Word: luge
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...showy, zillion-dollar model of the family of man that, for all its state-of-the-art grandeur and planning, cannot outswerve a block of ice. It shouldn't work, but it does; things should work, but they don't. As the surprise U.S. silver medalist in the doubles luge, Chris Thorpe, said of his surprise bronze-medalist teammates, "They don't have great lines, they don't have great form. They just...
...events may be obscure, but they are nonetheless fascinating. Lee dismisses luge and biatholon as "stupid," and for not making any sense. I ask him how much sense football makes. The biatholon at least arises from the context of hunting during icy conditions. And many of the Winter Olympic events, while not as flashy as some of the sports Americans are accustomed to, are very technical and difficult to master. How many of us could negotiate a luge course without getting killed...
...Artur Dmitriev, lifting his new partner Oksana Kazakova to a gold, with a long program of soulful if hardly flawless majesty, and collecting the medal he had won six years before. There was Georg Hackl, the businesslike German soldier, shooting away with the gold in the men's luge, as he had done in Lillehammer and in Albertville. And there was slalom ace Alberto Tomba, saying he wanted to find a girl to settle down with. As the newcomer Kazakova said, after surviving a singled double Axel, "We have a little problem"--and then her face brightened--"but I think...
...seemed, the regular guys took over. Roughly 750 soldiers in camouflage fatigues worked through the night to clear what looked like feet of fresh snow from the slopes. Cashiers consulted dictionaries between customers, and even the local organized-crime syndicates agreed to observe an Olympic truce. At the luge spiral, fans sat on banks of snow in earflaps, letting out cries of delight and astonishment as contestants whooshed past in 80-m.p.h. gusts of air. As cheering fellow lugers raised Hackl, lifting the perennial champion to their shoulders, a competing smile played out on the face of the Venezuelan team...
Boccalandro, a 37-year-old former Rolfer who'd always wanted to compete in the Olympics, had been watching the Lillehammer Games on TV when she noticed that the women's luge champion was, like herself, not small. "You'd be perfect for it," said her cross-country coach, John Feig. "You're laid back, you love speed, you're not afraid, and you're kind of crazy." With the Venezuelan delegation (mostly her twin sister and her mother), she marched through the opening ceremonies in a startling poncho. Declaring, "This is what I was destined to do," she finished...