Word: luge
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...Engine Company 45 on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, athletes in Calgary's Olympic Village will be tumbling out of bed for another day of fun, games and potential glory. Muniz is no stranger to that daily ritual. As one-half of Puerto Rico's two-member luge team, the fire fighter spent pleasant evenings last week playing free video games with the boys and girls of winter and precarious days sliding down the refrigerated luge track on his back at speeds pushing 70 m.p.h. "People were looking down at me, waving and ringing cowbells," he says with wonder...
...luge and bobsled seem to attract the largest number of Olympic eccentrics, many of whom have found the open-minded governing bylaw about nationality conveniently accommodating. For New Yorker George Tucker, a physicist born in Puerto Rico, Calgary actually offered a chance to improve. At his Sarajevo debut in 1984, Tucker shed alarming amounts of skin bouncing off the wall. "I was the luger who dripped blood," Tucker says. The next ( summer he recruited Muniz, who had schemed to represent Puerto Rico as a kayaker. "Misery loves company," explains Muniz. Argentine Ruben Gonzalez, a chemist, claims yet another distinction...
...skiing maintenance worker ("like hitting a tree") and broke her leg. After a brief cry, Fletcher was smiling again. "You can't have everything, you know," she said. "Where would you put it?" No American man or woman had ever finished as high as sixth in an Olympic luge, and when Bonny Warner moved up from the eighth position on her final run, she shivered with pleasure. "It's a warm feeling," said Warner, 25, "like the sled has little feelers on it, and it can tell you're happy, so it goes fast...
...practical reasons. Aerodynamic considerations have led ski jumpers to hold their arms at their sides to form an airfoil, getting as much updraft as possible after takeoff from the slope. Downhill racers crouch with their chests to their knees, assuming a near fetal position to cut wind resistance. In luge, sliders lying on their backs and steering with their feet minimize resistance by keeping their limbs aligned and body flat...
Among the lovely effects that the children of Calgary kept secret for weeks, even from their folks, were the moving pictures they formed on the stadium floor, first a snowflake, then a hockey game, a luge run, a dove. Scrambling to their stations, the ice blue snowsuits skipped and danced and punched the air with their sleeves. Meanwhile, the audience of athletes swayed and clapped, and laughed along...