Word: bobbers
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...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...
...brash British team, togged out in a wild assortment of jumpers and striped mufflers, did their best to act like casual beginners. "Now see here," said one bobber to another as they dashed down the chute, "do you jump in first...
What a rope driver gains in sensitivity, he sometimes loses in control. But Feierabend had no trouble keeping his sled on course; he bobbed his four final runs in a total time of five minutes, 10.55 seconds. U.S. Bobber Lloyd Johnson, 40, the 1953 champion, had less luck. Experimenting with rope guides earlier this month at Garmisch, he had been flipped on his head and suffered a broken collar bone. At St. Moritz, the broken bone held rigid in a splint, Johnson could not hold his sled on the chute. It climbed the wall of Sunny Corner, tossed...
...secret of steering Shady Corner is not much different from the way a speeding motorist takes a highway curve when there is no white line. An experienced Mt. Van Hoevenberg bobber comes in high on the left side of the chute (about two to five feet below the crest), then steers down and out of it, picking up speed as he goes. A bobsledder who doesn't take Shady that way is likely to lose time, get out of rhythm and/or wind up in a hospital. Says one World War II airplane pilot, who tried a $1.50 ride: "There...