Rodger Moore attended Colfax High School for just one year, but he left a lasting athletic legacy.
Yet despite his participation in football, basketball and track — or the long jump record he still holds at 21 feet, 11-1/2 inches — Moore’s most memorable feat didn’t occur on campus.
Moore, a member of the first graduating class in 1961, was one of several local men to carry the Olympic torch through the Sierra Nevada Mountains towards Squaw Valley Ski Resort for the 1960 Winter Olympics.
Fifty years and 13 Winter Games later, the former track star still works out regularly at Fitness 4 Life in Colfax, where he recently reunited with fellow torch carriers, Colfax residents and new retirees Pete Garcia and Dale Beckett to reminisce about the events of Feb. 12, 1960.
“My grandkids didn’t even know where the ’60 Olympics were,” Garcia laughed. “I showed my grandson and his wife the (site) and they said, ‘Wow, that’s so neat.’”
At the time, the three men were members of the Placer High School track team, as the Colfax High campus wasn’t finished. Their coach had selected a few of the team’s top runners for the job.
“I was pretty quick,” Moore said. “I could run hurdles and do shot put and relays. If I wasn’t lifting weights, I was running. Then I went to Sierra and (while running) I chipped a bone in my ankle. That kind of ended it.”
Beckett remembered riding an Olympic bus up to Rainbow Lodge on the newly constructed four lanes of Interstate 80.
“They kept a flame burning in an oil lamp inside the bus,” Beckett said. “They had five or six torches in there.”
Moore recalls taking the torch from a teammate, who promptly fell over in a ditch with exhaustion.
He then carried the torch from Alta to Baxter — a mile-long journey along steep backroads — before passing it off to Beckett.
“It was a pretty good distance uphill, and there was three inches of snow on the road,” Moore said.
There wasn’t much of a crowd, but there was a police car driving in front of and close behind the runners, making slipping particularly unappealing, Garcia said.
None of the men remember much about the actual Olympic Games that year.
“I was 16 years old at the time and I didn’t really think it was that big of a deal,” Moore said. “I appreciate it much more now.”
But they’ll be sure to tune in to this year’s Vancouver Winter Games.
“I kind of enjoy the summer events better, especially track and field,” Moore said. “But I like to watch pretty much every sport — well, except for the figure skating.”
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1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley
• The 1960 Olympics were the first games to be televised and the first to be held in the Western U.S.
•When Squaw Valley won the bid from the International Olympic Committee, beating out favored Austria, the young resort had just one chairlift, two rope tows, and a 50-room lodge
•Computers were used to calculate results for the first time in Olympic history, and the resort’s large IBM processer is said to have attracted almost as much attention as the games
• Walt Disney, acting as Head of Pageantry, oversaw the release of 2,000 doves at the start of the ceremonies
• The U.S. Hockey team won its first gold medal.
~Source: Squaw.com