Word: luge
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...Well, it's a new millennium, and no doubt feeling heat from the X-Games generation, the International Olympic Committee has indeed invited the world's best skeleton riders. With a third ya-gotta-be-nuts sliding sport (along with bobsled and luge) now on the schedule, the slate of what Americans consider the Peripherals-nonmarquee sports that zoom into the sporting Zeitgeist every fourth year only to melt away in the post-Games thaw-is at an all-time high. At Salt Lake we'll have all kinds of sleds, cross-country races (some with guns!), ski jumps...
...DeWitt says of lugers, who travel feetfirst, "Those guys are nuts." Not at all, says Gordy Sheer, who with doubles partner Chris Thorpe won America's first-ever luge medal in Nagano. Sheer is now the team's acting marketing director: "We don't have purple hair. We're not slamming six-packs of Mountain Dew and riding our BMX bikes to practice." Perhaps not, but lugers do reach 90 m.p.h...
...about trading on that charm, the pair had been photographed for cereal-box covers and had lined up other endorsements worth about half a million dollars. Other Yanks had cute angles too. Driver Jill Bakken had her best friend, Shauna Rhobock, aboard, and driver Bonny Warner was a luge veteran trying to make her fourth Olympic team with big Gea Johnson, the heptathlete in question, behind...
...taken 54 years for skeleton sliders to convince the authorities that it's no more risky than slithering feet first on a luge, leaping into the wide blue from a 90-m hill, or any of the other sports included in the Winter Olympics. And in these Games, women will be competing for the first time...
...Nagano is best known for the 1998 Winter Olympics held in its capital, a postcard-pretty ski resort of 363,000. The entire prefecture bought into an Olympic pipe dream, convinced that building a luge run and hosting Lycra-clad skaters would somehow translate into a big pot of gold. A bullet-train line was built from Tokyo, hotels went up, airport runways were laid down. In all, nearly $1 billion was spent. But once the Olympic torch was extinguished, Nagano's post-Olympic boom failed to materialize. The city's downtown looks deserted and there's plenty of room...