LAKE PLACID – After a 2015-16 winter when weather didn’t cooperate for much of the season, organizers of the Empire State Winter Games are hoping conditions are frigid enough in early February to host an unprecedented new sporting event – a Marathon Skate around Lake Placid.

At a press conference in Canton Wednesday, the games announced the Marathon Skate event for this year’s ESWG, as the 37th edition of the event will take place from Feb. 2 to 5. Speaking Friday, Lake Placid Mayor Craig Randall said more than 2,000 participants are expected this year after more than 1,800 athletes from across New York competed last year.

Randall said the ESWG intends to expand with more competitors from neighboring states and from across the border in Ottawa after a small number of Canadians competed last year. With its geographic growth, the event plans to increase adaptive sports competitions. Yet it’s the Marathon Skate that will take the ESWG to its most unconventional sporting surface yet: the perimeter of Mirror Lake.

Speaking Friday, ESWG spokesman Sandy Caligiore said the idea behind the Marathon Skate has been discussed for a couple of years by members of the ESWG organizing committee, which features representatives from the village of Lake Placid, town of North Elba, Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism and state Olympic Regional Development Authority.

North Elba Park District Manager Butch Martin and Caligiore said the idea came about after town employees first used Polaris utility vehicles to plow the skating path around Mirror Lake in 2014. Randall said, to his knowledge, it would be the first time a skating event was conducted around the perimeter of the lake, though he remembers speed skating on much smaller tracks in front of what is now the Golden Arrow Lakeside Resort in the 1950s.

Randall said he expected participants in the event to include a range from high-level competitors to more casual entrants, similar to 5K, half marathon and marathon races hosted in the village. Caligiore and Randall both touted how the natural setting of Mirror Lake, with spectators able to view the skating action from places such as Mid’s Park, would create a one-of-a-kind event. Caligiore said the Marathon Skate would likely include multiple laps on a 2- to 3-mile track on the perimeter of Mirror Lake.

“It is a marathon, so you’ve got to give it some length,” Caligiore said. “It’s such a neat idea to do, to have people skating past Mid’s Park, that natural setting, it could be a whole lot of fun to watch.”

Caligiore stressed, however, that safety would be the number one priority of putting on the race. Randall said the hosting of the event would follow an inevitable wait-and-see approach similar to the annual Can/Am Pond Hockey Tournament hosted on a portion of Mirror Lake off the shore of the Golden Arrow Lakeside Resort.

Last year the village, town and park district kept a close eye on the weather forecast, amount of snowfall and thickness of Mirror Lake’s ice as the 74-team pond hockey tournament approached in late January. With last winter’s unseasonably warm weather, it wasn’t until the week before the event that officials were confident ice conditions were ideal enough to host it on Mirror Lake.

For several weeks the village looked into contingency plans to host the event either on a more shallow portion of Paradox Bay on Lake Placid lake or on the Olympic Speedskating Oval.

Speaking Friday, Martin said Lake Placid lucked out a bit with Can/Am last winter.

“We were very fortunate,” he said. “It was the most ideal week of the winter to do that, and probably the only week it could have been possible to be done.”

Martin said, as of Friday, he only had basic knowledge of what the plan was for the ESWG Marathon Skate event and that he hadn’t received an official word from the ESWG that he and his park district crew would be tasked with readying the Mirror Lake ice for the event, though he assumed so. He said he heard initial details about the event at a meeting early last month.

“It would come through me because we do the plowing, my staff, we take care of it,” he said. “It’s not a minor undertaking, a major undertaking. With prize money and stuff, it makes a big difference, what kind of (quality of ice) we are looking at and all that.

“It’s possible (to do),” Martin added. “It’s also not an easy thing to do with nature out there to have a competitive race. Again, it depends on what they are looking for.”

Martin said with his past experience, he doesn’t think officials would know for sure if the lake ice would be safe for competition until a week before the event. He said the park district is not required by law to only put trucks atop the ice when it is 12 inches thick, though that’s the policy the park district follows.

In a case such as last January when the ice never reached the 12-inch thickness, park district employees can use the Polaris vehicles to plow the skating path or pond hockey rinks with thinner ice, though he thought trucks would be necessary for the proposed Marathon Skate.

“If we get a lot of snow, the smaller equipment could never move (the snow),” he said. “And once you start moving the snow, you create weight which often sinks the ice and makes wet spots (atop the ice). The whole thing is a little tricky.”

Martin said he and a crew of three park district employees – Ward Smith, Zach Clark and Tracy Daby – have cleared the path in recent years. Martin said the path they’ve plowed is 12 feet wide.

If the event is able to be pulled off, Randall and Caligiore said it may be the kind of event that attracts many competitive and casual athletes from Ottawa as Randall mentioned how many Canadians skate down the Rideau Canal Skateway.

“I could see where those type of skaters could be attracted to come down and race something like this,” he said.