Word: sled
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Next Wednesday afternoon in Bergisel Stadium in Innsbruck, Austria, 1,500 athletes from some 40 nations and 70,000 spectators will watch as Josef Feistmantl, a former luge-sled gold medalist, lights the Olympic flame opening the twelfth Winter Games. That flame will burn for twelve days of competition in the dangerous, exciting, magically graceful world of winter sports. More than half a billion people around the world will follow the action on TV, including millions in the U.S. who can tune in 39½ hours of coverage on ABC, most of it in prime time...
Zimmerer will drive both sleds again. He will have two weight men for ballast in the four, and brakemen under oath not to slow him down. The principal challenge could come from the Swiss, East Germans or the impetuous Italians. Says Italian Team Director Giorgio Galli: "We often have to keep some of our boys in the hospital longer than we should to make sure they don't get back into a sled prematurely." Not even warm weather deters them. In the summer the Italians replace their runners with wheels and career madly down mountain slopes and roads...
...environment. Both of those, they found, were not what they had been in gold-rush days. In Point Barrow, for instance, some of the Eskimos whom Ogden had come to interview turned up with Texas oil lawyers and New York accountants in respectful attendance. "I rode the only dog sled in Barrow," Ogden reports. "It belongs to a white high school teacher. The natives have turned in their dogs for snow mobiles...
Attla, a veteran on the sled-dog circuit that has grown to 400 races a season, made close to $20,000 last year in purses. (The money is raised by such diverse off-season activities as bingo and potluck suppers.) He finds the kicks at least as compelling as the cash. "There's no other sport," he says, "where you have to control 16 animals at one time." There is probably no other winter sport so expensive either. A beginner itching to compete in the "unlimited class" (seven or more dogs) can expect to spend...
...crossed the finish line, their faces masked in a film of frost. Attla's run-at an average of close to 20 m.p.h.-clipped six minutes off the course record. His reward: two trophies and a purse of $1,650. The next day, with Ely recovering from apres-sled festivities, Attla and his Huskies were in his ¾ton truck, rolling down State Route 169 toward Colorado and another race...