Word: sledding
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...Grrrrraaaack! A horrible grinding sound came from the woods. I turned and saw an asylum escapee hurtling down an icy chute, face first, on what appeared to be a cafeteria tray. He was, in fact, a member of the village "toboggan" club, out for a ride on his "skeleton" sled. Three quick thoughts emerged: it's a bit early in the day for that, he's loonier than a luger, and we'll not see skeleton in the Olympics anytime soon...
Well, when you board a sled, you join the crazy club. What we've got this time is a brakeman booted from her seat by her erstwhile best friend and replaced by a woman who in 1994 had her heptathlon career interrupted by a ban for drug use by the International Amateur Athletic Federation. The men nod knowingly. "We've been going through that for a long, long time," says Todd Hays, currently the world's best driver. Staying out of the headlines has enabled him to stay on mission, he says. "The more they can take the attention away...
...trouble with sports is, if you're not Anna Kournikova, you've got to keep winning, and as the pre-Olympic World Cup campaign wore on, Jean & Jen didn't. Or was it just Jen who wasn't pushing her weight? The brakeman's job in a two-person sled is primarily to propel the sled at the start. Go a tenth of a second too slow in this 50-m run-up, and you're a loser. Jean & Jen finished third in one race, out of the medals in all others, as Germans swarmed the podium. Racine told Davidson...
...olympic organizers looked at skeleton bobsleigh, so called because the first sleds were so rudimentary, and decided the sport was too dangerous. Sliding head first at up to 135 km/h on a tiny sled with no brakes and no steering down an ice track was just too crazy...
...looks a lot more dangerous than it really is," maintains Alex Coomber, the reigning women's World Cup champion. We'll take her word for it. A skeleton run begins with a 30-m sprint before the slider dives onto the 90-cm sled to hurtle around 15 steeply banked curves of the 1,500-m course. And without any mechanism for steering, sliders can control their descent only by shifting hips and shoulders. They risk losing precious 100ths of a second if they touch...