Word: bobbers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Monti is a bobber mostly by mischance. Skiing was his game until he ripped the ligaments in both knees practicing for the 1952 Olympics; he tried his hand briefly at auto racing (too expensive) before turning to bobsledding at the late age of 25. With speeds up to 70 m.p.h. on the straightaways, and G forces up to six times gravity on the turns, bobbing is one of the world's most exacting sports. The trick is to stay just short of disaster, taking the steeply banked turns as high as possible (so as to pick up speed...
...Olympics, the bobsled run at Lake Placid, N.Y., has been considered the ultimate twist by the world's top bobsledders. Plummeting down through 16 curves, it was tricky, low-banked, and so wide that a slight miscalculation sent a sled careening wildly off course; scores of bobbers have been injured, and two have been killed. For the 1964 Olympics, an Austrian engineer named Paul Aste, 46, a onetime bobber himself, designed a narrower, 13-curve run in the Alpine resort of Igls, just above the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck. Aste thought it might be a trifle slower than...
Inaugurated at the world bobsledding championships that ended last week, Igls proved about 3 sec. faster for the metric mile than the Lake Placid groove. It also turned out to be a bobber's nightmare. On the second day of the two-man trials, a Swedish team piloted by Gunnar Ähs was hitting 50 m.p.h. when it zoomed into the No. 9 bend, nicknamed the Hexenkessel, or Witches' Pot. The sled slid up the 40-ft. bank, bounced down and ricocheted sickeningly from wall to wall. Ähs's upper front teeth were sheared...