Word: sled
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Ever since it was built for the 1932 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...
...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 off on the ice; both his legs were fractured twice. His brakeman was thrown free, broke only one leg. Next day the U.S. sled steered...
...trial runs were suspended for a day, while the icy run was narrowed for safety's sake. But the rebuilding job did not curb the mounting casualties. A French sled came to grief in the Hexenkessel and skidded down out of control; the brakeman was carted off with a severe brain concussion...
...high-powered game of catch begins with a supersonic rocket sled streaking down three miles of rail shoved by five Nike-Hercules missile engines (see diagram). After traveling along the track for half a mile, the sled is moving at more than 1,000 m.p.h. and its rockets are cut off. Split seconds later, a pair of iss-mm. howitzers beside the track blast away at the decelerating sled. Their shells, moving at 1,088 m.p.h., quickly catch up with the target, slam into it, and are stopped with scarcely a scratch by a bale of synthetic rubber. Then...
Kennedy enlisted in the Army, spent nearly two years in Europe. Honing his competitive edge, he climbed the Matterhorn, entered and won a bobsled meet for novices in Switzerland-the first time he had ever ridden a sled. Discharged as a Pfc, Kennedy was readmitted to Harvard in 1953, banged around in a beat-up Pontiac, excelled in public speaking, earned honor grades in history and government in his senior year...