events.

By 1988, things were changing for Jim’s company, and he decided to move back to Lake Placid, where he bought the family’s Mirror Lake Liquor Store on Main Street. He ran the store until October 2002, when he sold it and retired. In February of the same year, his son won an Olympic gold medal in Utah during the skeleton competition. In January of that year, his father died in an automobile accident at the age of 91. When the Olympic torch relay came through Lake Placid in December 2001, Jack carried it into the speedskating oval where he had won two gold medals in 1932. Jim and Jimmy were both torchbearers prior to the lighting of the 2002 Winter Olympic cauldron.

“I felt like I was the bridge,” Jim said. “I was the bridge of three generations. I’ve never felt underlooked. I’m so proud of what my dad and my son did. I always tell people, ‘I did my best.’ I didn’t win an Olympic medal, but it’s OK. I had a tremendous experience during my Olympics.”