Olympia, the tallest snow person in the world was built in Bethel in 2008.

BETHEL — Olympia, the world’s tallest snow person, turned 15 this week and not unlike the lives of many teens, she is surrounded by drama.

On February 2, 2020 the world read this: “Riesi The Snowman smashed the previous world record held by a snow-woman 37.21 meters tall, named “Olympia” in the US state of Maine in 2008.”

Caretaker Gerhard Peer and ski-lift manager Erwin Petz, of Ski Riesneralm constructed Riesi in Irdning, Austria where he was declared the tallest, 38.04 meters, and was recorded in the Guinness World Book of Records.

Someone standing triumphantly, arm in air, is perched on top of Riesi’s black stove-pipe hat, which seems to reach into the sky.

But, soon after their success, it all came crashing down for the Austrians.

Guinness redacted the record and the crown was triumphantly returned to Olympia and Bethel.

Well, not exactly …”The whole town, the whole state, the whole everywhere, if you Google it,  everything says our record was broken. You can’t correct the whole Internet,” said Jessie Perkins, executive director of the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce.

Perkins found out about the redaction when Picture Researcher, Alice Jessop of Guinness World Records Ltd., contacted her in November of 2021 for a photo of Olympia for their annual book.  “I was astonished. It was a head-scratch moment when I went blank on what I was doing…” said Perkins. She asked Jessop for more details about the disqualification of Riesi, but she had none. She just needed her high resolution photo.

Perkins asked co-worker Cathy Howe to find out more. “If it’s in the book, it’s the record,” was the e-mail response from Guinness to Howe. “No one has ever given us a reason,” said Perkins.

OLYMPIA (AND ANGUS)

Between the Chamber of Commerce building on Cross Street and Parkway Road, two gigantic snow people were built by hundreds of volunteers using donated equipment and much human power. Angus, King of the Mountain was built in 1999.

With less fanfare but more snow, Olympia surpassed Angus by nine feet as Bethel broke their own record. “We decided we wanted Olympia to look less like a lighthouse,” as Angus did, and more like a woman. “She had hips,” said Robin Zinchuk, of the snow woman’s wider base. Zinchuk, former director of the Chamber of Commerce,  was in charge of both projects with Paula Wheeler, events director helping with Angus. Civil engineer, Jim Sysko, said, “As soon as we put the eyelashes up (16 alpine skis) everybody said ‘wow,'”

Both snowmen had car tire mouths, skidder tire buttons, arms made of 25’ spruce trees, and hats that were 16 feet (Olympia) and 20 feet (Angus) in diameter, and were made of fabric by middle school students.

Following Angus the chamber, with Sysko’s help, held several winter events on the lot where he had melted. They built a snow maze that spelled B-E-T-H-E-L when seen from the air, two or three snow volcanoes, an ice tower, and a skating rink. They had a snowman building contest and an antique snowmobile event. On Main Street they did a snowboard jam and they hosted a snow box derby at the Bethel Inn. “There was an appetite for a lot of snow-centered events,” said Zinchuk.

In 2007, someone suggested another snow person, but this time, make it a woman. Not that they needed to break their own record. But why not?

Jim Sysko, of Newry, was the ‘”clerk of the works”. He orchestrated how many people and what kind of equipment we needed,” said Zinchuk. Sysko was a general contractor overseeing the construction of three large building projects at Gould Academy when he was asked to build Angus and later Olympia. He’d built many highway bridges for the state and county and hydro electric plants, too. “Why did we build the snowmen? Because we had snow,” said Sysko.

“I built snowmen as a kid. I think the highest one was about six feet tall,” he said.”We made it [Olympia] like a like a wedding cake. [At the base] it was over 100 feet in diameter… Every time we went up [adding snow] we took one panel out. These were four foot by four foot plywood panels… All the way up we go. We made a big layer cake.”

The biggest piece of equipment they used was a crane with a clamshell bucket on it, donated along with the operator’s hours, from Bancroft Construction. When Sysko was sick for a week during Olympia’s construction his daughter, Mandy Ottone, a mechanical engineer, took over. As the project came to an end, they decided they liked Mandy’s work and hired her. “She still works for Bancroft,” said her father.

They needed snow. At first Sunday River lent them snow guns. “That helped a lot. We had a 40-foot giant start,” said Sysko.  They used compressors, pumps and hoses to draw water from the Androscoggin River through a culvert under the road, covering the hoses on both sides with hay so they wouldn’t freeze. “We had people out there making snow in the middle of the night,” said Zinchuk.

Dump trucks from Sunday River, the Town of Bethel, Greenwood and other towns brought snow they had cleared from their streets. Eventually, the street snow was all they needed, especially for Olympia, since 2008 was a good snow year.

Angus was built before the advent of the internet. An Associated Press photographer had been sent from Portland. She asked to plug her camera into a phone jack in the floor of the chamber. Said Zinchuk, “It felt a little like a miracle” to see the photos move around the world in an instant.

Technology had evolved by the time they were building Olympia. The chamber built a website for her and set up a camera across the street in the current C.N. Brown building. The camera recorded a live feed of Olympia’s progress to anyone who wanted to watch from home.

“We had an interesting cross section of people that showed up. All of these people [the volunteers] had a blast. It was hard work, shoveling, stomping with your feet,” said Zinchuk. The kids at the elementary school made Olympia’s nose. The middle school kids designed the hat. Jim Mann and his son Eli made the giant mica necklace that still hangs in the chamber building.

“Some days were ghastly weather. Cold and windy and You get up 30, 40, 50 feet and it’s colder and windier. People just kept showing up… There were a couple of love stories. People who met on the top of the snowman and started dating,” said Zinchuk.

Said Sysko, “There was a problem getting people to the top. The lift was 115 feet maximum and the snow woman was 122 feet tall. I put a ladder in the man basket and I climbed up. The crane operator could just barely could lift this ice chunk that we put on top.”

A very large group of volunteers showed up to sit in front of Angus and shout, “Good Morning, America!”  on live TV.  “People drove from Texas with their families to come see this phenomenon. Once it got on the Associated Press it was all over the news …it went global. I got phone calls from Scotland, Argentina, Vietnam. Many of them were plain old curious. Like, how did we do it? What are we going to do when it starts to melt? Is it going to flood our whole village?”

The snow woman was also a phenomenon and actually a much bigger phenomenon. Not that anyone went “ho hum”, but Good Morning America didn’t call for Olympia,” said Zinchuk. The greatest view, said Sysko, was from Locke Mills as you pass the animal hospital. “You come over that hill and there was that snow woman. Gigantic, higher than all the trees, higher than all the buildings it was up there like King Kong.

You saw the whole valley and the White Mountains in the background and this giant snow woman,” said Sysko.

At 122 feet, 1 inch, Olympia, the snow woman, built in 2008 in Bethel, holds the record in the Guinness World Book of Records as the tallest snow person in the world. Courtesy of Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce

Maybe, too tall? At one point, someone representing the Federal Aviation Association called, “have you thought about this being a nuisance?” No they hadn’t. Going forward, pilots flying in and out of nearby Bethel-Davis Regional Airport were warned of the eleven-story snow woman.

More than anything Olympia and Angus connected the Bethel community, said Zinchuk. This was perfectly illustrated when Musa Brown cut a heart from Angus’ scarf, made by the ladies of the Bethel Congregational Church, and gave it to Lanie Cross who took a ride in the man-lift to bury it in Olympia’s chest.

Months later when Olympia was melting, someone found the heart and brought it to Zinchuk in the Chamber, “it was lovely. It connected the projects, it connected the volunteers,” she said, and exemplified how important it was to include everyone in the community, no matter what part they wanted to play.

RECORD HOLDS

Riesi, of Austria, did not have giant Maine pine trees for arms or alpine skis as eyelashes. He did have an enormous stove pipe hat that blew off his head in 100 kilometer (62 mph) winds and needed to be rebuilt. “It’s very skinny. I think Olympia was more beautiful. The Austrian snowman had, let’s say, a bunch of dirt. He wasn’t as clean as Olympia,” said Perkins.

His huge lower half was blown in by snow canons. “They made a spire of ice and put a hat on top of it and called it a snowman,” said Sysko.

As he read a news story that said the hat was two meters [six feet, six inches] Sysko shook his head and said, “Take a look at that hat.” Pointing to the man standing on top of the giant hat, Sysko said, ” Suppose he [the man] is six feet tall, this [hat] is at least three or four times his height.” [Not six feet, six inches.]

“We’ve got good records on our snowmen.” said Sysko. (Three e-mails to Erwin Petz, one of the Austrian builders went unanswered as did emails to the Guinness World Record news department.

Even now, 15 years following Olympia and 23 years after Angus, the chamber fields snowman queries.

In an email to Sysko, Perkins wrote, “And every time [Angus and Olympia] make the news for no reason, we get loads of emails from people asking when they can come visit our snowman and snowwoman. I guess there are still some folks out there who don’t know how snow works.”