An Ironman triathlete bikes down Main Street, Lake Placid during Sunday’s race, followed by a state trooper on a motorcycle helping maintain safety. Several roads are closed for the annual triathlon. (Enterprise photo — Justin A. Levine)

“Ironman is a statement of excellence, passion, commitment. It is a test of physical toughness and mental strength. Ironman is about persevering, enduring and being a part of something larger than ourselves. It shows the heights that can be achieved when we push beyond our boundaries and go the distance.” — from the official Ironman site.

The above quote may have been true of the original Ironman, but the passion changed to greed when Ironman was acquired by a multi-billion-dollar Chinese conglomerate corporation in 2015. The new company that sponsors the event has done a bait-and-switch. Under the former owners, it used to donate police cars and ambulances to the village for allowing them to come here.

Instead, the new company demands public funds through the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism to hold the event here, ranging from $75,000 last year, increasing by $5,000 a year through 2021. This is not to mention the additional $100,000 Ironman requires for each year Lake Placid hosts a 70.3 Ironman, which we are set to do this September. This now feels like a shakedown.

Moreover, provisions are absent for Ironman to reimburse our villages, towns or county to pay for police, emergency medical services and a myriad of other public employees needed to make the race go off. Lake Placid has been a home to Ironman for 19 years. Now, with strained resources and personnel — police, firefighters, town, county and village employees — people in Lake Placid are fed up with the race. These are public highways that are being closed to profit a private corporation from the Orient.

This race and its owners are part of the reason for the lack of affordable housing in this community. This is because property owners rent out their second homes to people involved in the event and thus have little incentive to sell or rent to people in the community. As such, our hotels are staffed mostly by foreign students holding J1 visas, which is a form of indentured servitude. Many of these young foreign students are holed up in the back rooms and basements of the hotels they work. They are paid a wage lower than industry standards in exchange for their room and board, and for their opportunity to work and live in substandard conditions in America.

Locals can’t support themselves on the J1’s wages because they have to provide for their own housing and accommodations in a town that they can’t afford to live in by reason of the artificially inflated housing market, which is proximately and directly caused by Ironman and other large gimmick events in Lake Placid. Ironman may be a boon to the large hotel owners who employ foreign servants in the interest of profit, but in the end, only a few people in this town receive any real benefit from the race.

Given the complaints over the garbage-covered roadways, littered with Ironman defecation, and traffic jams caused by the event, the unappreciative competitors and the unscrupulous demands of the host company, the time has come to “push beyond our boundaries” and move the event to Saranac Lake. There, Mayor Clyde Rabideau, an outstanding and energetic town official with the integrity and will to engage meaningfully with the new Ironman owners, would no doubt host a better event under more attractive terms. This would allow Lake Placid to share the influx of tourism dollars with our sister community.

What’s good for Saranac Lake is good for Lake Placid. So much so that if public funding should continue to be provided for this event, then it should be required that the race is held in Saranac Lake so as not to upset high-value tourism on an already busy weekend in Lake Placid.

We should encourage more tourism in our neighboring community.

Brian P. Barrett lives in Lake Placid.